Böcker i Haney Foundation Series-serien

Thomas Prendergast's Poetical Dust offers a provocative and far-reaching analysis of Poets' Corner. Covering nearly a thousand years of political and literary history, the book examines the chaotic, sometimes fitful process through which Britain has consecrated its poetry and poets.

In 1573, the alchemist Anna Zieglerin gave her patron, the Duke of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, the recipe for an extraordinary substance she called the lion's blood. She claimed that this golden oil could stimulate the growth of plants, create gemstones, transform lead into the coveted philosophers' stone—and would serve a critical role in preparing for the Last Days. Boldly envisioning herself as a Protestant Virgin Mary, Anna proposed that the lion's blood, paired with her own body, could even generate life, repopulating and redeeming the corrupt world in its final moments.In Anna Zieglerin and the Lion's Blood, Tara Nummedal reconstructs the extraordinary career and historical afterlife of alchemist, courtier, and prophet Anna Zieglerin. She situates Anna's story within the wider frameworks of Reformation Germany's religious, political, and military battles; the rising influence of alchemy; the role of apocalyptic eschatology; and the position of women within these contexts. Together with her husband, the jester Heinrich Schombach, and their companion and fellow alchemist Philipp Sommering, Anna promised her patrons at the court of Wolfenbüttel spiritual salvation and material profit. But her compelling vision brought with it another, darker possibility: rather than granting her patrons wealth or redemption, Anna's alchemical gifts might instead lead to war, disgrace, and destruction. By 1575, three years after Anna's arrival at court, her enemies had succeeded in turning her from holy alchemist into poisoner and sorceress, culminating in Anna's arrest, torture, and public execution.In her own life, Anna was a master of self-fashioning; in the centuries since her death, her story has been continually refashioned, making her a fitting emblem for each new age. Interweaving the history of science, gender, religion, and politics, Nummedal recounts how one resourceful woman's alchemical schemes touched some of the most consequential matters in Reformation Germany.

Roberto Garvia explores the history of artificial spoken or written languages and the people who fought for them. Taking the three most prominent-Volapuk, Esperanto, and Ido-Garvia investigates what drove so many to invest incredible energy and time to learn and promote them.

In the decades after U.S. independence, American novelists carried on an argument that pitted direct democracy against the representative liberalism they attributed to their British counterparts. The result was an American novel distinguished by its use of narrative tropes that generated a social system resembling today's distributed network.

Compassion's Edge traces the relation between compassion and toleration after France's Wars of Religion. This is not, however, a story about compassion overcoming difference but one of compassion reinforcing division. It provides a robust corrective to today's hope that fellow-feeling draws us inexorably and usefully together.

In A Theater of Diplomacy, Ellen R. Welch argues that theater served not merely as a decorative accompaniment to negotiations, but rather underpinned the practices of embodied representation, performance, and spectatorship that constituted the culture of diplomacy in the early modern period.

As the first major study of Shakespeare's Birthplace during the nineteenth century, Shakespeare's Shrine draws on extensive archival research to describe the invention of the Birthplace in the Victorian period, when the site was purchased for the nation, extensively restored, and transformed into a major tourist attraction.

In the Shadow of the Gallows reveals how a sense of racialized culpability shaped Americans' understandings of personhood prior to the Civil War. Jeannine Marie DeLombard draws from legal, literary, and popular texts to address fundamental questions about race, responsibility, and American civic belonging.

Examining the writings of twentieth-century thinkers such as Raymond Aron, Isaiah Berlin, Norberto Bobbio, Michael Oakeshott, and Adam Michnik, Faces of Moderation argues that moderation remains crucial for today's encounters with new forms of extremism.

In an exploration of antitheatrical incidents from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, Lisa A. Freeman demonstrates that at the heart of antitheatrical disputes lies a struggle over the character of the body politic that governs a nation and the bodies public that could be said to represent that nation.

The Integrated Self is a book in which Stock continues his project of reading Augustine, and one in which he moves forward in new and perhaps unexpected directions.

Counter Jihad provides a sweeping account of America's military campaigns in the Islamic world and fills a gaping void in our understanding of the War on Terror.

In The Great War and American Foreign Policy, 1914-1924, Robert E. Hannigan challenges the conventional belief that the United States entered World War I only because its hand was forced and disputes the claim that Washington was subsequently driven by a desire "to make the world safe for democracy."

Our Emily Dickinsons situates Dickinson's life and work within larger debates about gender, sexuality, and literary authority in America. Examining Dickinson's influence on Marianne Moore, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop and others, Vivian R. Pollak complicates the connection between authorial biography and poetry that endures.

In Arendt's Judgment: Freedom, Responsibility, Citizenship, Jonathan Peter Schwartz claims that Arendt's theory of political judgment formed the core of her political thought, and that understanding it correctly makes it possible to grasp the systematic thread that runs through her diverse body of work.

In No Use, national security scholar Thomas M. Nichols examines the role of nuclear weapons and their prominence in U.S. security strategy, ultimately arguing that this belief in the utility of nuclear force is misguided and dangerously obsolete.

Examining the shift between American immigrant policy between 1924 and 1964, Ellis Island Nation traces the emergence of "contributionism," the belief that the newcomers from eastern and southern Europe contributed important cultural and economic benefits to American society.

This book examines charisma as the force in art, literature, and film that engages the reader's or viewer's consciousness and inspires admiration and imitation. Thirteen chapters analyze the workings of charisma and its effects, ranging from Homer to Woody Allen.

In this wry and insightful memoir, distinguished American diplomat John Paton Davies, Jr. describes his upbringing and wartime adventures in Asia, encounters with key twentieth-century figures from Mahatma Gandhi to Joseph Stalin, and how he carried on after his Foreign Service career was cut short by McCarthyism.

Saladin M. Ambar's innovative study is the first book to explicitly credit governors with making the presidency what it is today. This book explodes the idea that the modern presidency began after 1945, instead placing its origins squarely in the Progressive Era.

Daniel Cottom traces the vagabond word "bohemia" as it migrated across national borders over the course of the nineteenth century-from France to the United States, England, Italy, Spain, and Germany-and how it was transformed, contested, or rejected along the way.

Amid thorny issues of translation and appropriation, imperial rivalry, the rise of commercial authorship, and anxieties about authenticity, Barbara Fuchs traces how early modern English writers borrowed Spanish literary models, triumphantly reimagining the transnational appropriation as heroic looting.

In Levinas's Politics, Annabel Herzog argues that Levinas's Talmudic readings embody a political pragmatism which complements, revises, and challenges the ethical analyses he offers in his phenomenological works.

Focusing on such popular figures as the stage Jew, Scot, and Irishman, Michael Ragussis reveals the crucial role the theater played in developing, maintaining, and questioning the ethnic stereotypes through which the identity of the English nation was defined.

Animal Characters follows five species through the literature of early modern Europe. The horse, the parrot, the cat, the turkey, and the sheep all undergo a dramatic change in character as European writers begin to develop a new interest in-and understanding of-human character in its relation to literature.

What do we know about early modern sex? And how do we know it? How, when, and why does sex become history? In Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns, Valerie Traub addresses these questions and, in doing so, reorients the ways in which historians and literary critics, feminists and queer theorists approach sexuality and its history.

In Heroines and Local Girls, Pamela L. Cheek explores the rise of women's writing as a distinct, transnational category in Britain and Europe over the long eighteenth century, characterized by stories about heroines who transcend their gendered destiny.

Political Corruption considers the different ways in which a metaphor of impurity, disease, and dissolution was deployed by political philosophers from the Renaissance to the early twentieth century. It argues that speaking coherently about political corruption in our present moment requires a robust account of the good regime.

Holy War, Martyrdom, and Terror examines the ways Christian theology has shaped centuries of violence from Christianity's first centuries up to our own day, through the crusades, the French Revolution, and more recent American wars.

James Bernard Murphy challenges widely shared assumptions about personhood and its development through discrete stages, arguing they undermine our ability to see our lives as a whole. Drawing on classic and contemporary thinkers, Murphy argues that we live our whole lives as children, adolescents, and adults all at the same time.