Böcker utgivna av Yale University Press

This intriguing book explores how ordinary people in traditional China used contracts to facilitate the transactions of their daily lives, as they bought, sold, rented, or borrowed land, livestock, people, or money. In the process it illuminates specific everyday concerns during China's medieval transformation. Valerie Hansen translates and analyzes surviving contracts and also draws on tales of the supernatural, rare legal sources, plays, language texts, and other anecdotal evidence to describe how contracts were actually used. She explains that the educated wrote their own contracts, whereas the illiterate paid scribes to draft them and read them aloud. The contracts reveal much about everyday life: problems with inflation that resulted from the introduction of the first paper money in the world; the persistence of women's rights to own and sell land at a time when their lives were becoming more constricted; and the litigiousness of families, which were complicated products of remarriages, adoptions, and divorces. The Chinese even armed their dead with contracts asserting ownership of their grave plots, and Hansen provides details of an underworld court system in which the dead could sue and be sued. Illustrations and maps enrich a book that will be fascinating for anyone interested in Chinese life and society.

Seizing the Hungarian throne at the age of fifteen, Matthias Corvinus, the "Raven King," was an effervescent presence on the fifteenth-century stage. A successful warrior and munificent art patron, he sought to leave as symbols of his strategic and humanist ambitions a strong, unified country, splendid palaces, and the most magnificent library in Christendom. But Hungary, invaded by Turkey after Matthias's death in 1490, yielded its treasures, and the Raven King's exquisite library of two thousand volumes, witness to a golden cultural age, was dispersed first across Europe and then the world.The quest to recover this collection of sumptuously illuminated scripts provoked and tantalized generations of princes, cardinals, collectors, and scholars and imbued Hungarians with the mythical conviction that the restoration of the lost library would seal their country's rebirth. In this thrilling and absorbing account, drawing on a wealth of original sources in several languages, Marcus Tanner tracks the destiny of the Raven King and his magnificent bequest, uncovering the remarkable story of a life and library almost lost to history.

Famed for his learning, wordplay, fantasy and insight, the French writer Francois Rabelais (1494?-1553) was also widely known for scoffing, supposed atheism, salacious writing and irresponsible whimsy. This book explores Renaissance England's response to the humorous yet difficult and ambiguous Rabelais. Anne Lake Prescott describes in detail how a host of English writers - Philip Sidney, Ben Jonson, John Webster, John Donne, James I, Shakespeare and Michael Drayton, among many others - collectively and sometimes individually appreciated and condemned Rabelais.

Since its publication in the early nineteenth century, this long narrative poem has stood unchallenged as the supreme masterpiece of Vietnamese literature. Thông's new and absorbingly readable translation (on pages facing the Vietnamese text) is illuminated by notes that give comparative passages from the Chinese novel on which the poem was based, details on Chinese allusions, and literal translations with background information explaining Vietnamese proverbs and folk sayings.

Fascinating and mysterious, the idea of the harem long captured the imagination of the West. The Muslim practice of concealing the women of the household from the eyes of alien men tempted Europeans to extravagant projections of their own wishes and fears. This intriguing book examines the art that resulted. Drawing on a wide range of evidence from the late seventeenth century to the early twentieth century--including travel writing, literature, painting, and even opera--Ruth Bernard Yeazell demonstrates the surprising variety of expressions inspired by the harem of the Western imagination. The book provides both a rich account of changing perceptions of the harem and a demonstration of the tenacious persistence of myth and stereotype. Yeazell shows that Europe's hunger for facts about the harem combined repeatedly with the impulse to fantasize. Masculine erotic fantasies of the harem were reflected in the paintings of Ingres and Delacroix, the writings of de Sade, Byron, and Loti, and the work of anonymous pornographers. Alternate representations portrayed the harem as a prison or a locus of freedom, a place of murderous rivalry or a home of loving sisterhood, a chamber of erotic license or a nightmarish snare of frustration and ennui. And Montesquieu, Mozart, and Charlotte Brontë among others explored in their art the opposition of the imaginary pleasures of the harem to the freely chosen union of a loving couple. In a nuanced reading of Ingres's Bain turc andother works, Yeazell concludes that for some the appeal of the harem lay in the fantasy of eluding time and death.

The first history of all the English cathedrals, from Birmingham and Bury St Edmunds to Worcester and York Minster

The first complete history of Southwark, London’s stubbornly independent community over the Thames

A comprehensive look at how slavery and resistance to it have shaped Yale University

A former Harvard president reflects on how elite universities are responding to critiques from the left and the right, and how they can do better

A bold new account of the state of globalization today—and what its collapse might mean for the world economy

The lost memoir of Britain’s first Black Olympic medal winner—and the America he discovered

From two distinguished experts on election law, an alarming look at how the American presidency could be stolen—by entirely legal means

The first book to examine the iconic depiction of evolution, the “march of progress,” and its role in shaping our understanding of how humans evolved

An exploration of how China’s Belt and Road Initiative seeks to reshape international order and how it has catalyzed a new era of infrastructural geopolitics

An enchanting, beautifully illustrated guide to seasonal plants—showing the long history of herbal remedies and their uses today

Experience the world of Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius and the tremendous challenges he faced and overcame, with the help of Stoic philosophy

Award-winning author Francine Klagsbrun reveals the complex life and work of Henrietta Szold, founder of Hadassah and a Zionist trailblazer

A vivid account of the political triumphs and domestic tragedies of the Jewish king Herod the Great during the turmoil of the Roman revolution

A pioneering history of medical care in Stalin’s Gulag—showing how doctors and nurses cared for inmates in appalling conditions

A clear-sighted and entertaining defence of literary realism, and an account of its key practitioners

A unique journey with James Ensor through the history of still life in Belgium in the 19th and 20th century.

A spirited and essential companion to Orwell and his works, covering all the novels and major essays

Interviews with women artists connected with the Islamic world and their compelling works that are shaping contemporary art today

An engaging introduction to contemporary Black American collage brings together art by fifty artists that reflects the breadth and complexity of Black identity