Sri Lanka at the Crossroads of History

Sri Lanka at the Crossroads of History
Author: Zoltán Biedermann
Publisher: UCL Press
Total Pages: 357
Release: 2017-06-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 1911307843

The peoples of Sri Lanka have participated in far-flung trading networks, religious formations, and Asian and European empires for millennia. This interdisciplinary volume sets out to draw Sri Lanka into the field of Asian and Global History by showing how the latest wave of scholarship has explored the island as a ‘crossroads’, a place defined by its openness to movement across the Indian Ocean.Experts in the history, archaeology, literature and art of the island from c.500 BCE to c.1850 CE use Lankan material to explore a number of pressing scholarly debates. They address these matters from their varied disciplinary perspectives and diverse array of sources, critically assessing concepts such as ethnicity, cosmopolitanism and localisation, and elucidating the subtle ways in which the foreign may be resisted and embraced at the same time. The individual chapters, and the volume as a whole, are a welcome addition to the history and historiography of Sri Lanka, as well as studies of the Indian Ocean region, kingship, colonialism, imperialism, and early modernity.

A Comparative History of Literatures in the Iberian Peninsula

A Comparative History of Literatures in the Iberian Peninsula
Author: Fernando Cabo Aseguinolaza
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 766
Release: 2010-05-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9027288399

A Comparative History of Literatures in the Iberian Peninsula is the second comparative history of a new subseries with a regional focus, published by the Coordinating Committee of the International Comparative Literature Association. As its predecessor for East-Central Europe, this two-volume history distances itself from traditional histories built around periods and movements, and explores, from a comparative viewpoint, a space considered to be a powerful symbol of inter-literary relations. Both the geographical pertinence and its symbolic condition are obviously discussed, when not even contested. Written by an international team of researchers who are specialists in the field, this history is the first attempt at applying a comparative approach to the plurilingual and multicultural literatures in the Iberian Peninsula. The aim of comprehensiveness is abandoned in favor of a diverse and extensive array of key issues for a comparative agenda. A Comparative History of Literatures in the Iberian Peninsula undermines the primacy claimed for national and linguistic boundaries, and provides a geo-cultural account of literary inter-systems which cannot otherwise be explained.

Between Copernicus and Galileo

Between Copernicus and Galileo
Author: James M. Lattis
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2010-12-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0226469263

Between Copernicus and Galileo is the story of Christoph Clavius, the Jesuit astronomer and teacher whose work helped set the standards by which Galileo's famous claims appeared so radical, and whose teachings guided the intellectual and scientific agenda of the Church in the central years of the Scientific Revolution. Though relatively unknown today, Clavius was enormously influential throughout Europe in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries through his astronomy books—the standard texts used in many colleges and universities, and the tools with which Descartes, Gassendi, and Mersenne, among many others, learned their astronomy. James Lattis uses Clavius's own publications as well as archival materials to trace the central role Clavius played in integrating traditional Ptolemaic astronomy and Aristotelian natural philosophy into an orthodox cosmology. Although Clavius strongly resisted the new cosmologies of Copernicus and Tycho, Galileo's invention of the telescope ultimately eroded the Ptolemaic world view. By tracing Clavius's views from medieval cosmology the seventeenth century, Lattis illuminates the conceptual shift from Ptolemaic to Copernican astronomy and the social, intellectual, and theological impact of the Scientific Revolution.

Spain, China and Japan in Manila, 1571-1644

Spain, China and Japan in Manila, 1571-1644
Author: Birgit Tremml-Werner
Publisher:
Total Pages: 365
Release: 2015
Genre: History
ISBN: 9789089648334

Spain, China and Japan in Manila, 1571-1644 offers a new perspective on the connected histories of Spain, China, and Japan as they emerged and developed following Manila's foundation as the capital of the Spanish Philippines in 1571. Examining a wealth of multilingual primary sources, Birgit Tremml-Werner shows that cross-cultural encounters not only shaped Manila's development as a "Eurasian" port city, but also had profound political, economic, and social ramifications for the three pre-modern states. Combining a systematic comparison with a focus on specific actors during this period, this book addresses many long-held misconceptions and offers a more balanced and multi-faceted view of these nations' histories.