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Delogu examines how biographical writings on kings contributed to nascent ideas of nationhood, exerted pressure upon traditional ideals of kingship, and ultimately redefined the theoretical and practical bases of medieval kingship.
The Writer's Gift or the Patron's Pleasure? introduces a new approach to literary patronage through a reassessment of the medieval paragon of literary sponsorship, Charles V of France. Traditionally celebrated for his book commissions that promoted the vernacular, Charles V also deserves credit for having profoundly altered the literary economy when bypassing the traditional system of acquiring books through gifting to favor the commission. When upturning literary dynamics by soliciting works to satisfy his stated desires, the king triggered a multi-generational literary debate concerned with the effect a work's status as a solicited or unsolicited text had in determining the value and purpose of the literary enterprise. Treating first the king's commissioned writers and then canonical French late medieval authors, Deborah McGrady argues that continued discussion of these competing literary economies engendered the concept of the "writer's gift," which vernacular writers used to claim a distinctive role in society based on their triple gift of knowledge, wisdom, and literary talent.
Written in honor of John E. Murdoch's seventieth birthday, the essays collected here focus on the interpretation of ancient and scientific texts not just as isolated intellectual productions but as responses to particular settings or contexts.
Sweden is a book by Victor Alfred Nilsson. It incorporates a huge part of recorded Swedish history from before 1900, covering Kings, wars and difficult famines.
For medieval and early modern Europeans, contemporary culture was often refracted through the legend of Troy, arguably the most important set of stories outside the Bible for centuries of western European history. These stories were transmitted in dozens of competing versions, and contemporary local events were habitually understood in the context of a pagan legend whose origins were remote and whose mandate was ambiguous. The fifteen essays in this volume offer compelling new treatments of these now-evaporated fantasies of Troy, which were central to the European social imaginary. The essays consider texts and performances of Troy across a wide generic range, from learned court poetry to burlesque, from treatises on linguistic history to public spectacles.
It has been 15 years since the events of Einstein’s Bridge. George and Alice Griffin and Roger Coulton have established the Iris Foundation, a powerful island-isolated research organization tasked with exploiting the technologies learned from the Makers, re-learning Maker techniques for creating wormholes, reestablishing contact with the Makers, and protecting Earth from Hive invasions. Sparked by a new idea from Roger, Iris researchers finally master wormhole technology and use accelerated wormholes to create Fermi Station in the Oort Cloud. Contact is established with the Makers and the Centaurs, a justice-seeking robotic civilization in our galaxy. The triple alliance mounts a three-pronged attack on the Hive world, destroying the Hive and one of its colonies. A second Hive colony cannot be located and could pose a future problem. Iris launches an armada of accelerated wormholes to probe nearby star systems and establishes a colonization base on Orca, an Earth-like moon of Bowhead, a giant planet in the Tau Ceti system. Mankind has reached the stars. At the publisher's request, this title is sold without DRM (Digital Rights Management).
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Business, Charity and Sentiment, the fifty-year history of the SA Housing Trust, was published in 1986. Drawing on contemporary and often contentious records and recollections, Susan Marsden carries the Trust's story through the turbulent 25 years that followed, a time of profound social, environmental, political and public sector change.
While the sustainability of our world is being endangered or destroyed by the misguided activities of artificial human entities, real people have begun to expand their moral sympathies sufficiently to prioritize protecting our world's interests. They have developed a new technology-nanotechnology-that has the potential to advance human society towa