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Many Americans and Europeans have for centuries viewed Russia as a despotic country in which people are inclined to accept suffering and oppression. What are the origins of this stereotype of Russia as a society fundamentally apart from nations in the West, and how accurate is it? In the first book devoted to answering these questions, Marshall T. Poe traces the roots of today's perception of Russia and its people to the eyewitness descriptions of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European travelers. His fascinating account—the most complete review of early modern European writings about Russia ever undertaken—explores how the image of "Russian tyranny" took hold in the popular imaginat...
The publications of the Hakluyt Society (founded in 1846) made available edited (and sometimes translated) early accounts of exploration. The first series, which ran from 1847 to 1899, consists of 100 books containing published or previously unpublished works by authors from Christopher Columbus to Sir Francis Drake, and covering voyages to the New World, to China and Japan, to Russia and to Africa and India. This volume, first published in 1852, contains an English translation of the second part of the account by Sigismund von Herberstein (1486-1566) of his visits to Russia in 1517 and 1526 as Ambassador of the Holy Roman Emperor. He published his Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii in Latin in 1549, and it is the earliest detailed Western description of the land and people of Russia. Here Herberstein describes the geography and history of the country, with more fascinating details about the people and their customs.
Audiences are among the dominant elements of courtly life and may be referred to as a central aspect of representation of power in many societies. Audiences also served as a stage for negotiation and political decision-making. Beyond that, the ceremonial of audience acted as an integrative factor, strengthening the connections between the ruler and his subjects, the élite and his dynastic background. It thus reflects the structure, or at least the intended structure of rule, and allows us to get insight into the perception of the ruler in the respective society. This volume offers an approach to forms and structures of audiences in different epochs and regions. Choosing a transcultural and ...
How is it possible to imagine what is unknown and therefore unimaginable? How can the unimaginable be represented? On what materials do such representations rely? These questions lie at the heart of this book. Copernican theory redefined the role and importance of the imagination even as it implied the moment of its crisis. Based on this claim, Ladina Bezzola Lambert analyzes seventeenth-century astronomical texts – particularly descriptions of the moon and treatises written in support of the theory of the plurality of worlds – to show how early modern astronomers questioned the role of the imagination as a tool to visualize the unknown, but also how, pressed by the need to support their...
Both a scientific treatise on lunar astronomy and a science-fiction story about a voyage to the moon, Kepler's Somnium went unrecognized for centuries. This edition presents a full translation from the original Latin.
During the 1970s the todays Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research (Bundesministerium für Bildung, Wissenschaft und Forschung, BMBWF) supported the founding of the Center for Austrian Studies at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and the Austrian Chair at Stanford University in California. These foundings were the initial incentives for the world wide 'spreading' of similar institutions; currently nine Centers for Austrian and Central European Studies exist in seven states on three continents. The funding of the Ministry enables to connect senior with young scholars, to help the latter, to participate and benefit from the scientific connection of the former, as the Austrian say, `to sniff the scientific air', and to get in touch with the respective national scientific community, to avoid prejudices, and to spread a better understanding and knowledge about Austria and Central Europe. This volume contains the annual reports (2016/2017) of the Center Director's and the presented papers of their PhDs, which discuss various topics on (East-)Central European History from various perspectives and in different centuries.