An “absolutely magnificent” book (The New Republic)—the fruit of almost two decades of study—that traces the changes in Western attitudes toward death and dying from the earliest Christian times to the present day.A truly landmark study, The Hour of Our Death reveals a pattern of gradually developing evolutionary stages in our perceptions of life in relation to death, each stage representing a virtual redefinition of human nature.Starting ...

Reveals the change in Western man's conception and acceptance of death as evidenced in customs, literature, and art since medieval times.

**The landmark history of France and French culture in the eighteenth century, a winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.“Robert Darnton has the inquisitiveness of an investigative reporter, the thoroughness of a rigorous scholar, and the sensitivity of a novelist.” —New Republic**When the apprentices of a Paris printing shop in the 1730s held a series of mock trials and then hanged all the cats they could lay their hands on, why did they find it so hilariously ...

The Story of Civilization, Volume VIII: A history of European civilization in the period of Pascal, Moliere, Cromwell, Milton, Peter the Great, Newton, and Spinoza: 1648-1715. This is the eighth volume of the Pulitzer Prize-winning series.

In this marvelous book, acclaimed around the world, Alberto Manguel takes us on a fascinating exploration of what it means to be a reader of books. A History of Reading is a brilliant reminder of why we cherish the act of reading—despite distractions throughout the ages, from the Inquisition to the lures of cyberspace. He shows us what happens when we read; who we become; and how reading teaches us how to live. He reminds us that we live in books as well as among them—how we find ...

The acclaimed author of The Vertigo Years tells the remarkable story of the Parisian salon that brought together the greatest minds of the 18th century - Rousseau, Hume, Diderot, Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin - and changed the world forever.The Paris salon of Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d'Holbach - where friendship and radical philosophy flourished throughout the 1760s - stands as a seminal event in Western history. Over wine-soaked dinner parties, the finest minds of th...

Winner of the Pulitzer PrizeA history of civilization in France, England, and Germany from 1756, and in the remainder Europe from 1715 to 1789.

The eighteenth century Enlightenment marks the beginning of the modern age when the scientific method and belief in reason and progress came to hold sway over the Western world. In the twentieth century, however, the Enlightenment has often been judged harshly for its apparently simplistic optimism. Here a master historian goes back to the sources to give us both a more sophisticated and intriguing view of the philosophes, their world and their ideas.

"To the world when it was half a thousand years younger," Huizinga begins, "the outline of all things seemed more clearly marked than to us." Life seemed to consist in extremes—a fierce religious asceticism and an unrestrained licentiousness, ferocious judicial punishments and great popular waves of pity and mercy, the most horrible crimes and the most extravagant acts of saintliness—and everywhere a sea of tears, for men have never wept so unrestrainedly as in those centuries.First...

How fin-de-siècle Paris became the locus for the most intense revival of magical practices and doctrines since the Renaissance• Examines the remarkable lives of occult practitioners Joséphin Peladan, Papus, Stanislas de Guaïta, Saint-Yves d’Alveydre, Jules Doinel, and others• Reveals how occult activity deeply influenced many well-known cultural movements, such as Symbolism, the Decadents, modern music, and the “psychedelic 60s”During Paris’s Belle Époque (1871-1914...

François Mauriac, winner of the 1952 Nobel Prize in literature, is one of the most prominent Catholic novelists of the modern era, yet in the English speaking world he is known primarily for only one novel, 1927's Thérèse Desqueyroux. In this new translation of two other seminal works by Mauriac, the 1930 novel What Was Lost and its theoretical basis, the 1929 essay God and Mammon, Raymond N. MacKenzie re-introduces Mauriac to the English speaking world. Featurin...

We have long thought of the Renaissance as a luminous era that marked a decisive break with the past, but the idea of the Renaissance as a distinct period arose only during the nineteenth century. Though the view of the Middle Ages as a dark age of unreason has softened somewhat, we still locate the advent of modern rationality in the Italian thought and culture of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.Jacques Le Goff pleads for a strikingly different view. In this, his last book, ...