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 flourishing of radical philosophy in Baron Thierry Holbach's Paris salon from the 1750s to the 1770s stands as a seminal event in Western history. Holbach's house was an international epicenter of revolutionary ideas and intellectual daring, bringing together such original minds as Denis Diderot, Laurence Sterne, David Hume, Adam Smith, Ferdinando Galiani, Horace Walpole, Benjamin Franklin, Guillaume Raynal, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.In A Wicked Company, acclaimed hist...

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...

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, ...

Sixty years before the comics entered the American newspaper press, Rodolphe Töpffer of Geneva (1799-1846), schoolmaster, university professor, polemical journalist, art critic, landscape draftsman, and writer of fiction, travel tales, and social criticism, invented a new art form: the comic strip, or "picture story," that is now the graphic novel. At first he resisted publishing what he called his "little follies." When he did, they became instantly popular, plagiarized, and imitated thro...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Is the classic, accepted view of the life of Christ in some way incomplete? The authors of The Messianic Legacy present a provocative and meticulously researched look at Christ and the history of Christianity.“Enough to seriously challenge many traditional beliefs, if not alter them.”—Los Angeles Times Book ReviewExplosive, thought-provoking, fiercely compelling, Holy Blood, Holy Gr...

**A Vatican Secret Archive historian reveals the true story of the Templars: “**consider this little book the first-choice primer on its legend-laden subject” (Booklist).At its height, the Order of the Knights Templar rivaled the kingdoms of Europe in military might, economic power, and political influence. For 700 years, the story of these warrior-monks has been plagued by controversy and accusations of heresy. Tragically, the transcript of their Inquisit...

Dialogue Between a Priest and a Dying Man is a dialogue written by the Marquis de Sade while incarcerated in 1782, expressing his atheism by having the dying libertine convince the priest of the mistakes of a pious life. Excerpted from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.