The Routledge Companion to Cultural History in the Western World is a comprehensive examination of recent discussions and findings in the exciting field of cultural history.
A synthesis of how the new cultural history has transformed the study of history, the volume is divided into three parts – medieval, early modern and modern – that emphasize the way people made sense of the world around them. Contributions cover such themes as material cultures of living, mobility and transport, cultural exchange and transfer, power and conflict, emotion and communication, and the history of the senses. The focus is on the Western world, but the notion of the West is a flexible one. In bringing together 36 authors from 15 countries, the book takes a wide geographical coverage, devoting continuous attention to global connections and the emerging trend of globalization. It builds a panorama of the transformation of Western identities, and the critical ramifications of that evolution from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century, that offers the reader a wide-ranging illustration of the potentials of cultural history as a way of studying the past in a variety of times, spaces and aspects of human experience.
Engaging with historiographical debate and covering a vast range of themes, periods and places, The Routledge Companion to Cultural History in the Western World is the ideal resource for cultural history students and scholars to understand and advance this dynamic field.
Author(s): Alessandro Arcangeli, Jörg Rogge, Hannu Salmi
Series: Routledge Companions
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2020
Language: English
Pages: 604
City: London
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of illustrations
List of contributors
Acknowledgements
General introduction
PART 1: Shaping Western identities, 1250–1500
Introduction
1. Culture of politics in the Middle Ages: rituals to create and confirm political order
2. Cultures of conflict
3. Material cultures of living: spatiality and everyday life
4. Travel, mobility, and culture in Europe
5. Cultural encounters and transfer: the case of pious foundations in the Islamicate world
6. Practices of communication: literacy, gestures and words – research on late medieval communication
7. Making sense of one’s life and the world
8. Conceiving of medieval identities
9. Body, sexuality, and health
10. Contextualizing late medieval emot
PART 2: Europe meets the globe: Western identities in question, 1500–1750
Introduction
11. God’s green garden: interactions between humans and the environment
12. Material cultures of living: European attitudes to novelties
13. Reverence, shame and guilt in early modern European cultures
14. Making sense of the world: the creation and transfer of knowledge
15. The self: representations and practices
16. The experience of time
17. Written communication in urban spaces: publication, textual materiality and appropriations
18. Mobility, global interaction and cultural transfers in the age of exploration
19. Faces of power and conflict
PART 3: The Western world and the global challenge, from 1750 to the present
Introduction
20. Enlightenment, revolution, and melancholy
21. Individualism and emotion in modern Western culture
22. Health and illness, the self and the body
23. Family, home and variations in domestic life
24. Natural disasters and modernity
25. Cultures of mobility
26. The cultural life of the senses in modernity
27. Media and mediatization
28. Indigenous and postcolonial cultures
29. Violence and trauma: experiencing the two World Wars
30. The Cold War cultures and beyond
31. The culture of commerce and the global economy
32. Epilogue: cultural history in retrospect
Index of names
