By Ronald G. Witt (NHC Fellow, 1983–84) This monograph demonstrates why humanism began in Italy in the mid-thirteenth century. It considers Petrarch a third generation humanist, who christianized a secular movement. The analysis traces the beginning of humanism in poetry and its gradual penetration of other Latin literary genres, and, through stylistic analyses of texts, … Continued
By David Christian (NHC Fellow, 2006–07) Beginning with the breakup of the Mongol Empire in the mid-thirteenth century, Volume II of this comprehensive work covers the remarkable history of “Inner Eurasia,” from 1260 up to modern times, completing the story begun in Volume I. Volume II describes how agriculture spread through Inner Eurasia, providing the … Continued
By Annegret Fauser (NHC Fellow, 2015–16) Appalachian Spring, with music by Aaron Copland and choreography by Martha Graham, counts among the best known American contributions to the global concert hall and stage. In the years since its premiere-as a dance work at the Library of Congress in 1944-it has become one of Copland's most widely … Continued
By Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs (NHC Fellow, 1978–79) A lecture sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution Libraries in conjunction with the Washington Collegium for the Humanities Lecture Series: Death and the Afterlife in Art and Literature. Presented at the Smithsonian Institution, February 16, 1988.
Edited by Paul E. Szarmach (NHC Fellow, 1981–82) The European Middle Ages bequeathed to the world a legacy of spiritual and intellectual brilliance that has shaped many of the ideals, preconceptions, and institutions we now take for granted. An Introduction to the Medieval Mystics of Europe examines this phenomenon in vivid and scholarly accounts of the lives … Continued
Edited by Tatiana Seijas (NHC Fellow, 2016–17), Erica L. Ball, and Terri L. Snyder As If She Were Free brings together the biographies of twenty-four women of African descent to reveal how enslaved and recently freed women sought, imagined, and found freedom from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries in the Americas. Our biographical approach … Continued
Edited by David M. Halperin (NHC Fellow, 1985–86), John J. Winkler, and Froma I. Zeitlin A dream in which a man has sex with his mother may promise him political or commercial success — according to dream interpreters of late antiquity, who, unlike modern Western analysts, would not necessarily have drawn conclusions from the dream about the … Continued
By Armstead L. Robinson (NHC Fellow, 1984–85) Bitter Fruits of Bondage is the late Armstead L. Robinson’s magnum opus, a controversial history that explodes orthodoxies on both sides of the historical debate over why the South lost the Civil War. Recent studies, while conceding the importance of social factors in the unraveling of the Confederacy, … Continued
By Patricia Meyer Spacks (Trustee; NHC Fellow, 1982–83; 1988–89) This book offers a witty explanation of why boredom both haunts and motivates the literary imagination. Moving from Samuel Johnson to Donald Barthelme, from Jane Austen to Anita Brookner, Spacks shows us at last how we arrived in a postmodern world where boredom is the all-encompassing … Continued
By Gerard Passannante (NHC Fellow, 2010–11) When we catastrophize, we think the worst. We make too much of too little, or something of nothing. Yet what looks simply like a bad habit, Gerard Passannante argues, was also a spur to some of the daring conceptual innovations and feats of imagination that defined the intellectual and cultural history … Continued