The connoisseur has been an influential, if somewhat mysterious, figure in the history of art, responsible for making or breaking high-profile collections and reputations and influencing taste, the art market and the field of art history with their pronouncements. But what did it take to become a connoisseur, and how reliable were the great connoisseurs of previous centuries? With the advent of scientific techniques and artificial intelligence, what future is there for expertise based on t...

How is knowledge measured? How long does it take us to reflect on something and how long to express our thoughts? Such is the dilemma that the human, social and economic sciences go through, since they face the challenge of understanding complex processes when confronting the urgency of standards, measurements and forms of qualitative and quantitative evaluation that respond to notions of utility, productivity and viability, defined within social, cultural and political realities discordan...

In 1846, linguistics professor Fabrice Cleriquot is despatched from Lyon to the Swan River Colony, sent away with a box full of silkworms to stop him from bringing more disgrace upon the family. Accompanying him on board the Elizabeth are twenty-eight mismatched and misguided Catholic missionaries including Dom Salvado, who seeks to create a Spanish Benedictine monastery deep in the bush, and the Irish Sisters of Mercy, who are fleeing a dreadful famine. Given the job of distribut...

In this brilliant and widely acclaimed work, Peter Burke presents a social and cultural history of the Italian Renaissance. He discusses the social and political institutions which existed in Italy during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and analyses the ways of thinking and seeing which characterized this period of extraordinary artistic creativity. Developing a distinctive sociological approach, Peter Burke is concerned with not only the finished works of Michelangelo, Raphael, Leon...

The first three editions of this bestselling book have established A Social History of the Media as a classic, providing a masterful overview of communication media and of the social and cultural contexts within which they emerged and evolved over time.This fourth edition has been revised and updated throughout to reflect the latest developments in the field. Additionally, an expanded introduction explores the wide range of secondary literature and theory that inform the s...

A rich, wide-ranging history of ignorance in all its forms, from antiquity to the present dayA Seminary Coop Notable Book of 2023“Ignorance: A Global History explores the myriad ways in which ‘not-knowing’ affects our lives, sometimes for good, sometimes for ill.”—Michael Dirda, Washington PostThroughout history, every age has thought of itself as more knowledgeable than the last. Renaissance humanists viewed the M...

The Art of Conversation is a major contribution to the social history of language - a relatively new field which has become the focus of lively interdisciplinary debate in recent years.Drawing on the work of sociolinguists and others, Burke uses their concept while reserving the right to qualify their theories where the historical record makes this seem appropriate. Like the sociolinguists, Burke in concerned with the way language varies according to who is communicating t...

From Leonardo Da Vinci to Oliver Sacks: the first history of the western polymath, from the Renaissance to the present**"An absorbing group portrait and intellectual history."—**Kirkus Reviews"An admirable mixture of industry and erudition."—Robert Wilson, Wall Street JournalFrom Leonardo Da Vinci to John Dee and Comenius, from George Eliot to Oliver Sacks and Susan Sontag, polymaths have moved the...

Cultural history has in the last few decades come to the fore of historical research into early modern Europe. Due in no small part to Peter Burke’s pioneering work, the tools of the cultural historian are now routinely applied to every aspect of history, transforming our understanding of the past.First published in 1978, this study examines the broad sweep of pre-industrial Europe's popular culture. From the world of the professional entertainer to the songs, stories, rituals and ...

This book provides a critical history of the movement associated with the journal Annales, from its foundation in 1929 to the present. This movement has been the single most important force in the development of what is sometimes called ‘the new history’.Renowned cultural historian, Peter Burke, distinguishes between four main generations in the development of the Annales School. The first generation included Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, who fought against the old historical estab...

From comic verse to practical jokes, pornography to satire, acting to acrobatics, the Renaissance witnessed the flowering of play in all its forms. In the first wide-ranging and accessible introduction to play in Renaissance Italy, Peter Burke, celebrated historian of the Italian Renaissance, synthesizes over forty years’ research, explores the various forms of play in this period, and offers an overview that reveals the many connections between its different domains. While play could be r...

What is the history of knowledge? This engaging and accessible introduction explains what is distinctive about the new field of the history of knowledge (or, as some scholars say, ‘knowledges in the plural’) and how it differs from the history of science, intellectual history, the sociology of knowledge or from cultural history. Leading cultural historian, Peter Burke, draws upon examples of this new kind of history from different periods and from the history of India, East Asia and the Is...