bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Art Literature and Theory of Art
Authors: Weststeijn Thijs
Published: June 2013

In contrast to theories of poetry or rhetoric, no complete ancient theory of the figurative arts survives. Renaissance authors wishing to underpin the “rebirth” of painting therefore had to resort to a variety of strategies to invent a new genre. Literary metaphors and fragments from artists’ biographies (mainly from Pliny) were joined with scientific discoveries such as the theory of perspective and the proportions of human anatomy. Leon Battista Alberti’s On Painting of 1435 was the first text to merge ancient conceptions and newfangled geometric insights into a coherent whole that professed to revive classical art theory. His efforts sparked the development of a sizeable genre in Italy in the 15th and 16th centuries. In 17th-century France, the Netherlands and (to a lesser extent) Spain and Britain developed their own traditions. These texts shared a prescriptive approach in combination with biographical information about artists. As a central tenet from Alberti onward, humanistic knowledge was tied to basic acquaintance with the artist’s studio. Only at the end of the 16th century did art theory become a topic for courtiers stylizing their texts in a literary fashion. In the 17th century, the role of learned art lovers and their symbiotic relationship to the painters became increasingly important. By comparing the figurative arts to respectable activities such as poetry, rhetoric, and antiquarianism, and by drawing humanistic interest to the painter’s workshop, these texts served an essential role in facilitating the communication between craftsmen and the lettered. Developing the ideal of the “learned painter,” the textual tradition thus developed synchronously to the artist’s changing social status. Whereas in the 16th century most authors were artists or had some link to studio practice, in the 17th century amateur-connoisseurs began to replace them; simultaneously, visual art and its theory were institutionalized in the first academies of art. Implicitly or explicitly, Renaissance treatises on painting have, therefore, as their main argument the inclusion of painting among the liberal arts, the intellectual activities worthy of the universal man. Other written sources relevant for the historical reconstruction of manners of speaking about the visual arts include poems, plays, and diaries. As a topic of analysis, sculpture plays a comparatively minor role.
Hieronymus Bosch
Authors: Dixon Laurinda
Published: June 2013

The art of Hieronymus Bosch has challenged and fascinated viewers since the 15th century. His hybrid creatures and creative monstrosities seem unprecedented in the art historical canon and therefore mysterious to 21st-century viewers. Adding to this general sense of bafflement is the fact that we know perhaps less about Bosch than any other artist of his era. Unlike his famous contemporaries, Albrecht Dürer and Leonardo da Vinci, who documented their lives and works in copious letters and writings, Bosch left us nothing in his own words. His date of birth is unknown, and we cannot say if he ever left his birthplace, the town of ‘s-Hertogenbosh (the modern city of den Bosch, the Netherlands), from which he took his professional name. For the most part, the art itself is all that is left us, although ironically documentation does exist for several lost paintings. Today, only about twenty-five works are accepted as by Bosch’s hand, and his name appears on only seven of these. None shows a date. With the advent of sophisticated means of technical examination of panels, even these few are being disputed. No less important is the question of meaning in Bosch’s works, which were produced at a time when artists delighted in veiling content within layers of enigma and symbolism. As scholars continue to delve into the historical and artistic contexts from which Bosch evolved, the inscrutable painter emerges as a man of his time, conversant in the historical, intellectual, and religious controversies of his day. His works reflect a tumultuous era, different from, but no less complex than, our own.
Louise Labé
Authors: Read Kirk D.
Published: June 2013

Louise Labé (c. b. 1522–d. 1566) is the most well-known and celebrated woman writer of non-noble birth from the French Renaissance. While her published work (Œuvres, 1555) is modest in length, the variety of genres she employs (epistle, sonnet, elegy, prose dialogue), the robust evidence of her proto-feminist vocation, her strength of voice, and her mastery of Petrarchan and Neoplatonic conventions have made of her a hugely important figure in the literature of this period. Labé was born in the early 1520s to a family of wealthy rope makers in Lyon, a city at the crossroads of the burgeoning cultural Renaissance given its situation between Paris and Italy. Daughter of Pierre Charly and second wife Étiennette Roybet who died shortly after Labé’s birth, Louise received an uncommonly thorough humanist education, most probably in a convent setting (Le couvent de la Déserte), where it is conjectured she may have been sent by her very young stepmother. The volume that Labé published with one of the premier printing houses of her day (Jean de Tournes) offers a stunning trove of evidence in both prose and poetry of a female writer’s negotiation of the literary and social conventions that challenged learned women of this time. The Œuvres are prefaced by the epistolary dedication to the young Lyonnais noblewoman, Clémence de Bourges, a manifesto for women’s participation in letters wherein she implores the ladies of Lyon to look above their distaffs and join the writer’s enterprise. This call to writing is followed by a much lengthier but no less fiercely gendered Débat de Folie et d’Amour (Debate of folly and love), a mythological play that enacts many of the epistle’s issues in allegorical form. Following the debate are three elegies and a sonnet cycle of twenty-four poems, all manifesting a deep engagement with contemporary literary conventions as told in a consciously feminine voice: In her poetic work Labé inscribes on several occasions her regional sisterhood (ô Dames Lionnoises). Labé’s final sonnet (and final words in the Œuvres) serves as both an entreaty and an apology to the women she invites into her literary project. On the very next page begins the inscription of twenty-four homages to her by male contemporaries, an insurance policy of sorts, against the tide of scandal and criticism attached to her work and reputation. Their success continues to be the subject of some debate, as Louise Labé has endured centuries of both criticism and praise, shifting most dramatically in 2006 with the proposition that her works were not at all hers but cooked up by a clever male collaborative. Such is the legacy of a powerful woman writer at odds with 16th-century social and literary conventions and norms of gender.
Reformations and Revolt in the Netherlands, 1500–1621
Authors: Pollmann Judith , Duke Alastair , Janssen Geert
Published: June 2013

The Low Countries have a special place in Reformation history, both because of the great diversity of the religious landscape and because they experienced a genuine Reformation “from below,” as well as fierce repression of Protestant heresies. Protests against the latter helped to trigger the revolt that resulted in the split of the Habsburg Netherlands. In the northern Netherlands, the Dutch Republic gave the Reformed Church a monopoly of worship but also guaranteed freedom of conscience to dissidents. The southern Netherlands, once “reconciled” with the Habsburgs and having expelled its Protestant inhabitants, became a bulwark of the Counter-Reformation. For more on the revolt, see the Oxford Bibliographies in Renaissance and Reformation article “The Netherlands (Dutch Revolt/Dutch Republic)” by Henk van Nierop.
Women Writing in French
Authors: Winn Colette H.
Published: June 2013

In some domains, women may not have had a Renaissance, as Joan Kelly suggests in a 1977 article that transformed forever the way that critics study the history of women (Kelly 1977, cited under Monographs). Nevertheless, important historical and sociocultural phenomena such as the advent of print, humanism, religiously inspired educational campaigns (Lutheran, Calvinist, and Catholic), and the impact of the Italian Renaissance on France’s cultural and intellectual life provided French women from the aristocracy and the upper-bourgeois milieu with unprecedented opportunities to acquire literacy, to argue and promote causes dear to them in literary salons that they themselves ran, to circulate their manuscripts among friends, and even to enter into the public world of print. Granted, French women of letters had to be inventive in order to maneuver within male-authored literary conventions, circumvent gender strictures, and establish a public, intellectual life in a society often hostile to their aspirations. But their early steps in the area of cultural expression were great, and their contributions as writers of nearly every literary form, as generous patrons of literature and the arts, and as producers of books are noteworthy. This article deals with these different aspects of 16th-century French women’s involvement in writing. Since the early 1990s, scholarship on French women and writing has been dominated by edited collections of essays organized around a particular theme or a particular line of inquiry. Most of these works compile the proceedings of international, interdisciplinary, and, more recently, transhistorical and cross-cultural conferences. Monographs that have appeared so far are traditionally more general in scope. Quite remarkable is the recovery of a number of female-authored texts since the early 1990s, and the greater availability, thanks to several publishing firms and collective scholarly efforts on both sides of the Atlantic, of well-known women writers as well as less familiar ones in the form of critical editions (scholarly or student oriented), bilingual editions and English translations to address the needs of the ever-growing field of interdisciplinary studies, anthologies containing textual extracts from a wide variety of women’s writings and genre-based anthologies, and digitized libraries and websites of all sorts. Remarkable as well is the growing number of dictionaries and encyclopedias that pay tribute to early modern women and their creativity.
Art Market
Authors: North Michael
Published: June 2013

This overview concentrates on newer studies on art markets and on research that has not yet received attention in this context. This is not a résumé of recent art market research in general; rather, it is limited to the greater Renaissance. That is why Italy and the Low Countries are the areas that are of central importance. Of late, interest has centered on cultural transfer, that is, the diffusion and reception of the Renaissance and humanism in, and even beyond, Europe. In addition, studies of the Renaissance emphasis its social and economic location and, thus, the question of patrons, the art market, and the demand for art. Although this field has established its own research tradition in the past fifteen to twenty years, the dominant scholarship, stressing intellectual history or aesthetic approaches, has not taken adequate account of the development. Various sociological approaches have been tested for the reception of Italian Renaissance painting. We may distinguish here between macro-sociological, micro-sociological, and (macro-)economic approaches. The macro sociologists study the development of European society and associate particular artistic phenomena, such as the Italian Renaissance, with it. The micro-sociological approach, in contrast, places the material conditions under which art was produced at center stage. This approach includes, among others, the study of painters’ training, guild organization, and the relationship between painter and patron. Finally, the economic approach seeks to examine the links between a period’s artistic production and economic cycles. In all three approaches, the art market plays a role, although the focus could be on production and reception of art.
Cosimo il Vecchio de' Medici
Authors: Fletcher Stella
Published: June 2013

The reputation of Cosimo de’ Medici (b. 1389–d. 1464) is that of the head of a successful business empire, banker to successive popes, director of Florence’s foreign policy, the first member of his family to subvert Florence’s republican constitution, and a cultural patron of such generosity that he could single-handedly change the appearance of his city. There are no obvious fault lines in Cosimo’s biography: the business interests, relations with popes and princes, political activity and cultural patronage were all so interrelated that it is difficult to separate them. The categories in this article have therefore been kept to a minimum, and many of the individual books and articles could reasonably appear under a number of headings. After Reference Works and Primary Sources, the section devoted to Histories and Biographies is subdivided into works written and/or published between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries and those published in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Cosimo’s wealth and influence came from his direction of the Medici Bank and associated businesses, determining its place in the article. As the bank had branches beyond Florence, it in turn determined the nature of his Relations with Other States. As far as foreign princes were concerned, he was the face of republican Florence and a man with whom they could deal quite comfortably. That contributed to his status within Florence, but the employment created by his businesses counted for more, and his wealth mattered most of all. Wealth bought influence in the world of Florentine Politics, and the works in that section explore the detail behind that familiar generalization. Political patronage and cultural patronage operated along the same principles of mutual back-scratching, but the means by which Cosimo emerged as a significant cultural patron take us back to the world of commerce and Cosimo’s guilt at the means by which he amassed his fortune. Of his Religion there is perhaps relatively little to say, except that his conventional faith was manifested in his patronage of various religious communities. Such communities required buildings and were natural repositories of learning. This determines the order in which the bibliography addresses his Cultural Patronage: after general surveys that range across the visual arts and literary works, there are subsections on Architecture, Libraries, Humanists and Humanism. The article concludes with Collections of Papers, which cover diverse topics.
Women and Medicine
Authors: Fissell Mary E.
Published: June 2013

Women played substantial roles as healers in Renaissance and Reformation Europe, as well as experiencing ill health and serving as a focus of medical inquiry. The history of pre-modern women and medicine received its first modern treatment in a 1930s overview by a feminist physician, but the topic only began to receive sustained attention from the 1970s, when women’s history emerged as an academic discipline and the history of medicine became oriented to social history. Prior to this period, the history of medicine had emphasized the scientific developments that led to breakthroughs and the men who had made them and was often written by physicians. The ordinary everyday practice of medicine, let alone the kinds of domestic or marginal healing often performed by women, were simply not part of the agenda of the discipline. Feminist scholarship of the 1970s, combined with a new social history of medicine, broadened the remit of historians of medicine. Initially, historians offered stories of how male doctors elbowed female midwives out of the birthing room: a kind of feminist morality tale, a rejoinder to late 19th and early 20th century obstetricians’ portrayals of midwives as ignorant, superstitious, and dangerous. Such portrayals, of course, tell us more about the politics of obstetrics at the turn of the 20th century than they do about early modern midwives. Scholarship on women, health, and healing has expanded considerably since the 1970s, and such studies often complicate or nuance our more general understanding of early modern health and healing. First, scholarship on practitioners has broadened beyond midwives. While midwives were significant health-care providers (often the only medical occupation to be clearly designated in many historical records) we can now situate them in a much larger array of female healers. Healers ranged from the many women who prepared sophisticated medicines in their homes and treated family, friends, and neighbors, to the more specialized health-care workers such as searchers (who examined bodies to determine cause of death) and the variety of women who provided forms of nursing care in their own and others’ homes and in hospitals. Research into women and women’s experiences has also extended into other areas of medical history. Scholars have developed the history of the patient by examining the role of gender in shaping how women (and men) experienced illness and made meaning of their sufferings. Historians have also explored how ideas and practices about gender and body intersect with the history of medicine in multiple ways, from studies of popular ideas about reproduction to a new interpretation of the rise of anatomy that takes gender as a central category of analysis.
Reform Hinduism
Authors: Sen Amiya P.
Published: June 2013

The expression “Reform Hinduism” may justly be used to describe the new religious, moral, and social order that the Western-educated Hindu intelligentsia attempted to construct in the 19th century. In historical analysis, such attempts ought to be separated from seemingly similar attempts made in the premodern era. Equally, it must be kept apart from the expression “neo-Hinduism” for all that was new in Hinduism was not necessarily reformist in substance or orientation. In hindsight, “Reform Hinduism” appears distinctive on several counts. First, more than ever before, this took Hindus to constitute a unified community and Hinduism to consist of a homogenous system of religious beliefs and practices. Second, it worked upon the presumption that the impulse and direction for reform would originate in the upper castes or classes and subsequently filter down to the lower. Understandably, lower-caste attempts at reform, which had a momentum and motives of their own, tried to overturn such presumptions. Third, modern Hindus tried to foist the very concept of reform upon new theories of social and historical change emanating in the West. Arguably, this indicates the very different order of moral and intellectual challenge confronting the modern Hindu. While revealing a general willingness to change, Reform Hinduism actually represents a very specific and selective reading of change. Thus, not all matters that called for change entered reformist agendas, and arbitrary choices were often made between issues that were otherwise closely related. Reform work was also characterized by deep-seated differences over methods and strategies, making reform a sharply contested paradigm. On the whole though, reformers believed that contemporary Hinduism was a visibly corrupted form of an idyllic Hinduism of the past and that the latter had to be brought back, however selectively. They also emphasized human mediation as a potent instrument of change, taking such mediation to be morally binding upon man. The two issues most widely and fiercely agitated within Reform Hinduism were the status of women and caste. These are important themes by themselves and deserve detailed treatment elsewhere. Of these two issues, only the first has been briefly taken up here. This article focuses on contestations around ideology, motives, and methods adopted by Hindu reformers and their varied critics. On one level, Reform Hinduism was not just about altering beliefs or practices; it also touched upon deeper questions of identity and self-understanding. It consistently sought and deliberated upon a social subject. Thus, “What is Hindu?” became deeply intertwined with “Who is a Hindu?” or “What did it mean to be a Hindu?”
Representations of Slavery
Authors: Hamilton Douglas
Published: June 2013

Since the mid-1990s, issues of slave trades, slavery, and abolitions have been represented in museums and monuments and on film, television, radio, and countless websites. They have become central to developments in education curricula and pedagogical resources. This “breaking the silence” on slavery has been a remarkable global phenomenon: displays and memorials in Europe and North America have been matched by contemporaneous equivalents in Brazil and western and southern Africa. In part, this efflorescence has been inspired by developments since the 1990s in relation to restorative justice, reparations debates, and ideas of truth and reconciliation. This surge has been highly politicized, therefore, and many public representations of slavery remain in a national register and speak to local concerns. Scholarly studies often follow suit. In this national mode, representations remain highly controversial. In individual states, particularly in Europe, a series of important anniversaries prompted widespread commemorations, notably in France (1998) and Britain (2007). Yet, it is important to recognize that the representation of slavery has not just been about commemorating abolitions, such as the 2007 bicentenary of the abolition of the British slave trade, but also about the importance of slavery in societies generally. In this context, monuments and memorials, such as Le Morne in Mauritius or the installation at Anse Cafard in Martinique, speak as loudly and movingly to the place of slavery in society as any major exhibition in Europe or North America. The scholarship outlined below has been inspired by the multifarious forms of representation and it attempts to explore and explain their many meanings. Across the world, representations of slavery have been motivated and appropriated by different groups intent on highlighting either brutal maltreatment and continuing injustice or timely attempts to eradicate it. Some seek to emphasize the relatively “benign” nature of their own brands of enslavement. Increasingly, however, scholars are trying to develop explanations for the global nature of this phenomenon; a number of volumes now seek to compare the experiences of different nations and continents.
Political Participation in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World
Authors: Polfliet Marieke
Published: June 2013

Political participation in the 19th-century Atlantic world is related to a process that encompasses the development of political consciousness and practices among peoples in Europe and America. European and American political historiographies of the 19th century have used different concepts to characterize processes leading to the political participation of the masses. In the United States, the concept has been described as the era of “democratization”; in Europe, scholars described it as a “politicization” process, whereas Latin America has long been considered apart from these expressions of “modernity.” These different characterizations all encompass the study of the expansion of suffrage rights and the constitution of party politics, but they also include the development of “public spheres” through sociability structures and associations, the development of the press, and the expression of civic cultures through demonstrations and collective mobilizations. First, the Atlantic dimension of these phenomena includes the comparison among the evolutions of political systems, in which similar trends—development of political parties, debates on the expansion of the right of suffrage, and development of education and information—led to different results, in a transatlantic perspective. The founding influence of Alexis de Tocqueville’s analysis is still perceptible and discussed in this field. Beyond assessing the level of democracy and modernity of political practices of each society, the examination of common patterns in public life and civil society offers important insights into the development of political consciousness, through sociability structures as well as conflicting processes. Next, the Atlantic perspective also suggests the reading of 19th-century revolutionary episodes in the Caribbean, Latin America, and Europe as opportunities for direct involvement in political action with a global impact on the Atlantic world. Finally, structural transformations of 19th-century societies sharpened the issue of political participation for those not included in white men’s democracy—whether because of their race, gender, class, or ethnicity—an issue that affected the Atlantic space as a whole and challenged its stability.
Slave Codes
Authors: Hadden Sally
Published: June 2013

The creation of legal codes dates back to antiquity, but the preference for continuing to use codes (as opposed to garden-variety legislation) was not uniform across the Atlantic World. As early as the Romans, there were codes that defined and restricted the rights of slaves. Remnants of those Roman codes may be found in all civil law descendant codes, namely, the Spanish (Las Siete Partidas and Recopilacións), Portuguese (Ordenações Filipinas), and French (Le Code Noir), each of which contains some provisions relating to slaves. The Enlightenment and increased legislative power explains the creation of so many codes during the early modern period, for the era of 1500–1750 generated many of them. The English, following common-law tradition, did not rely upon codes; statutes passed by legislatures and court decisions rendered by judges created a patchwork of slave law that a few scholars have argued created a de facto slave code; the laws were sometimes referred to as such by their makers. The transmission of any of these European codes or laws to the New World was patchy, with some colonies of the 1600s and 1700s enacting their own local ordinances and so-called codes in English colonies. Not only was transmission uneven, but also the creation of codes did not insure their enforcement on the ground, for the gap between publication and practice on the ground often meant that the law was honored more in the breach than the observance. For further information on slave law in the New World, consult the separate Oxford Bibliographies articles on Law and Slavery and Emancipation.
Manumission
Authors: Ryden David
Published: June 2013

Along the western rim of the Atlantic basin, slavery’s growth was primarily in response to economic imperatives. The sugar industry, in particular, drove much of the flow of the transatlantic slave trade from the late 16th century to the second half of the 19th century. However, slavery proved to be a plastic institution, adapting to a variety of contexts and crop types throughout the Americas. As a consequence of this variation, the frequency and the rationale for master-sanctioned manumission (the voluntary freeing of slaves) differed among the array of economic, as well as cultural and legal, contexts. Taken at face value, manumission deeds show that masters granted freedom to individuals for cash payment; “loyal,” valorous, or “good service” shown by a slave; religious and ideological reasons; or the “love and affection” proclaimed by the manumitter. Historians of free populations of color in the Atlantic world have been drawn to manumission studies, but those scholars interested in the conditions and the standard of living of slaves have made the most use of manumission records. For the latter, analysis of the manumission deeds and the process of manumission yields rich insight into the relationship between masters and their slaves across time and space; both the textual content of individual manumission records and the aggregate statistical patterns in groups of records can offer some indication of the intensity in which slaves were controlled. Furthermore, manumission deeds provide one perspective into the strategies that slaves pursued in order to better their lives within a brutal labor regime. The manumission process, as well as the legal code regulating the freeing of slaves, not only details the attitudes of the master class toward slaves and the slave economy but also provides evidence of slave agency. Manumission, it should be kept in mind, is a very narrow topic within the slavery historiography, but paradoxically it is a subfield that touches on many broader themes that are much more developed in the literature, including slave resistance, urban slavery, the independent economy of slaves, and so forth. This article, therefore, cites scholarship that is closely connected to manumission; readers should be advised that many classic general works on slavery and freedom are excluded.
Puritanism
Authors: Van Engen Abram C.
Published: June 2013

Puritanism is a problem. It had a massive impact on the early modern history of England and New England, and yet no scholar can quite agree on how to define it or exactly what influence it had. In the absence of consensus, scholars can still attempt to summarize who the Puritans were and what they did. First, Puritans emerged as a group of zealously godly Protestants who wanted to see further reforms in the Church of England. Thus, Puritanism often (though not always) involved controversies over ecclesiastical polity: the form and function of the Church of England. Second, Puritans frequently sought each other out, banding together and separating from the ungodly either physically (in conferences, schools, and trips to nearby godly sermons), mentally (seeing themselves as a persecuted minority), or through outright declaration (in the case of more radical Puritans called Separatists). In this sense, Puritanism formed a social movement of the bonded godly. But third—and most importantly—Puritans were driven by their piety, as both they and their enemies agreed. Such piety usually involved an experiential account of grace tied to predestination combined with a disciplined life of holiness. And this third sense of Puritanism helps explain the other two, for in seeking disciplined holiness and the experience of grace, Puritans looked to be nourished by encountering each other’s representations of grace (producing conferences and covenants among the godly) and, primarily, by hearing the Word of God through evangelical preaching, with consequences pertaining to the entire ecclesiastical system of training and ordaining ministers. In large part, then, Puritanism constituted more a way of life than a set of doctrines or positions. And this way of life—this zealous godliness in pursuit of a grace that none could earn—helped cause the founding of New England and the English Civil War while contributing (according to differing interpretations) to the development of English political thought, American character, and the rise of modern society. This bibliography attempts to lay out Puritanism through four frameworks: place, period, key features, and potential legacies. Before proceeding, a word should be said about capitalizing “Puritanism.” Scholars of English Puritanism no longer capitalize this term in order to emphasize the difficulty of definition, the fluidity of membership, and the centrality of reformed thinking to English society (rather than the idea of a radical wing). Scholars of New England Puritans typically do capitalize the word, recognizing a distinct culture, even if filled with its own diversity, although some have also moved away from capitalizing the term for many of the same reasons. This article retains capitalization in part because its purpose is to help distinguish a certain people and a certain historiography of that people, and in part to recognize the different situation in New England.
Philanthropy
Authors: Moniz Amanda
Published: June 2013

Since the beginnings of European expansion, philanthropy both fostered the integration of the Atlantic world and was in turn shaped by it. First appearing in the 17th century and coming into common usage in English in the 18th century, the word philanthropy, from the Greek for “love of mankind,” referred to a sentiment of concern for humanity’s well-being. The corresponding activity to relieve, better, or reform suffering or disorderly people could be pursued through public measures, the benefactions and activism of individuals, or charitable bodies, Recognizing their interrelated and often mutually constitutive nature, this article encompasses public poor relief, private charity, and reform endeavors. Beginning in the same era as European expansion across the Atlantic, and prompted by similar forces of religious competition and social pressures, European peoples began transforming the personal and reciprocal charity of the medieval era into bureaucratic and global phenomenon it became by the late 19th century. In the early modern era, Europeans sought to make charitable institutions more efficient, and they pursued institutional solutions to social problems such as vagrancy. At the same time, they extended their charitable activity around the Atlantic and beyond by transferring the confraternities that provided welfare to imperial outposts and by founding missionary charities to evangelize religious outsiders and strengthen their empires. A second turning point came in the Age of Democratic Revolution. The development of an Atlantic and then global commercial, liberalizing economy, along with the Enlightenment drive for improvement, caused people on both sides of the Atlantic to think anew about poverty and charity. The same economic developments and the revolutionary forces in the late 18th century led to new moral concern for strangers—people who would formerly have been outside one’s moral responsibility—and made humanitarian activity addressing increasingly targeted problems possible. In addition, by the beginning of the 19th century, women on both sides of the Atlantic were setting up female-run charitable organizations that made women’s activism a new force for integration around the Atlantic.
The Atlantic Ocean and India
Authors: Stern Philip
Published: June 2013

Growing interest in world, global, and what Subrahmanyam 2007 (cited under Portuguese) calls “connected histories” have increasingly led historians to query the permeable and imprecise boundaries of the Atlantic, and to consider its relationship with the rest of the world. As European ships, goods, people, and ideas were increasingly diffused around the world, jurisdictional boundaries failed to hew neatly to arbitrary divisions between the seas and oceans, while itinerants, merchants, and pirates alike similarly defined their own economic, political, and social worlds in the space between the Eastern and Western hemispheres. Though there is a long tradition of historiography that has understood the way Atlantic and Indian empires have comingled in the metropolitan markets of Europe, historians have also come to more direct connections between the Atlantic and India along the “webs” of empire (see Games 2008, cited under British: Imperial and Global Connections), from the earliest European efforts to find various maritime routes to Asia via the Atlantic through the diffusion of Spanish American silver in South Asian markets to the late 18th-century dumping of English East India Company tea into Boston Harbor. For some, the recognition of the interfluvial nature of the oceans has increasingly become the framework for a methodological critique of Atlantic history itself; for others, it has opened up a wealth of new subjects and possibilities for enhancing our understanding of the nature of the early modern Atlantic world. In this spirit, and given the somewhat diffuse nature of this particular subject, the emphasis in this bibliography is on a sampling of different perspectives and approaches that scholars have used to pursue the historical or historiographical relationships between the Atlantic world and South Asia, directly and often self-consciously, in whole or in part. It is also delimited quite specifically to the early modern Atlantic and India, though at times it inevitably hints at work on the Indian Ocean writ large as well as the great interest, particularly in economic history, in Atlantic empires and East Asia. As such, the list below is intended simply to suggest a variety of overlapping points of entry for scholars who are interested in exploring the various consequences for Atlantic history, when considering comparisons, connections, and ramifications of the worlds beyond its borders, and specifically with India.
The Greater Middle East
Authors: Reich Bernard , Silverburg Sanford R. , Ettinger David
Published: June 2013

Dating back to biblical times, the area we refer to as the Middle East has, throughout the course of history, defied attempts to precisely define it. Until today, the region’s contours remain shrouded in geographic ambiguity. Through the centuries, the Middle East, or parts thereof, has been variously referred to as “Le Orient,” “Proche Orient,” “Anatolia,” “North Africa,” “the Persian Gulf region,” “Arabian Peninsula,” “the Levant,” “the Fertile Crescent,” “Asia Minor,” “the Maghreb,” “Southwest Asia,” “the Caspian region,” and “Greater Middle East.” Merriam-Webster Geographical Dictionary labels it “an indefinite and unofficial term.” Long before being adopted in common parlance, the term “Middle East” was a Western invention used by military strategists and governments in the 19th and 20th centuries to denote areas to the east of western Europe. As part of the Ottoman Empire, it extended from Algeria in the west to Iraq in the east, parts of Russia and Hungary to the north, and the Arabian Peninsula to the south. The term “Near East,” often used synonymously, was popularized after the dismantlement of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, referring to the area at the hub of Europe, Africa, and Asia that served as a crossroads and bridge among the three continents and to the various states around the eastern areas of the Mediterranean Sea. After World War II, the geographical demarcation of the Middle East included areas at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, as well as Greece, Turkey, North Africa, and Iran, reflecting the region’s strategic and geopolitical significance in the wake of the Cold War. Although scholars of the area continue to differ in their definitions of the region, this bibliography will focus on the core region generally regarded as the Middle East, bounded by Turkey to the north, Iran to the east, Egypt to the west, and Yemen to the south. It does not include North Africa, the Sudan, or Central Asia. The first section includes a list of General Overviews and introductory works and those on the region’s Geography, History, Politics, Economics, and International Relations. Important related topics such as Petroleum and Energy and the Arab-Israeli Conflict are also treated. In light of recent developments, we have added the “Arab Spring”. The second section is devoted individually to The Countries of the Middle East. Although the emphasis is on contemporary works, classic titles are included as well, in keeping with the authors’ goal to assist researchers in locating the best works on the region.
Channels of Electoral Representation in Advanced Industrialized Democracies
Authors: Kreuzer Marcus
Published: June 2013

Electoral systems and political parties not only are at the core of a wide range of representational mechanisms (others being lobbying, direct democracy, corporatism) used in modern democracies to project societal interests into the formal, legislative decision-making process, but also they vary greatly in their respective make-ups. Political parties differ in their internal decision making, membership size, funding, links with interest groups, and ideology. Electoral systems, in turn, are differentiated into systems of proportional representation (PR), single-member district (SMD), or first-past-the-post electoral systems (FPTP). Despite all these differences, parties and electoral systems are the two primary mechanisms for aggregating and then translating the preferences of private individual citizens. They also are the oldest, most widely studied, and arguably the most democratic channel of political representation. Parties and electoral systems certainly are important, but they are still only intermediary mechanisms that interact in complex ways with other factors, such as actors’ preferences, resources, other representational mechanisms, and the larger constitutional context. This complex interaction makes it intriguing to study how they affect political representation and explains why they are studied from so many different angles, methodologies, and theoretical perspectives. The following bibliographic suggestions are intended to reflect this diversity in the literature. The literature points out that parties and electoral systems function not just as mechanisms of political expression, through which voter preferences are bundled, articulated, and electorally weighted, but also as mechanisms of social control. The social control function becomes apparent in the ability of parties and electoral systems to contain the risks of overly expressive and potentially anarchic forms of direct and, hence, unorganized participation (i.e., protest, extremism, violence) as well as their potential to integrate individual citizens into the political order by creating political identities crucial for social order. Thus, parties and electoral systems have an as yet little understood but also fascinatingly complex relationship to popular sovereignty because they are indispensable for it while at the same time they give politicians the ability to mute and manipulate that sovereignty. In large part, the literature on parties and electoral systems tries to untangle this complex relationship by studying how their cross-national and historical variations influence the extent to which they have facilitated or distorted political representation.
Policy Responsiveness to Public Opinion
Authors: Erikson Robert S.
Published: June 2013

Policy responsiveness is a goal of democratic government—that government action responds to the preferences of its citizens. It is conceptually distinct from “representation,” whereby government actions mirror the preferences of public opinion. Governments can be representative without a direct responsiveness causal mechanism. Policy can respond to public opinion but remain biased due to other influences besides the public. Responsiveness is no certain result in a democracy, as there are many links in the causal chain that must be unbroken for it to be at work. Citizens can vote politicians in or out of office based on the adequacy of their policy representation. But are they up for the task? Do elected officials believe they must follow public opinion, and do they know what their constituents want? Ultimately, how strongly does government policy reflect citizen views? This essay addresses these questions. The literature reviewed here covers only policy representation in the United States. For related coverage, including outside the US sphere, see essays by Will Jennings (Mechanisms of Representation) and Christopher Wlezien (Advanced Democracies: Public Opinion and Public Policy in Advanced Democracies) as part of this Oxford Bibliographies in Political Science series. One conclusion is that public opinion is an influential force in determining public policy in the United States, especially when it comes to setting the ideological tone of policy in the states or the nation. The degree of influence may seem surprising given what we know about voters’ capabilities. Yet there is reason for caution as well as optimism. The general public’s influence sometimes faces the headwinds of hostile economic forces. Influence is not equally distributed across all segments of the public.
Political Economy
Authors: Hooks Gregory , Crookston Andrew
Published: June 2013

Arguably, political economy—the intersection of economics and politics—is the foundation of the modern social sciences and the focus of founding sociological theorists, most notably Max Weber, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels. Arguably, with his extended concern for the division of labor, even Emile Durkheim was profoundly concerned with political economy. Although this is not the case for economics and political science, the meaning of political economy has been fairly consistent in sociology. That is, the sociological examination of political economy has retained a focus on the intersection between the political and the economic. Theoretical emphases have shifted in the course of lively and extended debates over the state, markets, social class, culture, citizens, and globalization. Nevertheless, the central focus of political economy has persisted, as has its importance to sociological theory.
Children
Authors: Parcel Toby L.
Published: June 2013

One definition of “children” suggests it is the social grouping of humans from birth to age twenty. A closely related concept, “childhood,” refers to the life stage of these individuals. During the middle of the 20th century, sociologists generally were not focused on studying children, leaving that field to psychologists, who often studied children from the perspective of developmental psychology. Subsequently, three major streams of sociological thought began to develop. The first looked at how child development was conditioned by both historical and social circumstances. The second studied how children created their own worlds and were themselves active agents, rather than passive recipients of socialization. The third highlighted the importance of societal and family investment in children. For many researchers, scholarship from psychology, economics, and demography was combined with insights from sociology to provide new information on child well-being. As a consequence, several categories for entries in this article overlap conceptually. This means that entries logically could be listed under other subheadings or duplicated across these categories. A second definition of childhood suggests that it is a socially constructed life stage, with variations in how childhood is conceived both historically and cross-culturally. This definition ties directly to the second stream of research in which children are active participants in their socialization.
Health Literacy and Noncommunicable Diseases
Authors: Vamos Sandra , Frankish Jim , Yeung Paul
Published: June 2013

Health literacy (HL) is an essential capacity for living a healthy life. Limited levels of HL are a significant public health issue because of its prevalence and its negative implications for health-care costs, health-care quality, and health outcomes. Given that chronic disease is the leading global cause of death and disability, having the necessary skills to make daily health-related decisions and the capacity to navigate the health-care system is paramount. HL refers not only to the abilities of individuals, but also to the health-related systems and providers of information within those systems. While the concept of HL first appeared in the literature almost fifty years ago, the evolving concept has been informed by three main areas: (1) health care; (2) health promotion; and (3) education. It is important to note that the initial interest in HL in the United States was led by physicians with a medical perspective. However, over the past two decades interest in HL has grown in other countries, such as Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the European Union as well as African and Asian countries, led by people with a background in the social sciences and health promotion. HL as an emerging field of research, practice, and policy has the potential to increase our understanding of both noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) and health promotion in the global context. This article provides a context for HL in relation to NCDs. It offers a collection of key resources (such as textbooks, journals, reports, websites, etc.) to provide insights into the concept of HL, the relevance and role of NCDs, and evidence of the effectiveness of HL interventions in relation to chronic disease prevention and management.