Books With Flair

ROOTS OF THE WESTERN TRADITION is a brief chronological survey that covers the Ancient world in three parts: Prehistoric Europe and Ancient Near East; Ancient Greece; and Ancient Rome. Succinct enough to be used with supplements, the coverage is carefully balanced between narrative and interpretation, highlighting historians varying viewpoints on certain issues.

This brief, chronological survey provides students with an introduction to the histories of the Near East, Greece, and Rome from roughly 3000 B.C. until A.D. 500. Succinct enough to be used with supplements, the coverage is carefully balanced between narrative and interpretation, highlighting historians' varying viewpoints on issues of the past. Throughout, special attention is paid to connections between the cultures of the Near East including Mesopotamia and Egypt and Graeco-Roman civilization. This 8th edition has been thoroughly updated to include the latest scholarship on the ancient western world, as well as new timelines and pedagogical enhancements to assist students in their study.

This is a history book about how we came to believe what we believe and the effects of our faith upon the world around us. The commentary is insightful and biting. This book is for a person who wants to be challenged.

This brief, chronological survey covers the Ancient world in three parts: Prehistoric Europe and the Ancient Near East; Ancient Greece; and Ancient Rome. Succinct enough to be used with supplements, the coverage is carefully balanced between narrative and interpretation, highlighting historians' varying viewpoints on certain issues. Guy Rogers' careful revision preserves C. Warren Hollister's style while bringing the text up-to-date.

First published in 1987, the "Groundwork of Christian History" has been a primer for theological college students, undergraduates, lay readers and all interested in the history and development of Christian history. Now published in a new and attractive edition with an updated bibliography, the author still manages to argue his case convincingly that history need not be boring. He takes his readers from the earliest days of the fledgling Christian Church to the end of the twentieth century and enables readers to put characters, movements and places in their wider context and make connections between them. Diarmaid McCulloch is Professor of the History of the Church at the University of Oxford.

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Traces the development of book illustration, looks at stylistic and technological changes, and surveys the most influential artists

A magisterial history, ranging from antiquity to the present, that reveals anti-Judaism to be a mode of thought deeply embedded in the Western tradition. There is a widespread tendency to regard anti-Judaism - whether expressed in a casual remark or implemented through pogrom or extermination campaign - as somehow exceptional: an unfortunate indicator of personal prejudice or the shocking outcome of an extremist ideology married to power. But, as David Nirenberg argues in this ground-breaking study, to confine anit-Judaism to the margins of our culture is to be dangerously complacent. Anti-Judaism is not an irrational closet in the vast edifice of Western thought, but rather one of the basic tools with which that edifice was constructed.

In Images of Savages, the distinguished psychologist Gustav Jahoda advances the provocative thesis that racism and the perpetual alienation of a racialized 'other' are a central leagacy of the Western tradition. Finding the roots of these demonizations deep in the myth and traditions of classical antiquity, he examines how the monstrous humanoid creatures of ancient myth and the fabulous "wild men" of the medieval European woods shaped early modern explorers' interpretations of the New World they encountered. Drawing on a global scale the schematic of the Western imagination of its "others," Jahoda locates the persistent identification of the racialized other with cannibalism, sexual abandon and animal drives. Turning to Europe's scientific tradition, Jahoda traces this imagery through the work of 18th century scientists on the relationship between humans and apes, the new racist biology of the 19th century studies of "savagery" as an arrested evolutionary state, and the assignment, especially of blacks, to a status intermediate between humans and animals, or that of children in need of paternal protection from Western masters. Finding in these traditional tropes a central influence upon the most current psychological theory, Jahoda presents a startling historical continuity of racial figuration that persists right up to the present day. Far from suggesting a program for the eradication of racial stereotypes, this remarkable effort nevertheless isolates the most significant barriers to equality buried deep within the Western tradition, and proposes a potentially redemptive self-awareness that will contribute to the gradual dismantling of racial injustice and alienation. Gustav Jahoda demonstrates how deeply rooted Western perceptions going back more than a thousand years are still feeding racial prejudice today. This highly original socio-historical contextualisation will be invaluable to scholars of psychology, sociology and anthropology, and to all those interested in the sources of racial prejudice.