Joshua Cole

Carol Symes

Western Civilizations--written by two expert teachers--is the most pedagogically innovative text for the survey course. A carefully crafted text and media program empower students to master core content, engage in historical analysis, and think critically, and the Brief Fourth Edition has been substantially updated with the latest scholarship that connects the West to global contexts, as well as new "Past and Present" features that connect historical themes to contemporary topics.

Their History & Their Culture

Western Civilizations

Medieval Arras was a thriving town on the frontier between the kingdom of France and the county of Flanders, and home to Europe's earliest surviving vernacular plays: The Play of St. Nicholas, The Courtly Lad of Arras, The Boy and the Blind Man, The Play of the Bower, and The Play about Robin and about Marion. In A Common Stage, Carol Symes undertakes a cultural archeology of these artifacts, analyzing the processes by which a handful of entertainments were conceived, transmitted, received, and recorded during the thirteenth century. She then places the resulting scripts alongside other documented performances with which plays shared a common space and vocabulary: the crying of news, publication of law, preaching of sermons, telling of stories, celebration of liturgies, and arrangement of civic spectacles. She thereby shows how groups and individuals gained access to various means of publicity, participated in public life, and shaped public opinion. And she reveals that the theater of the Middle Ages was not merely a mirror of society but a social and political sphere, a vital site for the exchange of information and ideas, and a vibrant medium for debate, deliberation, and dispute. The result is a book that closes the gap between the scattered textual remnants of medieval drama and the culture of performance from which that drama emerged. A Common Stage thus challenges the prevalent understanding of theater history while offering the first comprehensive history of a community often credited with the invention of French as a powerful literary language.

Theater and Public Life in Medieval Arras

A Common Stage

The most pedagogically innovative text and media for the western civilizations course now more current, more global, and more interactive."

The most pedagogically innovative brief text--now connecting western civilizations to broader global contexts and students' own experiences.

Used by more than a million students since its original publication, Western Civilizations became the leading text for the course by combining historical scholarship with classroom innovation. Master scholars/teachers Joshua Cole and Carol Symes enhance coverage of the West in a global context with a new focus on migration and nationalism. Dynamic digital resources, including award-winning InQuizitive activities and new History Skills Tutorials for every chapter, guide students from basic understanding basics to analysis and interpretation.

West Civ 5e Br V1 Pa W/eits

Brief Edition

John T. Sebastian

Theresa Coletti

Jody Enders

For the first time, a group of distinguished authors come together to provide an authoritative exploration of the cultural history of tragedy in the Middle Ages. Reports of the so-called death of medieval tragedy, they argue, have been greatly exaggerated; and, for the Middle Ages, the stakes couldn't be higher. Eight essays offer a blueprint for future study as they take up the extensive but much-neglected medieval engagement with tragic genres, modes, and performances from the vantage points of gender, politics, theology, history, social theory, anthropology, philosophy, economics, and media studies. The result? A recuperated medieval tragedy that is as much a branch of literature as it is of theology, politics, law, or ethics and which, at long last, rejoins the millennium-long conversation about one of the world's most enduring art forms. Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: forms and media; sites of performance and circulation; communities of production and consumption; philosophy and social theory; religion, ritual and myth; politics of city and nation; society and family, and gender and sexuality.

A Cultural History of Tragedy in the Middle Ages

Caroline Goodson

Anne Elisabeth Lester

Offering a new interpretation of the pre-modern urban past, Cities, Texts and Social Networks highlights contemporary experiences of the city and their mediation through written, visual and environmental evidence. Comprising twelve essays that model important new ways of re-imagining the urban world, it points to significant patterns of socialisation in medieval urban milieus, particularly with respect to the role of sanctity, the evolution of charitable landscapes and the coalescence of formal institutions and informal networks of human interaction.

Carol Symes

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