An Alle K Nstler

Human life is susceptible of changing suddenly, of shifting inadvertently, of appearing differently, of varying unpredictably, of being altered deliberately, of advancing fortuitously, of commencing or ending accidentally, of a certain malleability. In theory, any human being is potentially capacitated to conceive of—and convey—the chance, view, or fact that matters may be otherwise, or not at all; with respect to other lifeforms, this might be said animal’s distinctive characteristic. This state of play is both an everyday phenomenon, and an indispensable prerequisite for exceptional innovations in culture and science: contingency is the condition of possibility for any of the arts—be they dominantly concerned with thinking, crafting, or enacting. While their scope and method may differ, the (f)act of reckoning with—and taking advantage of—contingency renders rhetoricians and philosophers associates after all. In this regard, Aristotle and Blumenberg will be exemplary, hence provide the framework. Between these diachronic bridgeheads, close readings applying the nexus of rhetoric and contingency to a selection of (Early) Modern texts and authors are intercalated—among them La Celestina, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Wilde, Fontane.

This groundbreaking collection of essays by a host of international authorities addresses the many aspects of the Danse Macabre, a subject that has been too often overlooked in Anglo-American scholarship. The Danse was once a major motif that occurred in many different media and spread across Europe in the course of the fifteenth century, from France to England, Germany, Scandinavia, Poland, Spain, Italy and Istria. Yet the Danse is hard to define because it mixes metaphors, such as dance, di ...

Liberalism, Nationalism and Design Reform in the Habsburg Empire is a study of museums of design and applied arts in Austria-Hungary from 1864 to 1914. The Museum for Art and Industry (now the Museum of Applied Arts) as well as its design school occupies a prominent place in the study. The book also gives equal attention to museums of design and applied arts in cities elsewhere in the Empire, such as Budapest Prague, Cracow, Brno and Zagreb. The book is shaped by two broad concerns: the role of liberalism as a political, cultural and economic ideology motivating the museums’ foundation, and their engagement with the politics of imperial, national and regional identity of the late Habsburg Empire. This book will be of interest for scholars of art history, museum studies, design history, and European history.

Galileo’s O, Volume III, is perhaps without peer in the history of the book. In this work, historians in various fields revise the results they presented in the first two volumes, which focused on the New York copy of Sidereus Nuncius, written in 1610. The analysis of this book was conceived as a uniquely multidisciplinary and cooperative undertaking, and many of its findings remain valid. Yet the subject of analysis proved to be the work of an international group of forgers. Volume III describes the chronology and methods by which the discovery of forgery was made – a veritable watershed moment in the continuing struggle between the ever-more refined methods of forgers and new methods used to apprehend them. Ultimately, the work also provides insight into the psychology of specialists who “research themselves” in order to prevent similar errors in the future.