If I Lose Mine Honor I Lose Myself

Courtney Thomas offers an intriguing investigation of honour's social meanings amongst early modern elites in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England.

All cultures have proverbs that capsulize subjects simply and effectively. Many of these are cross-cultural. For example, according to a Danish proverb, “The greater the fear, the nearer the danger,” while a Latin proverb says, “The less there is of fear, the less there is danger.” This work includes over 20,000 proverbs from more than 120 languages, nationalities and ethnic groups. The proverbs are arranged under 1,300 headings (e.g., accidents, divided loyalty, marriage, prosperity, shame), and each includes the nationality, group or language in which it originated. Comprehensive keyword and subject indexes allow access to the material in multiple ways.

After a century-long hiatus, honor is back. Academics, pundits, and everyday citizens alike are rediscovering the importance of this ancient and powerful human motive. This volume brings together some of the foremost researchers of honor to debate honor’s meaning and its compatibility with liberalism, democracy, and modernity. Contributors—representing philosophy, sociology, political science, history, psychology, leadership studies, and military science—examine honor past to present, from masculine and feminine perspectives, and in North American, European, and African contexts. Topics include the role of honor in the modern military, the effects of honor on our notions of the dignity and “purity” of women, honor as a quality of good statesmen and citizens, honor’s role in international relations and community norms, and how honor’s egalitarian and elitist aspects intersect with democratic and liberal regimes.

Presenting a background study of honor, the author compares ancient concepts with the sympathetic restatements of them that appeared during the Renaissance. He places Shakespeare's plays in the context of these Renaissance ideas, pointing up the sharp conflict between Christian morality and the revived pagan humanism. He demonstrates by pertinent evidence from the plays that Shakespeare favored humanist values over Christian values. Originally published in 1960. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Hailed as a classic by reviewers and historians, Bertram Wyatt-Brown's Southern Honor now appears in abridged form under the title Honor and Violence in the Old South. Winner of a Phi Alpha Theta Book Award and a Jefferson Davis Memorial Book Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History, this is the first major reinterpretation of Southern life and custom since W.J, Cash's The Mind of the South. It explores the meaning and expression of the ancient code of honor as whites—both slaveholders and non-slaveholders—applied it to their lives. Wyatt-Brown ranges widely—covering topics such as childbearing, marital patterns, duelling, slave discipline, and lynch-law—to discover the role of honor in the psyche of white Southerners.