The Idea Of Work In Europe From Antiquity To Modern Times

This volume takes a fresh and innovative approach to the history of ideas of work, concerning perceptions, attitudes, cultures and representations of work throughout Antiquity and the medieval and early modern periods. Focusing on developments in Europe, the contributors approach the subject from a variety of angles, considering aspects of work as described in literature, visual culture, and as perceived in economic theory. As well as external views of workers the volume also looks at the meaning of work for the self-perception of various social groups, including labourers, artisans, merchants, and noblemen, and the effects of this on their self-esteem and social identity. Taking a broad chronological approach to the subject provides readers with a cutting-edge overview of research into the varying attitudes to work and its place in pre-industrial society.

In Worthy Efforts Catharina Lis and Hugo Soly offer an innovative approach to the history of perceptions and representations of work in Europe throughout Classical Antiquity and the medieval and early modern periods.

Sex and Drugs Before the Rock ’n’ Rollis a fascinating volume that presents an engaging overview of what it was like to be young and male in the Dutch Golden Age. Here, well-known cohorts of Rembrandt are examined for the ways in which they expressed themselves by defying conservative values and norms. This study reveals how these young men rebelled, breaking from previous generations: letting their hair grow long, wearing colorful clothing, drinking excessively, challenging city guards, being promiscuous, smoking, and singing lewd songs. Cogently argued, this study paints a compelling portrait of the youth culture of the Dutch Golden Age, at a time when the rising popularity of print made dissemination of new cultural ideas possible, while rising incomes and liberal attitudes created a generation of men behaving badly.

Over the course of the fifteenth century, the Low Countries transformed Europe’s economic, political and cultural life. Innovative and influential cultural practices emerged across the region in flourishing courts, towns, religious houses, guilds and confraternities. Whether in visual culture, music, devotional practice, or communal rituals, the thriving cultures of the Low Countries wrestled with time, both through explicit measurement and reflection, and in the rhythms of social and religious life. This book offers a deeper understanding of how time was structured and experienced by different constituencies through a series of detailed readings of diverse cultural objects and practices, ranging from woodcuts and painted altarpieces, to early print books, and to the use of polyphony in the liturgy. Individual chapters are devoted to life in the university towns of Louvain and Ghent, the liturgical rituals at Cambrai Cathedral, and the rich pageantry that marked the courts of Philip the Good and the new Burgundian rulers. What emerges is a complex temporal landscape in which devotional and secular practices and experiences merged into a new "fullness of time.”

"This book focuses on how literate artisans began to write about their discoveries starting around 1400: in other words, it explores the origins of technical writing. Artisans and artists began to publish handbooks, guides, treatises, tip sheets, graphs and recipe books rather than simply pass along their knowledge in the workshop. And they tried to articulate what the new knowledge meant. The popularity of these texts coincided with the founding of a "new philosophy" that sought to investigate nature in a new way. Smith shows how this moment began in the unceasing trials of the craft workshop, and ended in the experimentation of the natural scientific laboratory. These epistemological developments have continued to the present day and still inform how we think about scientific knowledge"--

Winner of the 2020 PROSE Award for Multivolume Reference/Humanities In the early modern age technological innovations were unimportant relative to political and social transformations. The size of the workforce and the number of wage dependent people increased, due in large part to population growth, but also as a result of changes in the organization of work. The diversity of workplaces in many significant economic sectors was on the rise in the 16th-century: family farming, urban crafts and trades, and large enterprises in mining, printing and shipbuilding. Moreover, the increasing influence of global commerce, as accompanied by local and regional specialization, prompted an increased reliance on forms of under-compensated and non-compensated work which were integral to economic growth. Economic volatility swelled the ranks of the mobile poor, who moved along Europe's roads seeking sustenance, and the endemic warfare of the period prompted young men to sign on as soldiers and sailors. Colonists migrated to Europe's territories in the Americas, Africa, and Asia, while others were forced overseas as servants, convicts or slaves. The early modern age proved to be a “renaissance” in the political, social and cultural contexts of work which set the stage for the technological developments to come. A Cultural History of Work in the Early Modern Age presents an overview of the period with essays on economies, representations of work, workplaces, work cultures, technology, mobility, society, politics and leisure.

Ancient Greece was the model that guided the emergence of many facets of the modern sports movement, including most notably the Olympics. Yet the process whereby aspects of the ancient world were appropriated and manipulated by sport authorities of nation-states, athletic organizations and their leaders as well as by sports enthusiasts is only very partially understood. This volume takes modern Greece as a case-study and explores, in depth, issues related to the reception and use of classical antiquity in modern sport, spectacle and bodily culture. For citizens of the Greek nation-state, classical antiquity is not merely a vague "legacy" but the cornerstone of their national identity. In the field of sport and bodily culture, since the 1830s there had been persistent attempts to establish firm and direct links between ancient Greek athletics and modern sport through the incorporation of sport in school curricula, the emergence of national sport historiographies as well as the initiatives to revive (in the 19th century) or appropriate (in the 20th) the modern Olympics. Based on fieldwork and unpublished material sources, this book dissects the use and abuse of classical antiquity and sport in constructing national, gender and class identities, and illuminate aspects of the complex modern perceptions of classicism, sport and the body. This book was previously published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport.

The West suffers from intense work pressure, longer and less well paid hours. This text is a sociological analysis of the relationship between overwork and unemployment. The only possible response, the author claims, is a renewal of the working class struggle.