Professor Nigel Thrift's Books

Writing the Rural

Five Cultural Geographies

By: Professor Paul J Cloke,Professor Marcus A Doel,Dr David Matless, PhD,Professor Nigel Thrift,Dr Martin Phillips

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Writing the Rural

Five Cultural Geographies

By: Professor Paul J Cloke,Professor Marcus A Doel,Dr David Matless, PhD,Professor Nigel Thrift,Dr Martin Phillips

This book arises out of an ESRC project devoted to an examination of the economic, social and cultural impacts of the service class on rural areas. The research was an attempt to document these impacts through close empirical work in a set of three rural communities, but something happened on the way. The authors found that the rural became a real sticking point. Respondents used it in different ways - as a bludgeon, as a badge, as a barometer - to signify many different things - security, identity, community, domesticity, gender, sexuality, ethnicity - nearly always by drawing on many different sources - the media, the landscape, friends and kin, animals. It became abundantly clear that the rural, whatever chameleon form it took, was a prime and deeply felt determinant of the actions of many respondents. Yet it was also clear that to the authors they possessed no theoretical framework that could allow them to negotiate the rural to deconstruct its diverse nature as a category. Rather each of the extended essays in the book is an attempt by each author to draw out one aspect of the rural by drawing on different traditions in social and cultural theory.

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Page Count

268

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SAGE

Published Date

ISBN 10

1446240649

ISBN 13

9781446240649

Bordering

Identity Processes between the National and Personal

By: Professor Anders Linde-Laursen

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Bordering

Identity Processes between the National and Personal

By: Professor Anders Linde-Laursen

What is a border? This seemingly simple question is here answered via a multidisciplinary study of the cultural, geographic and historic existence of borders, and the ways that they have shaped our world. Using the Danish-Swedish border to illustrate the actions of groups and individuals engaged in bordering since the 1600s, this richly theoretical discussion highlights the complexities of political and cultural identity processes. Comparative perspectives are brought together to produce a thoughtful analysis of how such processes function, and of how borders work on both an imagined nationhood and experiential personal level. The author also examines how throughout history people have lived with and influenced or been influenced by borders, why some borders remain uncontested while others repeatedly provoke cross-border conflicts, and how today's bordering processes may be deliberately manipulated.

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Page Count

318

Publisher

Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published Date

ISBN 10

1409488764

ISBN 13

9781409488767

Critical Geographies of Cycling

History, Political Economy and Culture

By: Professor Glen Norcliffe

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Critical Geographies of Cycling

History, Political Economy and Culture

By: Professor Glen Norcliffe

Examining cycling from a range of geographical perspectives, this book uses historical and contemporary case studies to look at the history, politics, economy and culture of cycling. Pursuing a post-structural position in viewing understandings of the bicycle as contingent upon time and place, author Glen Norcliffe argues for the need for widespread processes such as gendered use of the bicycle, the Cyclists’ Rights Movement, and the globalization of bicycle-making to be interpreted in different ways in different settings.

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Page Count

291

Publisher

Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published Date

ISBN 10

1472439112

ISBN 13

9781472439116

Globalization and Culture

Global Mélange

By: Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Mellichamp Professor of Global Studies and Sociology

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Globalization and Culture

Global Mélange

By: Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Mellichamp Professor of Global Studies and Sociology

Now fully revised and updated, this seminal text asks if there is cultural life after the "clash of civilizations" and global McDonaldization. Jan Nederveen Pieterse argues that what is taking place is a global culture of hybridization. In a new chapter, the author explores East-West hybridities—the idea that globalization is a process of braiding rather than simply a diffusion from developed to developing countries. His historically deep and geographically wide approach to globalization is essential reading as we face the spread of conflicts bred by cultural misunderstanding.

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Page Count

197

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Published Date

ISBN 10

0742566617

ISBN 13

9780742566613

The Dissolution of Place

Architecture, Identity, and the Body

By: Professor Shelton Waldrep

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The Dissolution of Place

Architecture, Identity, and the Body

By: Professor Shelton Waldrep

Postmodern architecture - with its return to ornamentality, historical quotation, and low-culture kitsch - has long been seen as a critical and popular anodyne to the worst aspects of modernist architecture: glass boxes built in urban locales as so many interchangeable, generic anti-architectural cubes and slabs. This book extends this debate beyond the modernist/postmodernist rivalry to situate postmodernism as an already superseded concept that has been upended by deconstructionist and virtual architecture as well as the continued turn toward the use of theming in much new public and corporate space. It investigates architecture on the margins of postmodernism -- those places where both architecture and postmodernism begin to break down and to reveal new forms and new relationships. The book examines in detail not only a wide range of architectural phenomena such as theme parks, casinos, specific modernist and postmodernist buildings, but also interrogates architecture in relation to identity, specifically Native American and gay male identities, as they are reflected in new notions of the built environment. In dealing specifically with the intersection between postmodern architecture and virtual and filmic definitions of space, as well as with theming, and gender and racial identities, this book provides provides ground-breaking insights not only into postmodern architecture, but into spatial thinking in general.

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Page Count

421

Publisher

Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published Date

ISBN 10

1472404327

ISBN 13

9781472404329

Wild Animal Skins in Victorian Britain

Zoos, Collections, Portraits, and Maps

By: Professor Ann C Colley

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Wild Animal Skins in Victorian Britain

Zoos, Collections, Portraits, and Maps

By: Professor Ann C Colley

What did the 13th Earl of Derby, his twenty-two-year-old niece, Manchester’s Belle Vue Zoo, and even some ordinary laborers all have in common? All were avid collectors and exhibitors of exotic, and frequently unruly, specimens. In her study of Britain’s craze for natural history collecting, Ann C. Colley makes extensive use of archival materials to examine the challenges, preoccupations, and disordered circumstances that attended the amassing of specimens from faraway places only vaguely known to the British public. As scientific institutions sent collectors to bring back exotic animals and birds for study and classification by anatomists and zoologist, it soon became apparent that collecting skins rather than live animals or birds was a relatively more manageable endeavor. Colley looks at the collecting, exhibiting, and portraying of animal skins to show their importance as trophies of empire and representations of identity. While a zoo might display skins to promote and glorify Britain’s colonial achievements, Colley suggests that the reality of collecting was characterized more by chaos than imperial order. For example, Edward Lear’s commissioned illustrations of the Earl of Derby’s extensive collection challenge the colonial’s or collector’s commanding gaze, while the Victorian public demonstrated a yearning to connect with their own wildness by touching the skins of animals. Colley concludes with a discussion of the metaphorical uses of wild skins by Gerard Manley Hopkins and other writers, exploring the idea of skin as a locus of memory and touch where one’s past can be traced in the same way that nineteenth-century mapmakers charted a landscape. Throughout the book Colley calls upon recent theories about the nature and function of skin and touch to structure her discussion of the Victorian fascination with wild animal skins.

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Page Count

219

Publisher

Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published Date

ISBN 10

1472427807

ISBN 13

9781472427809

The Self as Enterprise

Foucault and the Spirit of 21st Century Capitalism

By: Professor Peter Kelly

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The Self as Enterprise

Foucault and the Spirit of 21st Century Capitalism

By: Professor Peter Kelly

Twenty first century, flexible capitalism creates new demands for those who work to acknowledge that all aspects of their lives have come to be seen as performance related, and consequently of interest to those who employ them (or fire them). At the start of the 21st century we can identify, borrowing from Max Weber, new work ethics that provide novel ethically slanted maxims for the conduct of a life, and which suggest that the cultivation of the self as an enterprise is the life-long activity that should give meaning, purpose and direction to a life. The book provides an innovative theoretical and methodological approach that draws on the problematising critique of Michel Foucault, the sociological imagination of Zygmunt Bauman and the work influenced by these authors in social theory and social research in the last three decades. The author takes seriously the ambivalence and irony that marks many people’s experience of their working lives, and the demands of work at the start of the 21st century. The book makes an important contribution to the continuing debate about the nature of work related identities and the consequences of the intensification of the work regimes in which these identities are performed and regulated. In a post global financial crisis (GFC) world of sovereign debt, austerity and recession the author’s analysis focuses academic and professional interest on neo-liberal injunctions to imagine ourselves as an enterprise, and to reap the rewards and carry the costs of the conduct of this enterprise.

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Page Count

396

Publisher

Gower Publishing, Ltd.

Published Date

ISBN 10

1409473570

ISBN 13

9781409473572

The Human Right to Science

History, Development, and Normative Content

By: Cesare P. R. Romano,Andrea Boggio,Professor of Legal Studies Andrea Boggio

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The Human Right to Science

History, Development, and Normative Content

By: Cesare P. R. Romano,Andrea Boggio,Professor of Legal Studies Andrea Boggio

The Human Right to Science offers a thorough and systematic analysis of the right to science in all of its critical aspects. Authored by experts in international law and science policy, the book meticulously explores the right's origins, development, and normative content. In doing so, it uncovers previously unarticulated entitlements and obligations, offering new insights on human rights interconnections.

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Page Count

905

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0197768997

ISBN 13

9780197768990

Prison Terms

Representing Confinement During and After Italian Fascism

By: Ellen Victoria Nerenberg,Professor Ellen Nerenberg

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Prison Terms

Representing Confinement During and After Italian Fascism

By: Ellen Victoria Nerenberg,Professor Ellen Nerenberg

An analysis of the confinement experience in Italian narrative between 1930 and 1960, covering the last years of Fascism. Not limiting herself to prisons, Nerenberg also explores military barracks, convents, and brothels as carceral homologues.

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Page Count

300

Publisher

University of Toronto Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0802035086

ISBN 13

9780802035080

Economies of Signs and Space

By: Professor Scott M Lash,Scott Lash John Urry,Professor John Urry

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Economies of Signs and Space

By: Professor Scott M Lash,Scott Lash John Urry,Professor John Urry

This is a novel account of social change that supplants conventional understandings of society' and presents a sociology that takes as its main unit of analysis flows through time and across space. Developing a comparative analysis of the UK and US, the new Germany and Japan, Lash and Urry show how restructuration after organized capitalism has its basis in increasingly reflexive social actors and organizations. The consequence is not only the much-vaunted postmodern condition' but also a growth in reflexivity. In exploring this new reflexive world, the authors argue that today's economies are increasingly ones of signs - information, symbols, images, desire - and of space, where both signs and social subjects - refugees, financiers, tourists and "fl[ci]aneurs " - are mobile over ever greater distances at ever greater speeds.

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Page Count

376

Publisher

SAGE

Published Date

ISBN 10

1446227162

ISBN 13

9781446227169

Mapping Controversies in Architecture

By: Professor Albena Yaneva

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Mapping Controversies in Architecture

By: Professor Albena Yaneva

The book tackles a number of challenging questions: How can we conceptualize architectural objects and practices without falling into the divides architecture/society, nature/culture, materiality/meaning? How can we prevent these abstractions from continuing to blind architectural theory? What is the alternative to critical architecture? Mapping controversies is a research method and teaching philosophy that allows divides to be crossed. It offers a new methodology for following debates surrounding contested urban knowledge. Engaging in explorations of on-going and recent controversies and re-visiting some well-known debates, the analysis foregrounds, traces and maps the changing sets of positions triggered by design: the 2012 Olympics stadium in London, the Welsh parliament in Cardiff, the Heathrow airport runway extension, the Sydney Opera House, the Eiffel Tower. By mobilizing digital technologies and new computational design techniques we are able to visualize the variety of factors that impinge on design and track actors' trajectories, changing groupings, concerns and modalities of action. The book places architecture at the intersection of the human and the nonhuman, the particular and the general. It allows its networks to be re-established and to run between local and global, social and technical. Mapping controversies can be extrapolated to a wide range of complex phenomena of hybrid nature.

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Page Count

148

Publisher

Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published Date

ISBN 10

1409482987

ISBN 13

9781409482987

Doing Family Photography

The Domestic, The Public and The Politics of Sentiment

By: Professor Gillian Rose

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Doing Family Photography

The Domestic, The Public and The Politics of Sentiment

By: Professor Gillian Rose

Family photography, a ubiquitous domestic tradition in the developed world, is now more popular than ever thanks to the development of digital photography. Once uploaded to PCs and other gadgets, photographs may be stored, deleted, put in albums, sent to relatives and friends, retouched, or put on display. Moreover, in recent years family photographs are more frequently appearing in public media: on posters, in newspapers and on the Internet, particularly in the wake of disasters like 9/11, and in cases of missing children. Here, case study material drawn from the UK offers a deeper understanding of both domestic family photographs and their public display. Recent work in material culture studies, geography, and anthropology is used to approach photographs as objects embedded in social practices, which produce specific social positions, relations and effects. Also explored are the complex economies of gifting and exchange amongst families, and the rich geographies of domestic and public spaces into which family photography offers an insight.

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Page Count

170

Publisher

Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published Date

ISBN 10

1409488535

ISBN 13

9781409488538

Tourism, Performance, and Place

A Geographic Perspective

By: Dr Michelle M Metro-Roland,Ms Lisa C Braverman,Professor Daniel C Knudsen

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Tourism, Performance, and Place

A Geographic Perspective

By: Dr Michelle M Metro-Roland,Ms Lisa C Braverman,Professor Daniel C Knudsen

Drawing upon theories of landscape and performance, this work weaves together existing tourism literature with new scholarship to forge a geographically informed theory of tourism. Such a theory integrates the ways in which places are co-produced, circulated, interpreted, experienced, and performed for and by tourists, tourism boards, and even as everyday spaces. Bringing together theories of ritual, Peircean semiotics, ideology, and performance, the authors blend the often separate literatures of tourism sites and touristic practices. Whereas most tourism texts focus on a part of the 'tourism equation'-the tourism site, or the tourist experience-a geographic theory of tourism brings these constituent parts together in thinking about notions of place. Place processes are central to geography as well as tourism studies because tourism facilitates encounters with distinct locations. As this book argues, considering tourism as performative draws disparate areas of tourism theory together to better understand the ways tourism happens in and across places.

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Page Count

290

Publisher

Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published Date

ISBN 10

1472403746

ISBN 13

9781472403742

Making Animals Public

Inside the ABC’s natural history archive

By: Gay Hawkins and Ben Dibley

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Making Animals Public

Inside the ABC’s natural history archive

By: Gay Hawkins and Ben Dibley

Making Animals Public: television, animality and political engagement focuses on the proliferation of animal content on television and how this has transformed how animals are known and encountered, generating unique modes of televisual animality. The book examines the multiplicity of public realities and knowledges that animals on TV have constituted: from scientific objectivity, to the unique Australian environment, to controversial victims of gross exploitation. Just as television has made animals public in very particular ways, it has also made new publics that have learnt to be affected by them. Thanks to extraordinary access to the ABC’s Natural History and general archives, the authors are able to investigate the dynamic relation between making animals public and making publics over time.

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Page Count

148

Publisher

Sydney University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1743329695

ISBN 13

9781743329696

Embodied Food Politics

By: Professor Michael S Carolan

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Embodied Food Politics

By: Professor Michael S Carolan

While the phenomenon of embodied knowledge is becoming integrated into the social sciences, critical geography, and feminist research agendas it continues to be largely ignored by agro-food scholars. This book helps fill this void by inserting into the food literature living, feeling, sensing bodies and will be of interest to food scholars as well as those more generally interested in the phenomenon known as embodied realism. This book is about the materializations of food politics; "materializations", in this case, referring to our embodied, sensuous, and physical connectivities to food production and consumption. It is through these materializations, argues Carolan, that we know food (and the food system more generally), others and ourselves.

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Page Count

200

Publisher

Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published Date

ISBN 10

1409490068

ISBN 13

9781409490067

The Challenge of Global Commons and Flows for US Power

The Perils of Missing the Human Domain

By: Valtteri Vuorisalo,Mr Juha Käpylä,Professor Mika Aaltola

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The Challenge of Global Commons and Flows for US Power

The Perils of Missing the Human Domain

By: Valtteri Vuorisalo,Mr Juha Käpylä,Professor Mika Aaltola

Global commons are domains that fall outside the direct jurisdiction of sovereign states - the high seas, air, space, and most recently man-made cyberspace - and thus should be usable by anyone. These domains, even if outside the direct responsibility and governance of sovereign entities, are of crucial interest for the contemporary world order. This book elaborates a practice-based approach to the global commons and flows to examine critically the evolving geopolitical strategy and vision of United States. The study starts with the observation that the nature of US power is evolving increasingly towards the recognition that command over the flows of global interdependence is a central dimension of national power. The study then highlights the emerging security and governance of these flows. In this context, the flows and the underlying global critical infrastructure are emerging as objects of high-level strategic importance. The book pays special attention to one of the least recognized but perhaps most fundamental challenges related to the global commons, namely the conceptual and practical challenge of inter-domain relationships-between maritime, air, space, and cyber-flows that bring about not only opportunities but also new vulnerabilities. These complexities cannot be understood through technological means alone but rather the issues need to be clarified by bringing in the human domain of security.

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Page Count

183

Publisher

Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published Date

ISBN 10

1409464237

ISBN 13

9781409464235

Reinventing the City?

Liverpool in Comparative Perspective

By: Head of Civic Engagement Dublin City University and Visiting Professor of Development Studies University of Liverpool and St Mary's University Nova Scotia Ronaldo Munck

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Reinventing the City?

Liverpool in Comparative Perspective

By: Head of Civic Engagement Dublin City University and Visiting Professor of Development Studies University of Liverpool and St Mary's University Nova Scotia Ronaldo Munck

Although Liverpool is the central theme of this book, the author gives an informed comparative overview of the city in a worldwide context. Chapters examine in detail the cultural social and economic legacy of the city.

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Page Count

280

Publisher

Liverpool University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0853237972

ISBN 13

9780853237976

Re-Forming the Body

Religion, Community and Modernity

By: MR Philip A Mellor,Philip A. Mellor Chris Shilling,Professor Chris Shilling

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Re-Forming the Body

Religion, Community and Modernity

By: MR Philip A Mellor,Philip A. Mellor Chris Shilling,Professor Chris Shilling

Enriches the concpetual arsenal for interdisciplinary analysis of political, social and cultural change... stimulates more nuanced thinking about the cultural and political legacy of the Reformation era... manages both to clarify tensions surrounding cultural and social integration in the late 20th century while underscoring the real historical complexity of modern bodies' - "American Journal of Sociology " Through an analysis of successive re-formations of the body, this innovative and penetrating book constructs a fascinating and wide-ranging account of how the creation and evolution of different patterns of human community are intimately related to the somatic experience of the sacred. The book places the relationship between the embodiment and the sacred at the crux of social theory, and casts a fresh light on the emergence and transformation of modernity. It critically examines the thesis that the rational projects of modern embodiment have 'died and gone to cyberspace', and suggests that we are witnessing the rise of a virulent, effervescent form of the sacred which is changing how people 'see' and 'keep in touch' with the world around them.

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Page Count

250

Publisher

SAGE

Published Date

ISBN 10

1446235297

ISBN 13

9781446235294

Flirting with Space

Journeys and Creativity

By: Professor David Crouch

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Flirting with Space

Journeys and Creativity

By: Professor David Crouch

The idea of 'flirting' with space is central to this book. Space is conceptualised as being in constant flux as we make our way through various contexts in our daily lives, and is considered in relation to encounters with complexities and flows of material culture. This book focuses on journeys, which are perceived as dynamic processes of contemporary life and its spaces, and how creativity happens in the inter-relations of space and journeys encourage creativity. Unravelled through a range of empirical case studies of journeys through and encountered with space, this book builds new critical syntheses of the intertwining of space and life. Based on investigations undertaken by the author over the past 20 years, it explores the mundane and the exotic, the 'lay' and the 'artistic', combining and inter-relating them in a diversity of time and expression, fleeting and surviving. Such investigations, using both visual and non-visual material, include examinations of allotment holding, the work of artists, caravanning and tourism, photography and parish maps. The analyses of such seemingly disparate subjects are linked together and build on each other to create a fascinating and original view of humanity's interaction with space. Included are fresh discussions of belonging, disorientation and the working of identity and play. The notion of 'gentle politics' is introduced.

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Page Count

180

Publisher

Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published Date

ISBN 10

1409488802

ISBN 13

9781409488804

Masculine Virtue in Early Modern Spain

By: Professor Shifra Armon

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Masculine Virtue in Early Modern Spain

By: Professor Shifra Armon

Culling genres as diverse as emblem books, poetry, drama, courtesy treatises and prose-fiction, this study extricates the history of masculinity in early modern Spain from the narrative of Spain’s fall from imperial power after 1640. Drawing on recent developments in gender theory, Masculine Virtue shows how the inception of courtiership at the Spanish Hapsburg court generated new models of masculine virtue that continue to resonate today.

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