Samuel K. Cohn, Jr.'s Books

Epidemics

Hate and Compassion from the Plague of Athens to AIDS

By: Samuel K. Cohn Jr.

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Epidemics

Hate and Compassion from the Plague of Athens to AIDS

By: Samuel K. Cohn Jr.

By investigating thousands of descriptions of epidemics reaching back before the fifth-century-BCE Plague of Athens to the distrust and violence that erupted with Ebola in 2014, Epidemics challenges a dominant hypothesis in the study of epidemics, that invariably across time and space, epidemics provoked hatred, blaming of the 'other', and victimizing bearers of epidemic diseases, particularly when diseases were mysterious, without known cures or preventive measures, as with AIDS during the last two decades of the twentieth century. However, scholars and public intellectuals, especially post-AIDS, have missed a fundamental aspect of the history of epidemics. Instead of sparking hatred and blame, this study traces epidemics' socio-psychological consequences across time and discovers a radically different picture: that epidemic diseases have more often unified societies across class, race, ethnicity, and religion, spurring self-sacrifice and compassion.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

656

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0192551582

ISBN 13

9780192551580

Lust for Liberty

The Politics of Social Revolt in Medieval Europe, 1200–1425

By: Samuel Kline COHN,Samuel Kline Cohn

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Lust for Liberty

The Politics of Social Revolt in Medieval Europe, 1200–1425

By: Samuel Kline COHN,Samuel Kline Cohn

Lust for Liberty challenges long-standing views of popular medieval revolts. Comparing rebellions in northern and southern Europe over two centuries, Samuel Cohn analyzes their causes and forms, their leadership, the role of women, and the suppression or success of these revolts. Popular revolts were remarkably common--not the last resort of desperate people. Leaders were largely workers, artisans, and peasants. Over 90 percent of the uprisings pitted ordinary people against the state and were fought over political rights--regarding citizenship, governmental offices, the barriers of ancient hierarchies--rather than rents, food prices, or working conditions. After the Black Death, the connection of the word liberty with revolts increased fivefold, and its meaning became more closely tied with notions of equality instead of privilege. The book offers a new interpretation of the Black Death and the increase of and change in popular revolt from the mid-1350s to the early fifteenth century. Instead of structural explanations based on economic, demographic, and political models, this book turns to the actors themselves--peasants, artisans, and bourgeois--finding that the plagues wrought a new urgency for social and political change and a new self- and class-confidence in the efficacy of collective action.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

385

Publisher

Harvard University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0674029674

ISBN 13

9780674029675

Popular Protest in Late Medieval English Towns

By: Samuel Kline Cohn,Douglas Aiton

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Popular Protest in Late Medieval English Towns

By: Samuel Kline Cohn,Douglas Aiton

Draws new attention to popular protest in medieval English towns, away from the more frequently studied theme of rural revolt.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

391

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1107027802

ISBN 13

9781107027800

Epidemics

Hate and Compassion from the Plague of Athens to AIDS

By: Samuel K. Cohn Jr.

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Epidemics

Hate and Compassion from the Plague of Athens to AIDS

By: Samuel K. Cohn Jr.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

656

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0192551582

ISBN 13

9780192551580

Cultures of Plague

Medical thinking at the end of the Renaissance

By: Samuel K. Cohn Jr.

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Cultures of Plague

Medical thinking at the end of the Renaissance

By: Samuel K. Cohn Jr.

Cultures of Plague opens a new chapter in the history of medicine. Neither the plague nor the ideas it stimulated were static, fixed in a timeless Galenic vacuum over five centuries, as historians and scientists commonly assume. As plague evolved in its pathology, modes of transmission, and the social characteristics of its victims, so too did medical thinking about plague develop. This study of plague imprints from academic medical treatises to plague poetry highlights the most feared and devastating epidemic of the sixteenth-century, one that threatened Italy top to toe from 1575 to 1578 and unleashed an avalanche of plague writing. From erudite definitions, remote causes, cures and recipes, physicians now directed their plague writings to the prince and discovered their most 'valiant remedies' in public health: strict segregation of the healthy and ill, cleaning streets and latrines, addressing the long-term causes of plague-poverty. Those outside the medical profession joined the chorus. In the heartland of Counter-Reformation Italy, physicians along with those outside the profession questioned the foundations of Galenic and Renaissance medicine, even the role of God. Assaults on medieval and Renaissance medicine did not need to await the Protestant-Paracelsian alliance of seventeenth-century in northern Europe. Instead, creative forces planted by the pandemic of 1575-8 sowed seeds of doubt and unveiled new concerns and ideas within that supposedly most conservative form of medical writing, the plague tract. Relying on health board statistics and dramatized with eyewitness descriptions of bizarre happenings, human misery, and suffering, these writers created the structure for plague classics of the eighteenth century, and by tracking the contagion's complex and crooked paths, they anticipated trends of nineteenth-century epidemiology.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

1815

Publisher

OUP Oxford

Published Date

ISBN 10

0191615889

ISBN 13

9780191615887

Creating the Florentine State

Peasants and Rebellion, 1348–1434

By: Samuel K. Cohn, Jr

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Creating the Florentine State

Peasants and Rebellion, 1348–1434

By: Samuel K. Cohn, Jr

This book offers a comprehensive approach to the study of the political history of the Renaissance: its analysis of government is embedded in the context of geography and social conflict. Instead of the usual institutional history, it examines the Florentine state from the mountainous periphery - a periphery both of geography and class - where Florence met its most strenuous opposition to territorial incorporation. Yet, far from being acted upon, Florence's highlanders were instrumental in changing the attitudes of the Florentine ruling class: the city began to see its own self-interest as intertwined with that of its region and the welfare of its rural subjects at the beginning of the fifteenth century. Contemporaries either remained silent or purposely obscured the reasons for this change, which rested on widespread and successful peasant uprisings across the mountainous periphery of the Florentine state, hitherto unrecorded by historians.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

324

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1139426761

ISBN 13

9781139426763

Paradoxes of Inequality in Renaissance Italy

By: Samuel K. Cohn, Jr.

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Paradoxes of Inequality in Renaissance Italy

By: Samuel K. Cohn, Jr.

This Element explores the longest spell that can be computed from quantifiable fiscal records when the gap between rich and poor narrowed. It was the post-Black-Death century, c. 1375 to c. 1475. Paradoxically, with economic equality and prosperity on the rise, peasants, artisans and shopkeepers suffered losses in political representation and status within cultural spheres. Threatened by growing economic equality after the Black Death, elites preserved and then enhanced their political, social, and cultural distinction predominantly through noneconomic means and within political and cultural spheres. By investigating the interactions between three 'elements'-economics, politics, and culture-this Element presents new facets in the emergence of early Renaissance society in Italy.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

146

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1108988687

ISBN 13

9781108988681

Popular Protest and Ideals of Democracy in Late Renaissance Italy

By: Samuel K. Cohn Jr

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Popular Protest and Ideals of Democracy in Late Renaissance Italy

By: Samuel K. Cohn Jr

Popular Protest and Ideals of Democracy in Late Renaissance Italy is the first study to analyse popular protest across the Italian peninsula and the Venetian colonies during the early modern period, 1494 to 1559. Drawing on over 100 contemporary chronicles and diaries, the fifty-eight volumes of Marin Sanudo's diplomatic dispatches, mercantile letters, and commentary, and 586 collective supplications scattered through archival sources from towns and villages in the Grand duchy of Milan, Samuel K. Cohn, Jr. places these incidents and their patterns in comparative perspectives, first with the late medieval heyday of popular revolt and then with regions north of the Alps. Cohn finds new developments during the early modern period such as an increase in women rebels, mutinies of soldiers, and new tactics of revolts such as shop closures, peaceful demonstrations of strength, and use of religious processions for discussions of tactics and strategies for obtaining logistic advantage. At the same time, these protests show convergences with the medieval Italian past, with leaders coming almost exclusively from the ranks of nonelites, religious ideology playing a surprisingly minor role, and the majority of revolts centring overwhelming in towns and cities. Finally, this study demonstrates that democracies do not just die under the duress of military occupation and growing powers of autocratic regimes. Ideals of representation and equality not only persisted; they could emerge in new forms and with greater sophistication.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

281

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0192849476

ISBN 13

9780192849472

The Cult of Remembrance and the Black Death

Six Renaissance Cities in Central Italy

By: Samuel Kline Cohn

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

The Cult of Remembrance and the Black Death

Six Renaissance Cities in Central Italy

By: Samuel Kline Cohn

In his award-winning study, Death and Property in Siena, historian Samuel K. Cohn, Jr., used close analysis of last wills to chart transformations in mentalities over a six-hundred-year history. Now, in The Cult of Remembrance and the Black Death, Cohn applies the same methodology to fashion a comparative history of six Italian city-states - Arezzo, Florence, Perugia, Assisi, Pisa, and Siena - showing the rise of a new Renaissance cult of remembrance. In 1363 the Black Death devastated central Italy for the second time, causing a detectable shift in notions of afterlife and patterns of charitable giving. Throughout Tuscany and Umbria, patricians and peasants alike abandoned the practice of dividing their bequests into small sums, combining them instead into last gifts to enhance their "fame and glory". But this new cult of remembrance, Cohn argues, does not support Burckhardt's thesis of Renaissance "individualism". Instead, the new piety grew in tandem with reverence for ancestors and a strong sense of family identity founded on the importance of male blood lines. But rather than retreat into the religious pessimism of earlier times, survivors of the plague would develop into a new generation of art patrons, albeit one with a taste for distinctively cruder and more regimented forms of religious art. From the supposed center of Renaissance culture - Florence - to the citadel of Franciscan devotion - Assisi - the widespread change of sentiment created a new demand for monumental burials, testamentary commissions for art, and other efforts to exert control over the living from beyond the grave.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

900

Publisher

JHU Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

080185606X

ISBN 13

9780801856068

Cultures of Plague

Medical Thinking at the End of the Renaissance

By: Samuel Kline Cohn

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Cultures of Plague

Medical Thinking at the End of the Renaissance

By: Samuel Kline Cohn

This title highlights the impact that the plague epidemic in Italy between 1575 and 1578 had on the medical writers and practitioners of the time. He asserts that these writers anticipated modern epidemiology and created the structure for plague classics of the next century.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

357

Publisher

Oxford University Press, USA

Published Date

ISBN 10

0199574022

ISBN 13

9780199574025

Women in the Streets

Essays on Sex and Power in Renaissance Italy

By: Samuel Kline Cohn

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Women in the Streets

Essays on Sex and Power in Renaissance Italy

By: Samuel Kline Cohn

Ultimately, Cohn argues, women are the protagonists of this book, whether the issue is their support of other women or the resolution of conflict in the streets of Florence, the control of their own dowries or the salvation of their own souls.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

270

Publisher

JHU Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0801853095

ISBN 13

9780801853098

Popular protest in late-medieval Europe

Italy, France and Flanders

By: Samuel Kline Cohn Jr

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Popular protest in late-medieval Europe

Italy, France and Flanders

By: Samuel Kline Cohn Jr

This collection of documents, spanning the years 1245-1424 concentrates on the 'contagion of rebellion' that followed the Black Death in Europe in the 14th century. Comprising a wide variety of sources from a range of authors - including revolutionaries, the aristoricacy, merchants and op

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

414

Publisher

Manchester University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1526112760

ISBN 13

9781526112767

Women in the Streets

Essays on Sex and Power in Renaissance Italy

By: Samuel Kline Cohn

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Women in the Streets

Essays on Sex and Power in Renaissance Italy

By: Samuel Kline Cohn

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

270

Publisher

JHU Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0801853095

ISBN 13

9780801853098

Epidemics

Hate and Compassion from the Plague of Athens to AIDS

By: Samuel Kline Cohn

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Epidemics

Hate and Compassion from the Plague of Athens to AIDS

By: Samuel Kline Cohn

Samuel K. Cohn, Jr. investigates thousands of descriptions of epidemics reaching back before the fifth-century-BCE Plague of Athens to the 2014 Ebola outbreak to challenge the dominant hypothesis that epidemics invariably provoke hatred, blaming of the 'other', and victimising bearers of epidemic diseases.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

N/A

Published Date

ISBN 10

0191859982

ISBN 13

9780191859984

Book's by Samuel K. Cohn, Jr.

Epidemics

Epidemics

Lust for Liberty

Lust for Liberty

Popular Protest in Late Medieval English Towns

Popular Protest in Late Medieval English Towns

Epidemics

Epidemics

Cultures of Plague

Cultures of Plague

Creating the Florentine State

Creating the Florentine State

Paradoxes of Inequality in Renaissance Italy

Paradoxes of Inequality in Renaissance Italy

Popular Protest and Ideals of Democracy in Late Renaissance Italy

Popular Protest and Ideals of Democracy in Late Renaissance Italy

The Cult of Remembrance and the Black Death

The Cult of Remembrance and the Black Death

Cultures of Plague

Cultures of Plague

Women in the Streets

Women in the Streets

Popular protest in late-medieval Europe

Popular protest in late-medieval Europe

Women in the Streets

Women in the Streets

Epidemics

Epidemics

Username

Password

Username

Password

Password again

Birthday

Email