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The Impact of Buddhism on Chinese Material Culture
From the first century, when Buddhism entered China, the foreign religion shaped Chinese philosophy, beliefs, and ritual. At the same time, Buddhism had a profound effect on the material world of the Chinese. This wide-ranging study shows that Buddhism brought with it a vast array of objects big and small--relics treasured as parts of the body of the Buddha, prayer beads, and monastic clothing--as well as new ideas about what objects could do and how they should be treated. Kieschnick argues that even some everyday objects not ordinarily associated with Buddhism--bridges, tea, and the chair--on closer inspection turn out to have been intimately tied to Buddhist ideas and practices. Long afte...
Sweets and Candy
With eye-popping colors and shapes, intense flavors, and curious textures, sweets and candy are beloved by people of all ages worldwide. They provide minor treats, lessons in economics for children, and colorful giveaways to mark festivities. They can be admired for beauty and novelty, make ideal gifts, and can even be used to woo. But these seemingly inconsequential indulgences are freighted with centuries of changing cultural attitudes, social and economic history, emotional attachments, and divergent views on the salubriousness of sugar. How did confectionary become so popular? Why do we value concentrated sweetness in such varied, gooey forms? And in the face of ongoing health debates, w...
The People's Guide
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Social Order through Contracts
This book is the first Western-language monograph on the study of the Qingshui River manuscripts. By examining over 3,000 contracts and other manuscripts, this book offers constructive insights into the long-standing question of how and why a society in late imperial China could maintain a well-functioning social system with few laws but many contracts, i.e., Hobbesian “words without sword.” Three interrelated questions, what contracts were, how and why they worked, are explained successively. Thus, this book presents a non-stereotypical “contract society” in southwest China, arguing that the social order which provides predictability and regularity for economic prosperity could be f...
Islamic and Christian Spain in the Early Middle Ages
Thomas Glick presents a comparative history of the Islamic and Christian areas of Spain in the period between A.D. 711 and 1250 when these areas emerged as distinct political, social, and cultural entities. The author accounts for the social, political, and ethnic structures that developed between the frontiers of Muslim and Christian territories and explores the cross-cultural relationships and the transmission of ideas and techniques, mainly from the Islamic culture to the Christian culture in Spain. Glick argues that science and technology are key indicators of cultural influence. The author has revised this text considerably since the first edition appeared in 1979 to reflect the fruits of the increased exploration of Spanish medieval history spurred by the “historiographical revolution” in Spain over the last two decades.
