This wide-ranging book is the first to explore the visual culture of Russia during the entire span of Russian history, from ancient Kiev to contemporary, post-Soviet society. Illustrated with more than one hundred diverse and fascinating images, the...

Understanding Puvis de Chavannes (1824-1898) is crucial to reading the history of art of the late nineteenth century and the development of modernism. Internationally heralded yet sometimes scorned, much exhibited, respected and emulated, an artist's...

According to sacred texts, the historical Buddha encouraged his disciples to make pilgrimages to sites associated with his life. As sacred images of the Buddha proliferated over time, it is said that his relics were divided among 84,000 South Asian s...

How and why has the saga of Scarlett O'Hara kept such a tenacious hold on the American imagination for almost three-quarters of a century? In the first book ever to deal simultaneously with Margaret Mitchell's beloved novel and David Selznick's spect...

Currently it is fashionable to be devoutly undevout. Religion's most passionate antagonists – Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and others – have publishers competing eagerly to market their various denunciations of r...

The Hell-Fire Clubs scandalized eighteenth-century English society. Rumours of their orgies, recruitment of prostitutes, extensive libraries of erotica, extreme rituals, and initiation ceremonies circulated widely at the time, only to become more sen...

The subversive, often jarringly direct sculptures of Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan (b. 1960) are acclaimed for their seemingly absurd juxtapositions and uncanny photorealism. Reflecting deep suspicions of religious and political authorities, these...

Now updated with new facts, and abridged for use in Soviet history courses, this gripping book assembles top secret Soviet documents, translated into English, from the era of Stalin's purges. The dossiers, police reports, private letters, secret tran...

In this debut, Heather Webb studies medieval notions of the heart to explore the "lost circulations" of an era when individual lives and bodies were defined by their extensions into the world rather than as self-perpetuating, self-limited entities. D...

This candid, intimate, and compellingly written new biography offers a completely fresh account of Robert Schumann's life. It confronts the traditional perception of the doom-laden Romantic, forced by depression into a life of helpless, poignant sadn...