Gabriel Metsu (1629-1667) employed an unusual variety of styles, techniques, and subjects, making him a particularly difficult artist to characterize. From his early days in Leiden until his death in Amsterdam at the height of his career, his unparal...

In a perplexing passage from the Gospel of John, Jesus is likened to the most reviled creature in Christian symbology: the snake. Attempting to understand how the Fourth Evangelist could have made such a surprising analogy, James H. Charlesworth has...

"Galleries of Friendship and Fame" is the first comprehensive investigation of the origin, development, and practices of 19th-century American photograph albums. In this fascinating book, the author argues that the album – whether functioning as fami...

This book presents an entirely fresh view of the upbringing of English children in upper and professional class families over three centuries. Drawing on direct testimony from contemporary diaries and letters, the book revises previous understandings...

A true icon of America at a turning point in its history, Gypsy Rose Lee was the first – and only – stripper to become a household name, write novels, and win the adulation of intellectuals, bankers, socialites, and ordinary Americans. Her outrageous...

The appearance during the first millennium A.D. of small, exquisitely carved artefacts of walrus ivory in the Bering Strait region marks the beginning of an extraordinary florescence in the art and culture of North America. The discovery in the 1930s...

The spectacular landscapes of Gwynedd – the historic counties of Anglesey, Caernarfon and Merioneth – are the setting for many of Wales' greatest buildings. Beaumaris, Caernarfon, Conwy and Harlech castles are unsurpassed as works of medieval militar...

This collection of interrelated stories about a sixteenth-century Prague rabbi and the golem he created became an immediate bestseller upon its publication in 1909. So widely popular and influential was Yudl Rosenberg's book, it is no exaggeration to...

"Grand Scale" brings to light rare surviving examples of mural-size prints – a Renaissance art form nearly lost from historical record. The most famous sixteenth-century woodcuts, engravings, and etchings were those done on an intimate scale. Yet art...

In the first volume of Raymond E. Brown's magisterial three-volume commentary on the "Gospel According to John", all of the major Johannine questions – of authorship, composition, dating, the relationship of John to the Synoptics (Mark, Matthew, and...