Marcel Tetel, Ronald G. Witt, and Rona Goffen, eds. Life and Death in Fifteenth-Century Florence (Duke Monographs in Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 10). Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1989. 19 pls. + xiv + 254 pp. $27.50.

1990 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 598-601
Author(s):  
George W. McClure
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Renaissance Studies ◽  
Duke University

Cultural Encounter

2021 ◽  
pp. 9-25
Author(s):  
John Parker
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Cultural Encounter ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Fifteenth

This chapter begins to set out the landscape of Willem Bosman's cultural encounter as it unfolded on the Gold Coast from the late fifteenth century. It highlights a set of fundamental metaphysical questions that, in the broadest sense, framed understandings of life and death among the Akan and their neighbours: Where did mankind come from? How did death come into the world? Where do people go when they die? By beginning the story with Bosman, the intention is not to recapitulate older ideas of the coast of Guinea as a 'white man's grave'. Rather, the chapter suggests that the reality and representation of the African encounter with mortality became entangled with the encounter with European others.

The King's Affinity in the Polity of Yorkist England

1973 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 1-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. A. L. Morgan
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Political Process ◽  
Formal Group ◽  
Political Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Strict Sense ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Scene

The rise and fall of the house of York is a story which sits uneasily towards both revolutionary and evolutionary interpretations of fifteenth-century England. Indeed, in general, attempts to tidy away the political process of Lancastrian and Yorkist times into the displacement of one type of régime by another always fail to convince. They do so because as a régime neither Lancaster nor York kept still long enough to be impaled on a categorical definition. The political life and death of both dynasties composes the pattern, changing yet constant, of a set of variations on the theme of an aristocratic society pre-dominantly kingship-focused and centripetal rather than locality-focused and centrifugal. In so far as the political process conformed to the social order, the households of the great were the nodal connections in which relationships of mutual dependence cohered. Those retinues, fellowships, affinities (for the vocabulary of the time was rich in terms overlapping but with nuances of descriptive emphasis) have now been studied both in their general conformation and in several particular instances; I have here attempted for the central affinity of the king over one generation not a formal group portrait but a sketch focused on the middle distance of figures in a landscape. The meagreness of household records in the strict sense is a problem we must learn to live with. But it would seem sensible to make a virtue of necessity and follow the life-line of what evidence there is to the conclusion that if an understanding of the household is only possible by attending to its wider context, so an understanding of that wider political scene requires some attention to the household.

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