Peter Burke

From comic verse to practical jokes, pornography to satire, acting to acrobatics, the Renaissance witnessed the flowering of play in all its forms. In the first wide-ranging and accessible introduction to play in Renaissance Italy, Peter Burke, celebrated historian of the Italian Renaissance, synthesizes over forty years’ research, explores the various forms of play in this period, and offers an overview that reveals the many connections between its different domains. While play could be rough,...

The period in which we live is marked by increasingly frequent and intense cultural encounters of all kinds. However we react to it, the global trend towards mixing or hybridization is impossible to miss, from curry and chips – recently voted the favourite dish in Britain – to Thai saunas, Zen Judaism, Nigerian Kung Fu, ‘Bollywood’ films or salsa or reggae music. Some people celebrate these phenomena, whilst others fear or condemn them. No wonder, then, that theorists such as Homi Bhabha, Stuart...

In this brilliant and widely acclaimed work, Peter Burke presents a social and cultural history of the Italian Renaissance. He discusses the social and political institutions which existed in Italy during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and analyses the ways of thinking and seeing which characterized this period of extraordinary artistic creativity. Developing a distinctive sociological approach, Peter Burke is concerned with not only the finished works of Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo...

Peter Burke follows up his magisterial Social History of Knowledge, picking up where the first volume left off around 1750 at the publication of the French Encyclopédie and following the story through to Wikipedia. Like the previous volume, it offers a social history (or a retrospective sociology of knowledge) in the sense that it focuses not on individuals but on groups, institutions, collective practices and general trends. The book is divided into 3 parts. The first argues that activities...

"El periodo en que vivimos está marcado por encuentros culturales de todo tipo, encuentros cada vez más frecuentes e intensos. Sin embargo, reaccionamos ante ello; es imposible ignorar la tendencia hacia la mezcla y la hibridación: del judaísmo Zen a la comida occidental con soja, las religiones New Age, el kung fu nigeriano, las películas de Bollywood o la música reggae o raï. Hay quien celebra estos fenómenos, mientras que otros los temen o los condenan. No es de extrañar, pues, que...

Disability and Impairment introduces professionals working with families to the everyday issues faced by disabled people of all ages in family life. Peter C Burke shows how social attitudes shape the world of the 'disabled family' either positively or negatively and the effects of stigma. He demonstrates the normality of disability – that children are children whatever their label – and the need for a sensitive professional understanding of the impact of both physical and learning...

How is knowledge measured? How long does it take us to reflect on something and how long to express our thoughts? Such is the dilemma that the human, social and economic sciences go through, since they face the challenge of understanding complex processes when confronting the urgency of standards, measurements and forms of qualitative and quantitative evaluation that respond to notions of utility, productivity and viability, defined within social, cultural and political realities discordant with...