Books about Gentility from Amazon.com

Regency heiress Philomena Wellesley-Clegg has rather strong opinions about men and clothing As to the former, so far two lords, a viscount, and a mad poet have fallen far short of her expectations But she is about to meet Inigo Linsley, an unshaven, wickedly handsome man with a scandalous secret. He's nothing she ever dreamed she'd want—why then can she not stop thinking about how he looks in his breeches?

A delightful marriage of Pride and Prejudice with Bridget Jones's Diary, Janet Mullany's The Rules of Gentility transports us to the days before designer shoes, apple martinis, and speed dating—when great bonnets, punch at Almack's, and the marriage mart were in fashion—and captivates us with a winsome heroine who learns that some rules in society are made to be broken.

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Where Adam delved and Eve span Who was then the gentleman? Mark Dawson's approach to this riddle is not to study the lives of those said to belong to early modern England's gentry. He suggests we remain skeptical of all answers to this question and consider what was at stake whenever it was posed. We should conceive of gentility as a mutable process of social delineation. Gentility was a matter of power and language; cultural definition and social domination. Neither consistently defined nor applied to particular social groups, gentility was about identifying society's elite. The book examines how gentility was portrayed through plays at London's theatres (1660-1725). Employing a rich assembly of sources, comedies with their cits and fops, periodicals, correspondence of theatre patrons and polemic from its detractors, Dawson revises several of social history's conclusions about the gentry and offers new interpretations to students of late Stuart drama..
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The quest for gentility has shaped Chinese civilization and the formation of culture in China until the present day. This book analyzes social aspirations and cultural practices in China from 1550 to 1999, showing how the notion of gentility has evolved and retained its relevance in China from late imperial times until the modern day. Gentility denotes the way of the gentleman and gentlewoman. The concept of gentility transcends the categories of gender and class and provides important new insights into the ways Chinese men and women lived their lives, perceived their world and constructed their cultural environment. In contrast to analyses of the elite, perceptions of gentility relate to ideals, ambitions, desires, social capital, cultural sophistication, literary refinement, aesthetic appreciation, moral behaviour, femininity and gentlemanly elegance, rather than to actual status or power. Twelve international leading scholars present multi-disciplinary approaches to explore the images, artefacts and transmission of gentility across the centuries in historical and literary situations, popular and high culture, private and official documents, poetry clubs, garden culture and aesthetic guidebooks. This volume changes the ways we look at Chinese cultural history, literature, women and gender issues and offers new perspectives on Chinese sources.

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Price: $135.97 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Nicolas Peiresc (1580-1637) was a parliamentarian, a lawyer, an abbot, an historian, a biologist, an astronomer, a collector, and a generous patron. He played an important role in the advancement of science and in the preservation of antiquities. He may be considered as one of the missing links between the brillant Italian academies and the scientific societies of Northern Europe

Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655) was born in Provence like Peiresc. He was a professor of philosophy, a priest, an astronomer, a friend of Mersenne, a rival of Descartes, an assistant of Peiresc from 1632 to 1637, a supporter of Galileo, and was appointed in 1645 as one of the two professors of mathematics at the Royal College of France. He is the author of the remarkable biographies of Peiresc, Epicurus, Tycho Brahe, and Copernicus..
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