- Table View
- List View
Jazz Age Chicago: Crucible of Modern America
by Joseph GustaitisWhen people imagine 1920s Chicago, they usually (and justifiably) think of Al Capone, speakeasies, gang wars, flappers and flivvers. Yet this narrative overlooks the crucial role the Windy City played in the modernization of America. The city's incredible ethnic variety and massive building boom gave it unparalleled creative space, as design trends from Art Deco skyscrapers to streamlined household appliances reflected Chicago's unmistakable style. The emergence of mass media in the 1920s helped make professional sports a national obsession, even as Chicago radio stations were inventing the sitcom and the soap opera. Join Joseph Gustaitis as he chases the beat of America's Jazz Age back to its jazz capital.
Jazz Age Cocktails: History, Lore, and Recipes from America's Roaring Twenties (Washington Mews Books)
by Cecelia TichiHow the Prohibition law of 1920 made alcohol, savored in secret, all the more delectable when the cocktail shaker was forced to go “underground”“Roaring Twenties” America boasted famous firsts: women’s right to vote, jazz music, talking motion pictures, flapper fashions, and wondrous new devices like the safety razor and the electric vacuum cleaner. The privations of the Great War were over, and Wall Street boomed. The decade opened, nonetheless, with a shock when Prohibition became the law of the land on Friday, January 16, 1920, when the Eighteenth Amendment banned “intoxicating liquors.” Decades-long campaigns to demonize alcoholic beverages finally became law, and America officially went “dry.”American ingenuity promptly rose to its newest challenge. The law, riddled with loopholes, let the 1920s write a new chapter in the nation’s saga of spirits. Men and women spoke knowingly of the speakeasy, the bootlegger, rum-running, black ships, blind pigs, gin mills, and gallon stills. Passwords (“Oscar sent me”) gave entrée to night spots and supper clubs where cocktails abounded, and bartenders became alchemists of timely new drinks like the Making Whoopee, the Petting Party, the Dance the Charleston. A new social event—the cocktail party staged in a private home—smashed the gender barrier that had long forbidden “ladies” from entering into the gentlemen-only barrooms and cafés. From the author of Gilded Age Cocktails, this book takes a delightful new romp through the cocktail creations of the early twentieth century, transporting readers into the glitz and (illicit) glamour of the 1920s. Spirited and richly illustrated, Jazz Age Cocktails dazzles with tales of temptation and temperance, and features charming cocktail recipes from the time to be recreated and enjoyed.
Jazz Age Giant: Charles A. Stoneham and New York City Baseball in the Roaring Twenties
by Robert F. GarrattIn the early 1920s, when the New York Yankees&’ first dynasty was taking shape, they were outplayed by their local rival, the New York Giants. Led by manager John McGraw the Giants won four consecutive National League pennants and two World Series, both against the rival Yankees. Remarkably, the Giants succeeded despite a dysfunctional and unmanageable front office. And at the center of the turmoil was one of baseball&’s more improbable figures: club president Charles A. Stoneham, who had purchased the Giants for $1 million in 1919, the largest amount ever paid for an American sports team. Short, stout, and jowly, Charlie Stoneham embodied a Jazz Age stereotype—a business and sporting man by day, he led another life by night. He threw lavish parties, lived extravagantly, and was often chronicled in the city tabloids. Little is known about how he came to be one of the most successful investment brokers in what were known as &“bucket shops,&” a highly speculative and controversial branch of Wall Street. One thing about Stoneham is clear, however: at the close of World War I he was a wealthy man, with a net worth of more than $10 million. This wealth made it possible for him to purchase majority control of the Giants, one of the most successful franchises in Major League Baseball. Stoneham, an owner of racehorses, a friend to local politicians and Tammany Hall, a socialite and a man well placed in New York business and political circles, was also implicated in a number of business scandals and criminal activities. The Giants&’ principal owner had to contend with federal indictments, civil lawsuits, hostile fellow magnates, and troubles with booze, gambling, and women. But during his sixteen-year tenure as club president, the Giants achieved more success than the club had seen under any prior regime. In Jazz Age Giant Robert Garratt brings to life Stoneham&’s defining years leading the Giants in the Roaring Twenties. With its layers of mystery and notoriety, Stoneham&’s life epitomizes the high life and the changing mores of American culture during the 1920s, and the importance of sport, especially baseball, during the pivotal decade.
Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra: Five Musical Years in Ghana
by Steven FeldIn this remarkable book, Steven Feld, pioneer of the anthropology of sound, listens to the vernacular cosmopolitanism of jazz players in Ghana. Some have traveled widely, played with American jazz greats, and blended the innovations of John Coltrane with local instruments and worldviews. Combining memoir, biography, ethnography, and history, Feld conveys a diasporic intimacy and dialogue that contests American nationalist and Afrocentric narratives of jazz history. His stories of Accra's jazz cosmopolitanism feature Ghanaba/Guy Warren (1923-2008), the eccentric drummer who befriended the likes of Charlie Parker, Max Roach, and Thelonious Monk in the United States in the 1950s, only to return, embittered, to Ghana, where he became the country's leading experimentalist. Others whose stories figure prominently are Nii Noi Nortey, who fuses the legacies of the black avant-gardes of the 1960s and 1970s with pan-African philosophy in sculptural shrines to Coltrane and musical improvisations inspired by his work; the percussionist Nii Otoo Annan, a traditional master inspired by Coltrane's drummers Elvin Jones and Rashied Ali; and a union of Accra truck and minibus drivers whose squeeze-bulb honk-horn music for drivers' funerals recalls the jazz funerals of New Orleans. Feld describes these artists' cosmopolitan outlook as an "acoustemology," a way of knowing the world through sound.
Jazz Cultures
by David AkeAke examines the musical identities and styles of several jazz musicians, some canonical and some not, to illuminate how and why identities and styles contribute to the making of the jazz canon.
Jazz Italian Style: From its Origins in New Orleans to Fascist Italy and Sinatra
by Anna Harwell Celenza<p>Jazz Italian Style explores a complex era in music history, when politics and popular culture collided with national identity and technology. When jazz arrived in Italy at the conclusion of World War I, it quickly became part of the local music culture. In Italy, thanks to the gramophone and radio, many Italian listeners paid little attention to a performer's national and ethnic identity. Nick LaRocca (Italian-American), Gorni Kramer (Italian), the Trio Lescano (Jewish-Dutch), and Louis Armstrong (African-American), to name a few, all found equal footing in the Italian soundscape. <p>The book reveals how Italians made jazz their own, and how, by the mid-1930s, a genre of jazz distinguishable from American varieties and supported by Mussolini began to flourish in Northern Italy and in its turn influenced Italian-American musicians. Most importantly, the book recovers a lost repertoire and an array of musicians whose stories and performances are compelling and well worth remembering.
Jazz Moon: A Novel
by Joe Okonkwo&“A passionate, alive, and original novel about love, race, and jazz in 1920s Harlem and Paris—a moving story of traveling far to find oneself&” (David Ebershoff, author of The Danish Girl and The 19th Wife). On a sweltering summer night in 1925, beauties in beaded dresses mingle with hepcats in dapper suits on the streets of Harlem. The air is thick with reefer smoke, and jazz pours out of speakeasy doorways. Ben Charles and his devoted wife are among the locals crammed into a basement club to hear music and drink bootleg liquor. For aspiring poet Ben, the heady rhythms are a revelation. So is Baby Back Johnston, an ambitious trumpet player who flashes a devilish grin and blasts dynamite from his horn. Ben finds himself drawn to the trumpeter—and to Paris, where Baby Back says everything is happening. In Paris, black people are welcomed as exotic celebrities, especially those from Harlem. It&’s an easy life, but it quickly leaves Ben adrift and alone, craving solace through anonymous dalliances in the city&’s decadent underground scene. From chic Parisian cafés to seedy opium dens, his odyssey will bring new love, trials, and heartache, even as echoes from the past urge him to decide where true fulfillment and inspiration lie. Jazz Moon is an evocative story of emotional and artistic awakening set against the backdrop of the Harlem Renaissance and Jazz Age–Paris—a winner of the Edmund White Award and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. &“Jazz Moon mashes up essences of Hurston and Hughes and Fitzgerald into a heady mixtape of a romance: driving and rhythmic as an Armstrong Hot Five record, sensuous as the small of a Cotton Club chorus girl&’s back. I enjoyed it immensely.&” —Larry Duplechan, author of Blackbird and Got &’til It&’s Gone
Jazz Owls: A Novel of the Zoot Suit Riots
by Margarita Engle Rudy GutierrezFrom the Young People’s Poet Laureate Margarita Engle comes a searing novel in verse about the Zoot Suit Riots of 1943. <P><P>Thousands of young Navy sailors are pouring into Los Angeles on their way to the front lines of World War II. They are teenagers, scared, longing to feel alive before they have to face the horrors of battle. Hot jazz music spiced with cool salsa rhythms calls them to dance with the local Mexican American girls, who jitterbug all night before working all day in the canneries. Proud to do their part for the war effort, these Jazz Owl girls are happy to dance with the sailors—until the blazing summer night when racial violence leads to murder. Suddenly the young white sailors are attacking these girls’ brothers and boyfriends. The cool, loose zoot suits they wear are supposedly the reason for the violence—when in reality these boys are viciously beaten and arrested simply because of the color of their skin. <P><P> In soaring images and powerful poems, this is the breathtaking story of what became known as the Zoot Suit Riots as only Margarita Engle could tell it.
Jazz Places: How Performance Spaces Shape Jazz History
by Kimberly Hannon TealThe social connotation of jazz in American popular culture has shifted dramatically since its emergence in the early twentieth century. Once considered youthful and even rebellious, jazz music is now a firmly established American artistic tradition. As jazz in American life has shifted, so too has the kind of venue in which it is performed. In Jazz Places, Kimberly Hannon Teal traces the history of jazz performance from private jazz clubs to public, high-art venues often associated with charitable institutions. As live jazz performance has become more closely tied to nonprofit institutions, the music's heritage has become increasingly important, serving as a means of defining jazz as a social good worthy of charitable support. Though different jazz spaces present jazz and its heritage in various and sometimes conflicting terms, ties between the music and the past play an important role in defining the value of present-day music in a diverse range of jazz venues, from the Village Vanguard in New York to SFJazz on the West Coast to Preservation Hall in New Orleans.
Jazz Planet
by E. Taylor AtkinsWith contributions by Raúl A. Fernández, Benjamin Givan, Acácio Tadeu de Camargo Piedade, Warren R. Pinckney Jr., Linda F. Williams, Christopher G. Bakriges, Stefano Zenni, S. Frederick Starr, Bruce Johnson, Christophine Ballantine, Michael Molasky, Johan Fornäs, and Andrew F. JonesJazz is typically characterized as a uniquely American form of artistic expression, and narratives of its history are almost always set within the United States. Yet, from its inception, this art form exploded beyond national borders, becoming one of the first modern examples of a global music sensation. Jazz Planet collects essays that concentrate for the first time on jazz created outside the United States. What happened when this phenomenon met with indigenous musical practices? What debates on cultural integrity did this “American” styling provoke in far-flung places? Did jazz's insistence on individual innovation and its posture as a music of the disadvantaged generate shakeups in national identity, aesthetic values, and public morality? Through new and previously published essays, Jazz Planet recounts the music's fascinating journeys to Asia, Europe, Africa, and Latin America. What emerges is a concept of jazz as a harbinger of current globalization, a process that has engendered both hope for a more enlightened and tranquil future and resistance to the anticipated loss of national identity and sovereignty. Essays in this collection describe the seldom-acknowledged contributions non-Americans have made to the art and explore the social and ideological crises jazz initiated around the globe. Was the rise of jazz in global prominence, they ask, simply a result of its inherent charm? Was it a vehicle for colonialism, Cold War politics, and emerging American hegemony? Jazz Planet provokes readers to question the nationalistic bias of most jazz scholarship, and to expand the pantheon of great jazz artists to include innovative musicians who blazed independent paths.
Jazz Radio America (Music in American Life)
by Aaron J. JohnsonOnce a lively presence on radio, jazz now finds itself relegated to satellite broadcasters and low-watt stations at the edge of the dial. Aaron J. Johnson examines jazz radio from the advent of Black radio in 1948 to its near extinction from the commercial dial after 1980. Even in jazz’s heyday, programmers and DJs excluded many styles and artists, and Johnson delves into how the politics of decision-making and the political uses of the medium shaped jazz radio formats. Johnson shows radio’s role in the contradictory perceptions of jazz as American’s model artistic contribution to the world, as Black classical music, and as the soundtrack of African American rebellion and resistance for much of the twentieth century. An interwoven story of a music and a medium, Jazz Radio America answers perennial questions about why certain kinds of jazz get played and why even that music is played in so few places.
Jazz and Machine-Age Imperialism: Music, "Race," and Intellectuals in France, 1918-1945
by Lane Jeremy F.Jeremy F. Lane’s Jazz and Machine-Age Imperialism is a bold challenge to the existing homogenous picture of the reception of American jazz in world-war era France. Lane’s book closely examines the reception of jazz among French-speaking intellectuals between 1918 and 1945 and is the first study to consider the relationships, sometimes symbiotic, sometimes antagonistic, between early white French jazz critics and those French-speaking intellectuals of color whose first encounters with the music in those years played a catalytic role in their emerging black or Creole consciousness. Jazz’s first arrival in France in 1918 coincided with a series of profound shocks to received notions of French national identity and cultural and moral superiority. These shocks, characteristic of the era of machine-age imperialism, had been provoked by the first total mechanized war, the accelerated introduction of Taylorist and Fordist production techniques into European factories, and the more frequent encounters with primitive “Others” in the imperial metropolis engendered by interwar imperialism. Through close readings of the work of early white French jazz critics, alongside the essays and poems of intellectuals of color such as the Nardal sisters, Léon-Gontran Damas, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and René Ménil, Jazz and Machine-Age Imperialism highlights the ways in which the French reception of jazz was bound up with a series of urgent contemporary debates about primitivism, imperialism, anti-imperialism, black and Creole consciousness, and the effects of American machine-age technologies on the minds and bodies of French citizens.
Jazz from Detroit
by Mark StrykerJazz from Detroit explores the city’s pivotal role in shaping the course of modern and contemporary jazz. With more than two dozen in-depth profiles of remarkable Detroit-bred musicians, complemented by a generous selection of photographs, Mark Stryker makes Detroit jazz come alive as he draws out significant connections between the players, eras, styles, and Detroit’s distinctive history. Stryker’s story starts in the 1940s and ’50s, when the auto industry created a thriving black working and middle class in Detroit that supported a vibrant nightlife, and exceptional public school music programs and mentors in the community like pianist Barry Harris transformed the city into a jazz juggernaut. This golden age nurtured many legendary musicians—Hank, Thad, and Elvin Jones, Gerald Wilson, Milt Jackson, Yusef Lateef, Donald Byrd, Tommy Flanagan, Kenny Burrell, Ron Carter, Joe Henderson, and others. As the city’s fortunes change, Stryker turns his spotlight toward often overlooked but prescient musician-run cooperatives and self-determination groups of the 1960s and ’70s, such as the Strata Corporation and Tribe. In more recent decades, the city’s culture of mentorship, embodied by trumpeter and teacher Marcus Belgrave, ensured that Detroit continued to incubate world-class talent; Belgrave protégés like Geri Allen, Kenny Garrett, Robert Hurst, Regina Carter, Gerald Cleaver, and Karriem Riggins helped define contemporary jazz. The resilience of Detroit’s jazz tradition provides a powerful symbol of the city’s lasting cultural influence. Stryker’s 21 years as an arts reporter and critic at the Detroit Free Press are evident in his vivid storytelling and insightful criticism. Jazz from Detroit will appeal to jazz aficionados, casual fans, and anyone interested in the vibrant and complex history of cultural life in Detroit.
Jazz in China: From Dance Hall Music to Individual Freedom of Expression
by Eugene MarlowFinalist for the 2019 Jazz Journalists Association Book of the Year About Jazz, Jazz Awards for Journalism"Is there jazz in China?" This is the question that sent author Eugene Marlow on his quest to uncover the history of jazz in China. Marlow traces China's introduction to jazz in the early 1920s, its interruption by Chinese leadership under Mao in 1949, and its rejuvenation in the early 1980s with the start of China's opening to the world under Premier Deng Xiaoping.Covering a span of almost one hundred years, Marlow focuses on a variety of subjects--the musicians who initiated jazz performances in China, the means by which jazz was incorporated into Chinese culture, and the musicians and venues that now present jazz performances.Featuring unique, face-to-face interviews with leading indigenous jazz musicians in Beijing and Shanghai, plus interviews with club owners, promoters, expatriates, and even diplomats, Marlow marks the evolution of jazz in China as it parallels China's social, economic, and political evolution through the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. Also featured is an interview with one of the extant members of the Jimmy King Big Band of the 1940s, one of the first major all-Chinese jazz big bands in Shanghai.Ultimately, Jazz in China: From Dance Hall Music to Individual Freedom of Expression is a cultural history that reveals the inexorable evolution of a democratic form of music in a Communist state.
Jazz in the Hill: Nightlife and Narratives of a Pittsburgh Neighborhood (American Made Music Series)
by Colter HarperFrom the 1920s through the 1960s, Pittsburgh’s Hill District was the heart of the city’s Black cultural life and home to a vibrant jazz scene. In Jazz in the Hill: Nightlife and Narratives of a Pittsburgh Neighborhood, Colter Harper looks at how jazz shaped the neighborhood and created a way of life. Beyond backdrops for remarkable careers, jazz clubs sparked the development of a self-determined African American community. In delving into the history of entrepreneurialism, placemaking, labor organizing, and critical listening in the Hill District, Harper forges connections to larger political contexts, processes of urban development, and civil rights struggles.Harper adopts a broad approach in thinking about jazz clubs, foregrounding the network of patrons, business owners, and musicians who were actively invested in community building. Jazz in the Hill provides a valuable case study detailing the intersections of music, political and cultural history, public policy, labor, and law. The book addresses distinctive eras and issues of twentieth century American urban history, including notions of “vice” during the Prohibition Era (1920–1934); “blight” during the mid-twentieth century boom in urban redevelopment (1946–1973); and workplace integration during the civil rights era (1954–1968). Throughout, Harper demonstrates how the clubs, as a nexus of music, politics, economy, labor, and social relations, supported the livelihood of residents and artists while developing cultures of listening and learning. Though the neighborhood has undergone an extensive socioeconomic transformation that has muted its nightlife, this musical legacy continues to guide current development visions for the Hill on the cusp of its remaking.
Jazz à la Creole: French Creole Music and the Birth of Jazz (American Made Music Series)
by Caroline VézinaWinner of the 2023 Award for Excellence for Best Historical Research in Recorded Jazz from the Association for Recorded Sound CollectionsDuring the formative years of jazz (1890–1917), the Creoles of Color—as they were then called—played a significant role in the development of jazz as teachers, bandleaders, instrumentalists, singers, and composers. Indeed, music penetrated all aspects of the life of this tight-knit community, proud of its French heritage and language. They played and/or sang classical, military, and dance music as well as popular songs and cantiques that incorporated African, European, and Caribbean elements decades before early jazz appeared. In Jazz à la Creole: French Creole Music and the Birth of Jazz, the author describes the music played by the Afro-Creole community since the arrival of enslaved Africans in La Louisiane, then a French colony, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, emphasizing the many cultural exchanges that led to the development of jazz. Caroline Vézina has compiled and analyzed a broad scope of primary sources found in diverse locations from New Orleans to Quebec City, Washington, DC, New York City, and Chicago. Two previously unpublished interviews add valuable insider knowledge about the music on French plantations and the danses Créoles held in Congo Square after the Civil War. Musical and textual analyses of cantiques provide new information about the process of their appropriation by the Creole Catholics as the French counterpart of the Negro spirituals. Finally, a closer look at their musical practices indicates that the Creoles sang and improvised music and/or lyrics of Creole songs, and that some were part of their professional repertoire. As such, they belong to the Black American and the Franco-American folk music traditions that reflect the rich cultural heritage of Louisiana.
Jazz: A Beginner's Guide (Beginner's Guides)
by Stuart NicholsonThis definitive guide includes a unique chapter-by-chapter playlist for the reader. Jazz: A Beginner&’s Guide is a lively and highly accessible introduction to a global musical phenomenon. Award-winning music journalist and author Stuart Nicholson takes the reader on an entertaining journey from jazz's early stirrings in America&’s south through to the present day, when almost every country in the world has its own vibrant jazz scene.En route we meet a host of jazz heroes past and present, from Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman and Miles Davis, to Keith Jarrett and Kamasi Washington. Each chapter is accompanied by a playlist designed to provide a stimulating and enjoyable entry point to what has been described as the most exciting art form of all.
Jazzing: New York City's Unseen Scene
by Thomas H. GreenlandHow do we speak about jazz? In this provocative study based on the author's deep immersion in the New York City jazz scene, Tom Greenland turns from the usual emphasis on artists and their music to focus on non-performing participants, describing them as active performers in their own right who witness and thus collaborate in a happening made one-of-a-kind by improvisation, mood, and moment. Jazzing shines a spotlight on the constituency of proprietors, booking agents, photographers, critics, publicists, painters, amateur musicians, fans, friends, and tourists that makes up New York City's contemporary jazz scene. Drawn from deep ethnographic research, interviews, and long term participant observation, Jazzing charts the ways New York's distinctive physical and social-cultural environment affects and is affected by jazz. Throughout, Greenland offers a passionate argument in favor of a radically inclusive conception of music-making, one in which individuals collectively improvise across social contexts to co-create community and musical meaning. An odyssey through the clubs and other performance spaces on and off the beaten track, Jazzing is an insider's view of a vibrant urban art world.
Jazzocracy: Jazz, Democracy, and the Creation of a New American Mythology
by Kabir SehgalSehgal explores the nature of jazz as it relates to the liberty and freedoms of a democratic nation.
Jean Améry and Existentialism’s Limits
by John Reed SpiersThis book provides an in-depth analysis of the influences and impact of philosopher, writer and public intellectual, Jean Améry. Améry&’s writing is often analysed in terms of his experiences as a Jew in Austria during WWII which saw him stripped of his identity, driven into exile, and dehumanised in torture and the death camps. Despite the increasing interest in the philosophical, ethical, and literary dimensions of Améry&’s thought, little research discusses his relationship with the most important intellectual discovery of his life: existentialism. This book contributes to and expands upon recent engagements with Améry&’s work by situating him within the existential tradition and discussing his writing within the context of his peers and influences. John Reed Spiers argues that reading Améry in the context of the existential tradition contributes to a greater appreciation of his importance as a writer reflecting on the human condition, broadening the Anglophone reception of his work beyond Holocaust Studies, trauma studies, and victimology.
Jean Améry: Beyond the Mind's Limits
by Yochai Ataria Amit Kravitz Eli PitcovskiThis volume explores themes originating from the work of Jean Améry (1912–1978), a Holocaust survivor and essayist—mainly, ethics and the past, torture and its implications, death and suicide. The volume is interdisciplinary, bringing together contributions from philosophy, psychology, law, and literary studies to illuminate each of the topics from more than one angle. Each essay is a novel contribution, shedding new light on the relevant subject matter and on Jean Améry's unique perspective. The ensuing picture is rich and multifaceted, uncovering unforeseen traits of Amery's thought, and surprising correlations that have so far been under-researched. It invites further studies of the Holocaust and its consequences to take their cue from non-neutral first person reflections.
Jean Bodin (International Library Of Essays In The History Of Social And Political Thought Ser.)
by Julian H. FranklinIn the course of a lifetime, Jean Bodin aimed at nothing less than to encompass all the disciplines of his age in a huge encyclopedia of knowledge. In many areas, his ideas have been not only original but seminal. He made major contributions to historiography, philosophy of history, economics, political science, comparative public law and policy, religion and national philosophy. This volume brings together a selection of major articles in English, representing almost all of his intellectual interests. It is an essential collection for libraries and scholars in both humanities and social sciences.
Jean Bodin: Four chapters from The Six Books of the Commonwealth
by Jean Bodin Julian H. FranklinThis volume contains the essential points of Jean Bodin's theory of sovereignty, a landmark in legal theory and royalist ideology.
Jean Genet: Performance And Politics (Routledge Modern and Contemporary Dramatists)
by David Bradby Claire FinburghThis book is the only introductory text to Genet in English, offering an overview of this key figure in defining and understanding twentieth-century theatre. The authors provide a comprehensive account of Genet's key plays and productions, his early life and his writing for and beyond the theatre.
Jean Gerson and Gender
by Nancy McloughlinJean Gerson and Gender reconciles the somewhat enigmatic legacy of one of the most influential late medieval intellectuals: the theologian, court preacher, university chancellor, and church reformer, Jean Gerson (d. 1429). Gerson provided foundational contributions to two historical developments: the promotion of rational and just government, and the development of the European concept of the witch. This book argues that Gerson's association of royal and ascetic women with sin and diabolical influences allowed him to maintain - against overwhelming evidence to the contrary – the appearance of centralized monarchical rule, a stable ecclesiastical hierarchy, and a reliable method for constructing communally verifiable political and religious truths.