In a fascinating article, Andrea Addobbati and Francesca Bregoli use a recently discovered play in French from 1786 to mine into the rapidly shifting place Livornese #Jews had in the Tuscan public sphere, in the context of ransoming captives across the Mediterranean.
Public life in #AncientGreece was dominated by a binary between political life and private life. Integrating philosophical texts with #epigraphic evidence, Benjamin Gray argues, however, that by the 2nd c. BCE the Greeks started developing a concept of "social life" that contradicts usual views of "depolitization" in that period.
👉 The Invention of the Social? Debating the Scope of Politics in the Greek Polis
How were #maps produced in the 16th century? Zoltán Biedermann compares maps of the #Caspian Sea produced in #Goa and #Venice to propose "a '(dis)connected history' of knowledge production and consumption" where, beyond segmented flows of information, the Caspian proved to have very different meanings in different #mapmaking contexts.
They talk about Jewish political participation in Livorno, mapmaking in Goa and Venice, the commons in Italy and the Iberian Peninsula, and the Greek invention of the social out of the political sphere.
Our latest published issue is a special issue on social histories of #religion across the world. Although it is in French, two articles are already available in English: