פרסומים

Roger Ascham's Greek Isocrates records two decades of tutorials at the pinnacle of Tudor politics. At the Imperial court at Augsburg in the early 1550s, Ascham and Sir Richard Morison read ancient Athens into the Reformation, as they shaped the events unfolding around them. And almost twenty years later, just six weeks before his death, Ascham was invited back to Hampton Court for one last tutorial. As Elizabeth and her tutor read Isocrates on free speech, frank counsel, and intervention in foreign wars, an anxious faction of humanist courtiers was peering over Ascham's shoulder, desperate to influence their headstrong queen.

At opposite ends of Reformation Europe, Martin Luther and the Italian
Jewish theatre director Leone de’ Sommi both declare that the Jews
invented tragedy and the Greeks took the credit. How to explain this
unlikely alliance over a still unlikelier account of literary history? De’
Sommi was asserting the value of Jewish culture; Luther was mounting a
complex argument against the Catholic canon. De’ Sommi’s sources were
Talmudic, Luther’s patristic. Across geography, chronology, and faith,
tragedy served as a contested borderland, in which to probe the
boundaries between history and fiction, scripture and apocrypha, pagan,
Jew, and Christian.

How do voters respond to economic crises: do they turn against the incumbent, reward a certain political camp, polarize to the extremes, or perhaps continue to vote much like before? Analyzing extensive data on electorates, parties and individuals in 24 countries for over half a century, we document a systematic pattern whereby economic crises tend to disproportionately favor the right. Three main forces underlie this pattern. First, voters tend to decrease support for the party heading the government when the crisis erupts. Second, after crises voters tend to assign greater importance to issues typically owned by the right. Third, when center-right parties preside over a crisis, voters often drift further rightward to nationalist parties rather than defect to the left. The far-right thus serves as an effective vehicle for keeping the center-right in power even when facing post-crisis disaffection by its voters.