From Michael Pollan to locavores, from Whole Foods to farmers' markets nationwide, cooks and foodies today are paying more attention than ever to the history of the food they bring into their kitchens-and especially to vegetables. Whether it's an heirloom tomato, curled cabbage, or succulent squash,[...]

Before the end of the thirteenth century, theologians had little interest in demons, but with Thomas Aquinas and his formidable "Treatise on Evil" in 1272, everything changed. In "Satan the Heretic, " Alain Boureau trains his skeptical eye not on Satan or Satanism, but on the birth of demonology and[...]

For more than a thousand years, Byzantium flourished at the crossroads of the Eastern and Western worlds. But who were the people of the first modern civilized state? What features distinguished them from earlier civilizations, and what cultural characteristics, despite their multi-ethnic origins, m[...]

Slavery, the State, and Islam looks at slavery as the foundation of power and the state in the Muslim world. Closely examining major theological and literary Islamic texts, it challenges traditional approaches to the subject. Servitude was a foundation for the construction of the new state on the Ar[...]