Mark Salber Phillips

Drawing on Marco Parenti's "Memoir" (a public history), private letters, and ricordanze (diaries), Phillips describes the world of this fifteenth-century Florentine patrician.

"The essays in this volume deal in diverse ways with the complexities of cultural transmission and collectively ask, what is tradition when it is not invented? The first essays, rooted in anthropology, art history, and museum studies, are grounded in real case studies that help to challenge and inform the more abstract discussions in the second half of the book devoted, broadly, to intellectual history, philosophy, and politics. Until now, there has been no concerted attempt to put the various disciplines in conversation with one another around the problem of tradition. Combining discussions of the idea of tradition by major scholars from a variety of disciplines with synoptic, synthesizing essays, Questions of Tradition will initiate a renewal of interest in this subject."--BOOK JACKET.

Conceptions of distance are foundational to historical thought but Mark Salber Phillips gives the idea new subtlety and meaning. He argues that distance is a matter not just of time and space but also of form, affect, ideology, and understanding.