At a glance:
Cambridge Companions Online - Complete Collection
Cambridge Companions are a series of authoritative guides, written by leading experts, offering lively, accessible introductions to major writers, artists, philosophers, topics, and periods.
Collection in action:
Students in Professor Gregory Crane's Introduction to Digital Humanities course are using digital methodologies to explore and find meaningful patterns in Edward Gibbon's iconic and massive Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. This text was originally published in 6 large volumes and covers nearly 15 centuries of history. If that text isn't large enough, scholarship on Gibbon is even more vast. Professor Crane and his students needed a guide to help them wade through so much material.
Here is where The Cambridge Companion to Edward Gibbon comes in. This relatively slim volume contains several stand alone essays each of which provides a useful high-level overview of a topic related to Edward Gibbon. These essays are a snapshot of where modern scholarship stands on a given topic. For this reason, students were able to quickly get up to speed on a previously unknown subject. This allowed them to test their interpretations of Gibbon against scholarly consensus.
So, if you need to get caught up on a subject quickly, whether it is the Rolling Stones, early American literature, or the philosophy of Spinoza, browse through Cambridge Collections Online to see what you might find.
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