So far, the body of work on the American Enlightenment has focused almost exclusively on two areas - politics and religion. In contrast, scholars have paid little attention to the polyglot efforts of American doctors, scientists, engineers, botanists, poets and other Enlightenment actor. This work fills this significant gap.

This book uncovers medieval and early modern examples of unions and divisions from western, central, eastern and south-eastern Europe. It provides case studies, especially from central and eastern Europe, giving students a range of accessible examples which they may be unfamiliar with. Unions and Divisions offers assessments of each union to provide an understanding for students and researchers of the political and social forces involved in the respective countries. It also investigates how the unions were reflected in contemporary literature (pamphlets, memoranda, chronicles, diaries etc.) and propaganda, in legal and historical discourses. It therefore provides the political as well as the social and cultural implications on these unions. Provides a comprehensive and engaging account with a variety of topics aimed at upper level students and researchers of personal unions, composite monarchies and multiple rule in premodern Europe uncovering how this diplomatic solution was adopted by a range of monarchies in this period.

During the mid-seventeenth century, the Stuart dynasty faced revolution in their three kingdoms - Scotland, Ireland and England - which was marked by constitutional defiance, civil war, regecide, republicanism and the eventual restoration of monarchy. Opposition in all three kingdoms to the Stuarts as an imperial dynasty drew upon and shaped different perceptions of Britain. Allan Macinnes' wider contextualising of a British revolution - which challenges the anglocentric dominance of British History - takes account of apocalyptic visions, baronial politics and commercial networks, as well as confessional allegiances, representative images and written texts. This comprehensive survey is essential reading for all those studying this period of political crisis, which ultimately contributed to the definition of both the national interest of England and the national survival of Scotland and Ireland.

Making Women Martyrs in Tudor England examines the portrayal of Protestant women martyrs in Tudor martyrology, focusing mainly on John Foxe's Book of Martyrs . Foxe's women martyrs often defy not just ecclesiastically and politically powerful men; they often defy their husbands by chastising them, disobeying them, and even leaving them altogether. While by marrying his female martyrs to Christ Foxe mitigates their subversion of patriarchy, under his pen his heroic women challenge the foundations of social and political order, offering an accessible model for resistance to antichristian rule.

The Sciences of Homosexuality in Early Modern Europe investigates early modern scientific accounts of same-sex desires and the shapes they assumed in everyday life. It explores the significance of those representations and interpretations from around 1450 to 1750, long before the term homosexuality was coined and accrued its current range of cultural meanings.

This collection establishes that efforts to produce scientific explanations for same-sex desires and sexual behaviors are not a modern invention, but have long been characteristic of European thought. The sciences of antiquity had posited various types of same-sexual affinities rooted in singular natures. These concepts were renewed, elaborated, and reassessed from the late medieval scientific revival to the early Enlightenment. The deviance of such persons was interpreted as outwardly inscribed upon their bodies, documented in treatises and case studies. It was attributed to diverse inborn causes such as distinctive anatomies or physiologies, and embryological, astrological, or temperamental factors.

This original book freshly illuminates many of the questions that are current today about the nature of homosexual activity and reveals how the early modern period and its scientific interpretations of same-sex relationships are fundamental to understanding the conceptual development of contemporary sexuality.

Arguing on recent cognitive evidence that reading a Bible is much more difficult for human brains than seeing images, this book exposes the depth and breadth of Protestant theologians' misunderstandings about how people could reform their spiritual lives - how they could literally change their minds. Shakespeare's achievement, accomplished for the English stage by a translation of the Italian grotesque, was to display for audiences battered by years of religious chaos and dread that a loving God was not only in heaven but in full control on earth: His providence was embodied and visible: you didn't have to read it.

Examining the development of a secular, purely material conception of human beings in the early Enlightenment, Bodies of Thought provides a fresh perspective on the intellectual culture of this period, and challenges certain influential interpretations of irreligious thought and the 'Radical Enlightenment'. Beginning with the debate on the soul in England, in which political and religious concerns were intertwined, and ending with the eruption of materialism onto the public stage in mid-eighteenth-century France, Ann Thomson looks at attempts to explain how the material brain thinks without the need for an immaterial and immortal soul. She shows how this current of thinking fed into the later eighteenth-century 'Natural History of Man', the earlier roots of which have been overlooked by many scholars. Although much attention has been paid to the atheistic French materialists, their link to the preceding period has been studied only partially, and the current interest in what is called the 'Radical Enlightenment' has served to obscure rather than enlighten this history. By bringing out the importance of both Protestant theological debates and medical thinking in England, and by following the different debates on the soul in Holland and France, this book shows that attempts to find a single coherent strand of radical irreligious thought running through the early Enlightenment, coming to fruition in the second half of the eighteenth century, ignore the multiple channels which composed Enlightenment thinking.

This book examines the lives, careers, and publications of a group of Spanish Renaissance surgeons as exemplars of both the surgical renaissance occurring across Europe and of the unique context of Spain. In the sixteenth century, European surgeons forged new identities as learned experts who combined university medical degrees with manual skills and practical experience. No longer merely apprentice-trained craftsmen engaged only with healing the exterior wounds and rashes of the body, these learned surgeons actively engaged with the epistemic shifts of the sixteenth century, including new forms of knowledge construction, based in empiricism, and knowledge circulation, based in printing. These surgeons have long been overshadowed by the innovative work of anatomists and botanists but were participants in the same intellectual currents reshaping many aspects of knowledge. Active in communities across both Castile and Aragon, learned surgeons formed an intellectual community of practitioners and scholars who helped reshape surgical knowledge and practice. This book provides an overview of the Spanish learned surgeons, known as medicos y cirujanos, who were influential in universities, on battlefields, at court, and in private practice. It argues that the surgeons' larger significance rests in their collective identity as part of the broader intellectual shift to empiricism and innovation of the Renaissance. Renaissance Surgeons: Learning and Expertise in the Age of Print is essential reading for upper-level students and scholars of the history of medicine and early modern Spain.

The setting for the studies collected here is the West-Eurasian steppe region, extending from present-day Kazakhstan through southern Russia, Ukraine and Moldavia to the Carpathian Basin. The first articles deal with pre-Mongol, Turkic peoples of the region and their relations with the Byzantine Empire to the south, but the core of the volume is the history of the Golden Horde and its successor states, such as the Kazan and Crimean Khanates, whose Turco-Mongol overlords are often referred to as Tatars. These played a decisive role in the history of Western Central Asia and Eastern Europe in the 13th-16th centuries and had a fundamental influence on the rise of the Russian state. Particular articles look at Mongol institutions and terminology, others at the interaction of the medieval Tatar and Russian worlds.

Drawing extensively on the author's archival research in Spain, this book is the first major study in English of the first three and a half centuries in Spain of a people, its gypsies or "gitanos," who, despite their elevation by Spaniards and non-Spaniards alike to culturally iconic status in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, have until now remained largely invisible to history in the English-speaking world.

Salvaging Spenser is a major new work of literary revision which places Edmund Spenser's corpus, from The Shepheardes Calender to A View of the Present State of Ireland, within an elaborate cultural and political context. The author refuses to engage in the sterile opposition between apology and attack that has marred studies of Spenser and Ireland, seeking neither to savage nor to save, but rather, in a project of critical recovery, to salvage Spenser from the wreckage of Irish history.

The primary focus of this collection by leading medieval historians is the laity, in particular the ideas and ideals of lay people. The contributors explore lay attitudes as expressed in legal cases, charters, chronicles and collective activities. Highlights the centrality of kinship, whilst stressing its limitations as an all purpose social bond. Ranges chronologically and geographically from the seventh century to the eve of the Reformation, from Western Britain to papal and urban Italy, from Carolingian dynastic politics to the decline of medieval pilgrimage in the sixteenth century, and from the courts of twelfth-century France to the fifteenth-century wards of London. -- .

This detailed study of the parish clergy in England on the Eve of the break with Rome is based on a wide variety of documentary sources, both ecclesiastical and secular, ranging from diocesan records to sworn evidence offered in litigation and acc

This book examines on an analytical basis the system of international relations between 1648 and 1815. It considers the character of the states, their principal foreign policy goals and the beliefs that influences their relations. The author seeks on this basis to examine the character of the system as a whole: in particular how from the proclaimed desire to maintain the 'balance of power' it succeeded in establishing international stability in preventing the domination of particular states.

While it lasted only sixteen months, King Philip's War (1675-1676) was arguably one of the most significant of the colonial wars that wracked early America. As the first major military crisis to directly strike one of the Empire's most important possessions: the Massachusetts Bay Colony, King Philip's War marked the first time that Massachusetts had to mobilize mass numbers of ordinary, local men to fight. In this exhaustive social history and community study of Essex County, Massachusetts's militia, Kyle F. Zelner boldly challenges traditional interpretations of who was called to serve during this period.

Drawing on muster and pay lists as well as countless historical records, Zelner demonstrates that Essex County's more upstanding citizens were often spared from impressments, while the "rabble" -- criminals, drunkards, the poor-- were forced to join active fighting units, with town militia committees selecting soldiers who would be least missed should they die in action. Enhanced by illustrations and maps, A Rabble in Arms shows that, despite heroic illusions of a universal military obligation, town fathers, to damaging effects, often placed local and personal interests above colonial military concerns.

For introductory World or Global history classes, especially those that cover the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries; upper-division courses on global imperialism in the modern era. Imperialism in the Modern World combines narrative, primary and secondary sources, and visual documents to examine global relations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The three co-editors, Professors Bowman, Chiteji, and Greene, have taught for many years global history classes in a variety of institutions. They wrote Imperialism in the Modern World to solve the problem of allowing teachers to combine primary and secondary texts easily and systematically to follow major themes in global history (some readers use primary materials exclusively. Some focus on secondary arguments). This book is more focused than other readers on the markets for those teachers who are offering more specialized world history courses--one important trend in global history is away from simply trying to cover everything to teaching real connections in more chronologically and thematically focused courses. invites students to study seriously world history from a critical framework. Too many readers offer a smorgasbord approach to world history that leaves students dazed and confused. This reader avoids that approach and will therefore solve many problems that teachers have in constructing and teaching world history courses at the introductory or upper-division levels. The reader will allow show students how to read historical documents through a hands-on demonstration in the introduction. The book also incorporates images as visual documents. Finally, the book conceives of global history in the widest possible terms; it contains pieces on political, diplomatic, economic, and military history, to be sure, but it also has selections on technology, medicine, women, the environment, social changes, and cultural patterns. Other readers can not match this text's breadth because they are chronologically and thematically so extended.

What was the relationship between power and the public sphere in early modern society? How did the printed media inform this relationship? Contributors to this volume address those questions by examining the interaction of print and power in France and England during the 'hand-press period'. Four interconnected and overlapping themes emerge from these studies, showing the essential historical and contextual considerations shaping the strategies both of power and of those who challenged it via the written word during this period. The first is reading and control, which examines the relationship between institutional power and readers, either as individuals or as a group. A second is propaganda on behalf of institutional power, and the ways in which such writings engage with the rhetorics of power and their reception. The Academy constitutes a third theme, in which contributors explore the economic and political implications of publishing in the context of intellectual elites. The last theme is clientism and faction, which examines the competing political discourses and pressures which influenced widely differing forms of publication. From these articles there emerges a global view of the relationship between print and power, which takes the debate beyond the narrowly theoretical to address fundamental questions of how print sought to challenge, or reinforce, existing power-structures, both from within and from without.

A fresh approach to the English civil war, War in England 1642-1649 focuses on answering a misleadingly simple question: what kind of war was it to live through? Eschewing descriptions of specific battles or analyses of political and religious developments, Barbara Donagan examines the 'texture' of war, addressing questions such as: what did Englishmen and women believe about war and know about its practice before 1642? What were the conditions in which a soldier fought - for example, how efficient was his musket (not very), and how did he know where he was going (much depended on the reliability of scouts and spies)? What were the rules that were supposed to govern conduct in war, and how were they enforced (by a combination of professional peer pressure and severe but discretionary army discipline and courts martial)? What were the officers and men of the armies like, and how well did they fight?
The book deals even-handedly with royalists and parliamentarians, examining how much they had in common, as well as discussing the points on which they differed. It looks at the intimacy of this often uncivil war, in which enemies fought at close quarters, spoke the same language and had often been acquainted before the war began, just as they had often known the civilians who suffered their presence. A final section on two sieges illustrates these themes in practice over extended periods, and also demonstrates the integration of military and civilian experience in a civil war.
Drawing extensively on primary sources, Donagan's study illuminates the human cost of war and its effect on society, both in our own day as well as in the seventeenth century.

In these classic works, now reissued by Routledge, Professor Jordan studies the origins of modern social and cultural institutions in England. He is concerned with the momentous shift which occurred in men's aspirations for their society in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as reflected in the charities which were established by gifts and bequests. In a fascinating account of the measures taken by the Tudors and Stuarts to deal with the problem of poverty, Jordan concludes that it was principally dealt relieved by an immense outpouring of charitable wealth.

'This is a fascinating and very important book on conflicts and their resolution (or attempted resolution) within early Stuart London Puritanism. It has vital things to say about the complexity and contradictory potentials within Puritanism divinity and Puritan milieux. It challenges a variety of simple notions about Puritanism as either consensual/establishment/mainstream or extremist/unpopular, by analyzing a series of conflicts, encounters, and juxtapositions amongst London Puritans. At its heart are remarkable individuals vividly portrayed - the aggressive and paranoid Puritan minister Stephen Denison and the perhaps heretical box-maker Etherington.' Professor Paul Seaver, Stanford University This book is based on a story. Its main protagonists are a London clergyman, Stephen Denison, and a lay sectmaster and prophet, John Etherington. The dispute between the two men blew up in the mid-1620s, but its reverberations can be traced back to the 1590s and continued to 1640. Through Denison, the book analyses the tensions and contradictions within the 'religion of protestants' that dominated great swathes of the early Stuart church. Through Etherington, it eavesdrops on a London puritan underground that has remained largely hidden from view and which, while it was related to, indeed, parasitic upon, was not coterminous with, the order and orthodoxy-centred puritanism of Stephen Denison. By placing the Denison/Etherington dispute in its multiple contexts, the book becomes a study of puritan theology and intra-puritan theological dispute; of lay clerical relations and of the politics of the parish; and thus of the social history of parish and puritan religion in London. It also discusses the local effects of national theological/political events such as the rise of Laudianism and the Personal Rule of Charles I, finally analysing the long-term origins of the ideological cacophany of the 1640s.

This fascinating collection of essays written by renowned and emerging scholars of the early modern period explores the relationship between the extraordinary and the everyday to provide a greater understanding of and new insights into the mental and material worlds of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. By juxtaposing cases that struck early modern people as irregular or strange with things that they found perfectly usual, everyday matters such as household relationships, farting, drinking and exchanging insults are shown to reveal extraordinary aspects of early modern life, while seemingly exceptional events and beliefs -- such as those involving ghosts, prophecies, and cannibalism -- illuminate something of the routine experience of ordinary people. The contributions present not one worldview, nor adopt one way of approaching or illuminating the past. Rather, they demonstrate that categories such as the strange and the commonplace should be and were the subject of constant renegotiation, just as they are now.

This volume of original essays is designed to be of interest to students not only of Bunyan, but of the history, religion and literature of the seventeenth century

The essays in this volume contribute to a new understanding of the second half of the sixteenth century when England experienced the unprecedented rule of two successive queens regnant. Focusing on a diverse range of issues, from politics and personnel to ceremony and costume, and from a range of perspectives," Tudor Queenship" demonstrates that thinking about both queens at the same time can be highly suggestive, and propels us to revise, develop and understand, and to contextualize, traditional interpretations. From what Elizabeth learnt from Mary, assessments of political acumen and the significance of confessional differences this is the first volume to focus on both Mary and Elizabeth, and to consider them as Renaissance monarchs a European stage.