A full colour map showing London in about 1520 - its many churches, monasteries, legal inns, guild halls, and a large number of substantial private houses, in the context of the streets and alleyways that survived the Great Fire and can still be discovered. Dominating the city are the Tower of London in the east, the old St Paul's Cathedral in the west and London Bridge in the south. The city was largely contained within its medieval walls and ditches but shows signs of spilling out into the great metropolis it was destined to be. This is a second edition of a map first published in 2018, incorporating changes to the map as new information has become available. The map has been the Historic Towns Trust's number one best seller since publication and has been very well received. The new edition has a revised cover and illustrations.

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the establishment of the new Safavid regime in Iran. Along with reuniting the Persian lands under one rule, the Safavids initiated the radical transformation of the religious landscape by introducing Imami Shi'ism as the official state faith and in this as in other ways, laying the foundations of Iran's modern identity. In this book, leading scholars of Iranian history, culture and politics examine the meaning of the idea of Iran in the Safavid period by examining contemporary experiences of both insiders and outsiders, asking how modern scholarship defines the distinctive features of the age. While sometimes viewed as a period of decline from the high points of classical Persian literature and the visual arts of preceding centuries, the chapters of this book demonstrate that the Safavid era was nevertheless a period of great literary and artistic activity in the realms of both secular and theological endeavour. With the establishment of comparable polities across western, southern and central Asia at broadly the same time, the book explores some of the literary and political interactions with Iran's Ottoman, Mughal and Uzbek neighbours. As the volume and frequency of European merchants and diplomats visiting Safavid Persia increased, especially in the seventeenth century, and as more Iranians recorded their own travel experiences to surrounding Muslim lands, the Safavid period is the first in which we can document and explore the contours of Iran's place in an expanding world, and gain insights into how Iranians saw themselves and others saw them.

The Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) lies at the intersection of early modern and modern times. Frequently portrayed as the concluding chapter of the Reformation, it also points to the future by precipitating fundamental changes in the military, legal, political, religious, economic, and cultural arenas that came to mark a new, the modern era. Prompted by the 400th anniversary of the outbreak of the war, the contributors reconsider the event itself and contextualize it within the broader history of the Reformation, military conflicts, peace initiatives, and negotiations of war.

The Kunstkammer was a programmatic display of art and oddities amassed by wealthy Europeans during the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. These nascent museums reflected the ambitions of such thinkers as Descartes, Locke, and Kepler to unite the forces of nature with art and technology. Bredekamp advances a radical view that the baroque Kunstkammer is also the nucleus of modern cyberspace.

In The Emergence of Pastoral Authority in the French Reformed Church, c.1555-c.1572, Gianmarco Braghi offers a broad overview of the issues and ambiguities connected to the implementation of the authority of the first generation of Geneva-trained French Reformed pastors and of their implications for the character and identity of the early French Reformed movement at large, using them as a prism for historical analysis of the transition from loose evangelicalism to a nascent synodal-consistorial network of Reformed congregations scattered across the kingdom of France.

This collection of essays presents new insights into what shaped and constituted the Renaissance and early modern views of fate and fortune. It argues that these ideas were emblematic of a more fundamental argument about the self, society, and the universe and shows that their influence was more widespread, both geographically and thematically, than hitherto assumed.