This volume investigates the various ways in which writers comment on, present, and defend their own works, and at the same time themselves, across early modern Europe. A multiplicity of self-commenting modes, ranging from annotations to explicatory prose to prefaces to separate critical texts and exemplifying a variety of literary genres, are subjected to analysis. Self-commentaries are more than just an external apparatus: they direct and control reception of the primary text, thus affecting notions of authorship and readership. With the writer understood as a potentially very influential and often tendentious interpreter of their own work, the essays in this collection offer new perspectives on pre-modern and modern forms of critical self-consciousness, self-representation, and self-validation. Contributors are Harriet Archer, Gilles Bertheau, Carlo Caruso, Jeroen De Keyser, Russell Ganim, Joseph Harris, Ian Johnson, Richard Maber, Martin McLaughlin, John O'Brien, Magdalena Ozarska, Federica Pich, Brian Richardson, Els Stronks, and Colin Thompson.

Robin Raybould's Hieroglyph, Emblem and Renaissance Pictography is the first English translation of Ludwig Volkmann's Bilderschriften der Renaissance, the classic text which promoted the symbol as a defining cultural and literary characteristic of early modern Europe. Volkmann enumerates and describes many of the works which illustrated the contemporary obsession with hieroglyph, emblem and device, particularly those from France and Germany, thus complementing Karl Giehlow's earlier Hieroglyphenkunde on the subject. Volkmann's book highlights both Renaissance theories of the image as language and the symbol as an aid to an understanding of the meaning of life and the nature of God. Raybould's translation has been described as elegant, admirable and impeccable and includes an introduction, extensive notes and several additional essays on topics relevant to the field.

An amazing woman from Bourne, Collyweston and Maxey who had a profound impact on history but has been virtually forgotten in our Lincolnshire locality. Read tales of her survival from the traumatic birth of her son (Henry VII) when aged only thirteen, her ever-changing fortunes in the Wars of the Roses, being condemned as a traitor by Richard III and her eventual triumph, which saw her become the matriarch of the Tudor dynasty. As the only blood link from the Normans to our present Royal Family (documented here), her legacy through her symbols and academia is still far-reaching today.

Women, fashion, consumption, luxury, and education are the main subjects of our researchers. The contributors of this volume accompanied women and objects in their travels across Modern Europe and offered thorough and diverse analyses connecting the circulation of people with the circulation of ideas. Making use of archive materials, visual sources and museum collections, the authors point out the richness of the region and the role of women in promoting new ideas of modernity. This will help the public to better know and understand the importance of women's sociability in building new nations and constructing new identities in South-Eastern Europe and beyond.

Based on consilia and decisiones, Wouter Druwe studies the multinormative framework on loans and credit in the Golden Ages of Antwerp and Amsterdam (c. 1500-1680). He analyzes the use of a wide variety of legal financial techniques in the Low Countries, such as money lending and the taking of interest, the constitution of annuities, cession and delegation, bearer bonds, bills of exchange, partnerships, and representation in financial affairs, as well as the consequences of monetary fluctuations. Special attention is paid to how the transregional European system of learned Roman and canon law (ius commune) was applied in daily 'learned legal practice'. The study also deals with the prohibition against usury and with the impact of moral theology on legal debates.

In an era when women were supposed to be disciplined and obedient, Anna proved to be neither. Defying 16th-century social mores, she was the frequent subject of gossip because of her immodest dress and flirtatious behavior. When her wealthy father discovered that she was having secret, simultaneous affairs with a young nobleman and a cavalryman, he turned her out of the house in rage, but when she sued him for financial support, he had her captured, returned home and chained to a table as punishment. Anna eventually escaped and continued her suit against her father, her siblings and her home town in a bitter legal battle that was to last 30 years and end only upon her death.

Drawn from her surviving love letters and court records, The Burgermeister's Daughter is a fascinating examination of the politics of sexuality, gender and family in the 16th century, and a powerful testament to the courage and tenacity of a woman who defied the inequalities of this distant age.

The English Bible in the Early Modern World addresses the most significant book available in the English language in the centuries after the Reformation, and investigates its impact on popular religion and reading practices, and on theology, religious controversy and intellectual history between 1530 and 1700. Individual chapters discuss the responses of both clergy and laity to the sacred text, with particular emphasis on the range of settings in which the Bible was encountered and the variety of responses prompted by engagement with the Scriptures. Particular attention is given to debates around the text and interpretation of the Bible, to an emerging Protestant understanding of Scripture and to challenges it faced over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

In With Eyes and Ears Open: The Role of Visitors in the Society of Jesus, twelve historians examine important visitations in the history of the Society. After a thorough investigation of the nature and role of the "visitor" in Jesuit rules and regulations, ten visitations of missions and provinces-from Peru in the sixteenth century, to Ireland in the seventeenth, to the Zambesi mission and Australia in the twentieth-are considered. Visitors, appointed by the superior general in Rome, surveyed the situation for fidelity to the Jesuit way of life, resolved any problems, and recommended future paths, often to the disapproval of Jesuit hosts. One contribution concerns the canonical visitation of the non-Jesuit Francis Saldanha da Gama in 1758, which resulted in the expulsion of the Jesuits from Portugal in 1759.

In these stormy times, voices from all fronts call for change. But what kind of revolution brings true freedom to both society and the human soul? Cultural observer Os Guinness explores the nature of revolutionary faith, contrasting between secular revolutions such as the French Revolution and the faith-led revolution of ancient Israel. He argues that the story of Exodus is the highest, richest, and deepest vision for freedom in human history. It serves as the master story of human freedom and provides the greatest sustained critique of the abuse of power. His contrast between "Paris" and "Sinai" offers a framework for discerning between two kinds of revolution and their different views of human nature, equality, and liberty. Drawing on the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, Guinness develops Exodus as the Magna Carta of humanity, with a constructive vision of a morally responsible society of independent free people who are covenanted to each other and to justice, peace, stability, and the common good of the community. This is the model from the past that charts our path to the future. "There are two revolutionary faiths bidding to take the world forward," Guinness writes. "There is no choice facing America and the West that is more urgent and consequential than the choice between Sinai and Paris. Will the coming generation return to faith in God and to humility, or continue to trust in the all sufficiency of Enlightenment reason, punditry, and technocracy? Will its politics be led by principles or by power?" While Guinness cannot predict our ultimate fate, he warns that we must recognize the crisis of our time and debate the issues openly. As individuals and as a people, we must choose between the revolutions, between faith in God and faith in Reason alone, between freedom and despotism, and between life and death.