The present volume is the last in the Entangled Balkans series and marks the end of several years of research guided by the transnational, "entangled history" and histoire croisee approaches. The essays in this volume address theoretical and methodological issues of Balkan or Southeast European regional studies-not only questions of scholarly concepts, definitions, and approaches but also the extra-scholarly, ideological, political, and geopolitical motivations that underpin them. These issues are treated more systematically and by a presentation of their historical evolution in various national traditions and schools. Some of the essays deal with the articulation of certain forms of "Balkan heritage" in relation to the geographical spread and especially the cultural definition of the "Balkan area." Concepts and definitions of the Balkans are thus complemented by (self-)representations that reflect on their cultural foundations.

CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2016 Food and Health in Early Modern Europe is both a history of food practices and a history of the medical discourse about that food. It is also an exploration of the interaction between the two: the relationship between evolving foodways and shifting medical advice on what to eat in order to stay healthy. It provides the first in-depth study of printed dietary advice covering the entire early modern period, from the late-15th century to the early-19th; it is also the first to trace the history of European foodways as seen through the prism of this advice. David Gentilcore offers a doctor's-eye view of changing food and dietary fashions: from Portugal to Poland, from Scotland to Sicily, not forgetting the expanding European populations of the New World. In addition to exploring European regimens throughout the period, works of materia medica, botany, agronomy and horticulture are considered, as well as a range of other printed sources, such as travel accounts, cookery books and literary works. The book also includes 30 illustrations, maps and extensive chapter bibliographies with web links included to further aid study. Food and Health in Early Modern Europe is the essential introduction to the relationship between food, health and medicine for history students and scholars alike.

`A shepstar's (dressmaker) son, hatched in Gutter lane', Davis became an Oxford scholar, a skilled mathematician. The story might have ended there, teaching at the University or schoolmastering. Instead he became a soldier and follower of the Earl of Essex and lost everything when he joined him in rebellion. He saved his life by turning government supergrass and in the process destroyed Essex's line of defence. His rehabilitation was tortuous, but he died a country gentleman. The book casts new light on the plotting that preceded the rebellion of 1601 and on the examinations and trial that followed it. It also describes the military career of a middle-ranking officer, who was a `conformable' Catholic, finally distinguishing him from so many others of the same name. Roger Ashley, like Davis, graduated from Worcester College (then Gloucester Hall) and has found Sir John persistently invading his spare time since postgraduate days.

In The Martyrs of Japan, Rady Roldan-Figueroa examines the role that Catholic missionary orders played in the dissemination of accounts of Christian martyrdom in Japan. The work combines several historiographical approaches, including publication history, history of missions, and "new" institutional history. The author offers an overarching portrayal of the writing, printing, and circulation of books of 'Japano-martyrology.' The book is organized into two parts. The first part, "Spirituality of Writing, Publication History, and Japano-martyrology," addresses topics ranging from the historical background of Christianity in Japan to the publishers of Japano-martyrology. The second part, "Jesuits, Discalced Franciscans, and the Production of Japano-martyrology in the Early Modern Spanish World," features closer analysis of selected works of Japano-martyrology by Jesuit and Discalced Franciscan writers.

Early modern travelers often did not form part of classic 'diaspora' communities: they frequently never really settled, perhaps remaining abroad for some time in one place, then traveling further; not 'blown by the wind,' but by changing and complex conditions that often turned out to make them unwelcome anywhere. The dispersed developed strategies of survival by keeping their distance from old and new temporary 'homes,' as well as by using information from and manipulating foreign representations of their former countries. This volume assembles case studies from the Mediterranean context, the Americas and Japan. They explore what kind of 'power(s)' and agency dispersed people had, counterintuitively, through the connections they maintained with their former homes, and through those they established abroad. Contributors: Eduardo Angione, Iordan Avramov, Marloes Cornelissen, David Do Paco, Jose Luis Egio, Maria-Tsampika Lampitsi, Paula Manstetten, Simon Mills, David Nelson, Adolfo Polo y La Borda, Ana M. Rodriguez-Rodriguez, Cesare Santus, Stefano Saracino, and Cornel Zwierlein.

Analyzing the literature on art from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, The Spiritual Language of Art explores the complex relationship between visual art and spiritual experiences during the Italian Renaissance. Though scholarly research on these writings has predominantly focused on the influence of classical literature, this study reveals that Renaissance authors consistently discussed art using terms, concepts and metaphors derived from spiritual literature. By examining these texts in the light of medieval sources, greater insight is gained on the spiritual nature of the artist's process and the reception of art. Offering a close re-readings of many important writers (Alberti, Leonardo, Vasari, etc.), this study deepens our understanding of attitudes toward art and spirituality in the Italian Renaissance.

This volume uses a biography-as-history approach to illuminate the interconnectedness of the peoples of the Americas, West Africa, and Europe. Contributors highlight individuals' and people's experiences made possible by their participation in the creation of an Atlantic world, where conflict, cooperation, neccessity and invention led to new societies and cultures. Composed of chapters that span a broad chronological, topical and thematic range, Atlantic Biographies highlights the uniqueness of the Atlantic as a social, political, economic, and cultural theater bound together to illustrate what the Atlantic meant to those subjects of each chapter. This is a book about people, their resilience, and their resolve to carve a niche or have a broader impact in the ever-changing world around them.

Searching for Compromise? is a collection of articles researching the issues of toleration, interreligious peace and models of living together in a religiously diverse Central and Eastern Europe during the Early Modern period. By studying theologians, legal cases, literature, individuals, and congregations this volume brings forth unique local dynamics in Central and Eastern Europe. Scholars and researchers will find these issues explored from the perspectives of diverse groups of Christians such as Catholics, Hussies, Bohemian Brethren, Old Believers, Eastern Orthodox, Lutherans, Calvinists, Moravians and Unitarians. The volume is a much-needed addition to the scholarly books written on these issues from the Western European perspective. Contributors are Kazimierz Bem, Wolfgang Breul, Jan Cervenka, Slawomir Koscielak, Melchior Jakubowski, Bryan D. Kozik, Uladzimir Padalinski, Maciej Ptaszynski, Luise Schorn-Schutte, Alexander Schunka, Paul Shore, Stephan Steiner, Bogumil Szady, and Christopher Voigt-Goy.

Cette etude s'inscrit dans un courant de pensee tres actuel: la recherche d'un nouvel equilibre entre hommes et femmes provoque toute une efflorescence d'ouvrages et d'articles sur la question feminine, renouvelant en quelque sorte la 'Querelle des femmes'. Les dix-septieme et dix-huitieme siecles ont ete, depuis l'essor de la preciosite jusqu'a la Revolution, un moment d'intense reflexion sur la feminite. Cette enquete permet de mieux saisir les enjeux du debat contemporain: elle ne constitue pas un travail litteraire tourne vers le passe, mais surtout un travail qui est conscience accrue du present. Susceptible d'interesser tous ceux qui travaillent sur l'ecriture feminine, l'ouvrage s'interroge sur le statut de la femme dans la litterature utopique francaise de 1675 a 1795. Car l'existence meme de la femme est problematique en terre utopique: alors qu'on aurait pu penser que l'equilibre du classicisme conjugue a l'elan des Lumieres eut permis a la litterature utopique d'inventer une place progressiste a la femme dans une societe donnee, le feminin demeure le 'sexe second' - mere ou amante - selon l'expression de Retif de La Bretonne, voire disparait en tant que personne, absorbe par le masculin des etres androgynes crees par Foigny ou Casanova. Seules les marges de l'utopie narrative classique avec Sade et sa societe de bohemiens, ou l'utopie 'experimentale' de Du Laurens, Imirce ou la Fille de la nature, parviennent a effacer la part d'ombre qui recouvre la feminite. Un statut plus lumineux lui est alors offert, qui tend a abolir le conflit, constant en utopie, entre liberte individuelle ou recherche personnelle du bonheur, et gestion rationnelle et collective d'une societe. De ce fait, la feminite s'elabore en critique du systeme utopique dont elle indique le degre d'instabilite: l'etude des mythes qui sous-tendent l'imaginaire utopique est particulierement revelatrice de ce processus. L'enquete s'appuie prioritairement sur les utopies narratives de Foigny, Fenelon, Prevost, Rousseau, Casanova et Sade, theatrales de Marivaux, programmatiques de Retif et 'experimentale' de Du Laurens. Mais ce corpus implique des comparaisons avec d'autres utopies, comme celles de Veiras, de Diderot, ce qui fait du present ouvrage la premiere etude d'ensemble sur la femme dans les utopies francaises des dix-septieme et dix-huitieme siecles.

The Oxford Handbook of the Age of Shakespeare presents a broad sampling of current historical scholarship on the period of Shakespeare's career that will assist and stimulate scholars of his poems and plays. Rather than merely attempting to summarize the historical 'background' to Shakespeare, individual chapters seek to exemplify a wide variety of perspectives and methodologies currently used in historical research on the early modern period that can inform close analysis of literature. Different sections examine political history at both the national and local levels; relationships between intellectual culture and the early modern political imagination; relevant aspects of religious and social history; and facets of the histories of architecture, the visual arts and music. Topics treated include the emergence of an early modern 'public sphere' and its relationship to drama during Shakespeare's lifetime; the role of historical narratives in shaping the period's views on the workings of politics; attitudes about the role of emotion in social life; cultures of honour and shame and the rituals and literary forms through which they found expression; crime and murder; and visual expressions of ideas of moral disorder and natural monstrosity, in printed images as well as garden architecture.

Based on the discovery of an unknown Latin manuscript, Maria Petyt - A Carmelite Mystic in Wartime provides surprising new information about the seventeenth century Flemish mystic Maria Petyt (1623-1677) who wrote many letters to her spiritual director, Michael of St. Augustine. The book contains a transcription of the (unfortunately partly damaged) manuscript, an English translation of it, and several articles opening up new horizons concerning the life and spirituality of Maria Petyt and her historical and religious backgrounds. The authors characterize Maria Petyt as a self-confident spiritual daughter with a strong political mission, a zealous figure fighting side by side with Louis XIV for the catholic victory during the Dutch War, and as one who lived and profoundly understood the spirituality of Teresa of Avila.

Improvement was a new concept in seventeenth-century England; only then did it become usual for people to think that the most effective way to change things for the better was not a revolution or a return to the past, but the persistent application of human ingenuity to the challenge of increasing the country's wealth and general wellbeing. Improvements in agriculture and industry, commerce and social welfare, would bring infinite prosperity and happiness. The word improvement was itself a recent coinage. It was useful as a slogan summarising all these goals, and since it had no equivalent in other languages, it gave the English a distinctive culture of improvement that they took with them to Ireland and Scotland, and to their possessions overseas. It made them different from everyone else. The Invention of Improvement explains how this culture of improvement came about. Paul Slack explores the political and economic circumstances which allowed notions of improvement to take root, and the changes in habits of mind which improvement accelerated. It encouraged innovation, industriousness, and the acquisition of consumer goods which delivered comfort and pleasure. There was a new appreciation of material progress as a process that could be measured, and its impact was publicised by the circulation of information about it. It had made the country richer and many of its citizens more prosperous, if not always happier. Drawing on a rich variety of contemporary literature, The Invention of Improvement situates improvement at the centre of momentous changes in how people thought and behaved, how they conceived of their environment and their collective prospects, and how they cooperated in order to change them.

This absorbing account of Catholic and anti-Catholic plots and machinations at the English, French, and exiled Scottish courts in the latter part of the sixteenth century is a sequel to John Bossy's highly acclaimed Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair. It tells the story of an espionage operation in Elizabethan London that was designed to find out what side France would take in the hostilities between Protestant England and the Catholic powers of Europe. France was a Catholic country whose king was nonetheless hostile to Spanish and papal aggression, Bossy explains, but the king's sister-in-law, Mary Queen of Scots, in custody in England since 1568, was a magnet for Catholic activists, and the French ambassador in London, Michel de Castelnau, was of uncertain leanings. Bossy relates how Queen Elizabeth's Secretary of State, Sir Francis Walsingham, found a mole in Castelnau's household establishment, who passed information to someone in Walsingham's employ. Bossy discovers the identity of these persons, what items of intelligence were passed over, and what the English government decided to do with the information. He describes how individuals were arrested or fled, a political crisis occurred, an ambassador was expelled, deals were made. He concludes with a discussion of the authenticity of Elizabethan secret operations, arguing that they were not theatrical devices to prop up an unpopular regime but were a response to genuine threats of counter-revolution inspired by Catholic zeal.

Natural History in Early Modern France offers a longue duree account of recurring poetic structures of the genre through case studies spanning from the Renaissance to the eve of the nineteenth century. These case studies reveal the lasting epistemic importance of bookish knowledge and commonplacing in the natural-historical description from Belon to Buffon. They also highlight the French reception of Baconianism. Natural History in Early Modern France makes a case for the literary status of the genre by attending to the permanence of its 'Plinian' features, such as wonders. Natural history was not only concerned with increasingly rational modes of ordering natural particulars: this book reveals its enduring social, affective, spiritual, and aesthetic underpinnings. Contributors are: Peter Anstey, Susan Broomhall, Isabelle Charmantier, Arlette Fruet, Raphaele Garrod, Paul Gibbard, Dana Jalobeanu, Myriam Marrache-Gouraud, Stephane Schmitt, Paul J. Smith, and Stephane Van Damme.

Jacob Boehme's Aurora (Morgen Roete im auffgang, 1612) exercised a vast open or underground influence on popular and mystical religion, poetry, and philosophy from Germany to England to Russia. This beautiful and highly original work containing elements of alchemical, esoteric, and anticlerical thought is a portal to the cultural, scientific, and theological currents on the eve of the Thirty Years' War. Its author heralded the new heliocentrism, opposed intolerance and religious conflict, and entertained an ecstatic vision of order reconciled with freedom. This first modern English translation places the translated text opposite an edition of the German manuscript from the author's own hand. Also included is the brief, influential Fundamental Report (Grundlicher Bericht, 1620) in a critical edition and translation. An extensive commentary that cites documents of the time offers access to the sources of Boehme's themes and concepts.

The twenty studies collected in this volume focus on the transition from the Middle Ages to the modern world. The method leads from technical investigations on William Durant the Younger (ca. 1266-1330) and Hermann Conring (1606-1681) through reflection on the nature of historical knowledge to a break with historicism, an affirmation of anachronism, and a broad perspective on the history of Europe. The introduction explains when and why these studies were written, and places them in the context of contemporary historical thinking by drawing on Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. This book will appeal to historians with an interest in historical theory, historians of late medieval and early modern Europe, and students looking for the meaning of history.

After the State and the Church, the most well organized membership system of medieval and early modern Europe was the confraternity. In cities, towns, and villages it would have been difficult for someone not to be a member of a confraternity, the recipient of its charity, or aware of its presence in the community. In A Companion to Medieval and Early Modern Confraternities, Konrad Eisenbichler brings together an international group of scholars to examine confraternities from various perspectives: their origins and development, their devotional practices, their charitable activities, and their contributions to literature, music, and art. The result is a picture of confraternities as important venues for the acquisition of spiritual riches, material wealth, and social capital. Contributors to this volume: Alyssa Abraham, Davide Adamoli, Christopher F. Black, Dominika Burdzy, David D'Andrea, Konrad Eisenbichler, Anna Esposito, Federica Francesconi, Marina Gazzini, Jonathan Glixon, Colm Lennon, William R. Levin, Murdo J. MacLeod, Nerida Newbigin, Dylan Reid, Gervase Rosser, Nicholas Terpstra, Paul Trio, Anne-Laure Van Bruaene, Beata Wojciechowska, and Danilo Zardin.