This book is not designed to define the sacred. It is, rather, a bringing together of case histories (a rich, varied collection from medieval, early modern and nineteenth-century contexts in England and Wales) that goes beyond familiar paradigms to explore the dynamic, protean interaction, in different times and places, between sacred space and text. Essentially an interdisciplinary enterprise, it focuses a range of historical and critical methodologies on that complex process of transformation and transmission whereby spiritual intuitions, experiences and teachings are made palpable 'in art and architecture, poetry and prayer, in histories, scriptures and liturgies, even landscapes. So the sacred, variously constructed and inscribed, makes itself felt 'on the pulse'; is a presence, a voice even now not stilled.

Tributaries and Peripheries of the Ottoman Empire offers thirteen studies on the relationship between Ottoman tributaries with each other in the imperial framework, as well as with neighboring border provinces of the empire's core territories from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. A variety of surveys related to the Cossack Ukraine, the Crimean Khanate, Dagestan, Moldavia, Ragusa, Transylvania, Upper Hungary and Wallachia allow the reader to see hitherto less known subtleties of the Ottoman administration's hierarchic structures and the liberties and restrictions of the office-holders' power. They also shed light upon the strategies of coalition-building among the elites of the tributaries as well as the core provinces of the border zones, which determined their cooperation, but also the competition between them. Contributors include: Janos B. Szabo, Ovidiu Cristea, Tetiana Grygorieva, Klara Jako, Gabor Karman, Dariusz Kolodziejczyk, Natalia Krolikowska-Jedlinska, Erica Mezzoli, Viorel Panaite, Radu G. Paun, Ruza Rados Curic, Balazs Sudar, Michal Wasiucionek.

Early modern anger is informed by fundamental paradoxes: qualified as a sin since the Middle Ages, it was still attributed a valuable function in the service of restoring social order; at the same time, the fight against one's own anger was perceived as exceedingly difficult. And while it was seen as essential for the defence of an individual's social position, it was at the same time considered a self-destructive force. The contributions in this volume converge in the aim of mapping out the discursive networks in which anger featured and how they all generated their own version, assessment, and semantics of anger. These discourses include philosophy and theology, poetry, medicine, law, political theory, and art. Contributors: David M. Barbee, Maria Berbara, Tamas Demeter, Jan-Frans van Dijkhuizen, Betul Dilmac, Karl Enenkel, Tilman Haug, Michael Krewet, Johannes F. Lehmann, John Nassichuk, Jan Papy, Christian Peters, Bernd Roling, Paolo Santangelo, Barbara Sasse Tateo, Anita Traninger, Jakob Willis, and Zeynep Yelce.

A set of essays intended to recognize the scholarship of Professor Cynthia Neville, the papers gathered here explore borders and boundaries in medieval and early modern Britain. Over her career, Cynthia has excavated the history of border law and social life on the frontier between England and Scotland and has written extensively of the relationships between natives and newcomers in Scotland's Middle Ages. Her work repeatedly invokes jurisdiction as both a legal and territorial expression of power. The essays in this volume return to themes and topics touched upon in her corpus of work, all in one way or another examining borders and boundaries as either (or both) spatial and legal constructs that grow from and shape social interaction. Contributors are Douglas Biggs, Amy Blakeway, Steve Boardman, Sara M. Butler, Anne DeWindt, Kenneth F. Duggan, Elizabeth Ewan, Chelsea D.M. Hartlen, K.J. Kesselring, Tom Lambert, Shannon McSheffrey, and Cathryn R. Spence.

The essays in Living Dangerously, written by some of the leading scholars in the fields of history and literature, examine the lives of those who lived on the margins of medieval and early modern European society. While some essays explore obvious marginalized classes, such as criminals, gypsies, and prostitutes, others challenge traditional understandings of the margin by showing that female mystics, speculators in the Dutch mercantile empire, and writers of satire, for example, could fall into the margins. These essays reveal the symbiotic relationship that exists between the marginalized and the social establishment: the dominant culture needs its margins. This well-written and lively collection covers a wide geographical area, including England, Spain, Germany, Italy, France, and the Netherlands, making it an ideal resource for a broad range of courses in European history and literature. Contributors: Barbara A. Hanawalt, Richard Firth Green, Vickie Ziegler, Dyan Elliott, Anne J. Cruz, Ian Frederick Moulton, and Mary Lindemann.

Topographies of Tolerance and Intolerance challenges the narrative of a simple progression of tolerance and the establishment of confessional identity during the early modern period. These essays explore the lived experiences of religious plurality, providing insights into the developments and drawbacks of religious coexistence in this turbulent period. The essays examine three main groups of actors-the laity, parish clergy, and unacknowledged religious minorities-in pre- and post-Westphalian Europe. Throughout this period, the laity navigated their own often-fluid religious beliefs, the expectations of conformity held by their religious and political leaders, and the complex realities of life that involved interactions with co-religious and non-co-religious family, neighbors, and business associates on a daily basis. Contributors are: James Blakeley, Amy Nelson Burnett, Victoria Christman, Geoffrey Dipple, Timothy G. Fehler, Emily Fisher Gray, Benjamin J. Kaplan, David M. Luebke, David Mayes, Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer, William Bradford Smith, and Shira Weidenbaum.

The Reformation is often alluded to as Gutenberg's child. Could it then be said that the Counter-Reformation was his step-child? The close relationship between the Reformation, the printing press and books has received extensive, historiographical attention, which is clearly justified; however, the links between books and the Catholic world have often been limited to a tale of censorship and repression. The current volume looks beyond this, with a series of papers that aim to shed new light on the complex relationships between Catholicism and books during the early modern period, before and after the religious schism, with special focus on trade, common reads and the mechanisms used to control readership in different territories, together with the similarities between the Catholic and the Protestant worlds. Contributors include: Stijn Van Rossem, Rafael M. Perez Garcia, Pedro J. Rueda Ramirez, Idalia Garcia Aguilar, Bianca Lindorfer, Natalia Maillard Alvarez, and Adrien Delmas.

In Making Sense of History: Narrativity and Literariness in the Ottoman Chronicle of Na'ima, Gul Sen offers the first comprehensive analysis of narrativity in the most prominent official Ottoman court chronicle. Using an interdisciplinary approach that combines methods from history and literary studies, Sen focuses on the purpose and function of the chronicle-not just what the text says but why Na'ima wrote it and how he shaped the narrated reality on the textual level. As a case study on the literalization of historical material, Making Sense of History provides insights into the historiographical and literary conventions underpinning Na'ima's chronicle and contributes to our understanding of elite mentalities in the early modern Ottoman world by highlighting the author's use of key concepts such as history and time.

First multi-disciplinary study of the cultural and social milieu of the post-medieval castle. The castle was an imposing architectural landmark in late medieval and early modern England and Wales. Castles were much more than lordly residences: they were accommodation to guests and servants, spaces of interaction between the powerful and the powerless, and part of larger networks of tenants, parks, and other properties. These structures were political, symbolic, residential, and military, and shaped the ways in which people consumed the landscape and interacted with the local communities around them. This volume offers the first interdisciplinary study of the socio-cultural understanding of the castle in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, a period duringwhich the castle has largely been seen as in decline. Bringing together a wide range of source material - from architectural remains and archaeological finds to household records and political papers - it investigates the personnel of the castle; the use of space for politics and hospitality; the landscape; ideas of privacy; and the creation of a visual legacy. By focusing on such an iconic structure, the book allows us to see some of the ways in which men and women were negotiating the space around them on a daily basis; and just as importantly, it reveals the impact that the local communities had on the spaces of the castle. AUDREY M. THORSTAD teaches in the Department of History, University of North Texas.

Shakespeare, Court Dramatist centres around the contention that the courts of both Elizabeth I and James I loomed much larger in Shakespeare's creative life than is usually appreciated. Richard Dutton argues that many, perhaps most, of Shakespeare's plays have survived in versions adapted for court presentation, where length was no object (and indeed encouraged) and rhetorical virtuosity was appreciated. The first half of the study examines the court's patronage of the theatre during Shakespeare's lifetime and the crucial role of its Masters of the Revels, who supervised all performances there (as well as censoring plays for public performance). Dutton examines the emergence of the Lord Chamberlain's Men and the King's Men, to whom Shakespeare was attached as their 'ordinary poet', and reviews what is known about the revision of plays in the early modern period. The second half of the study focuses in detail on six of Shakespeare's plays which exist in shorter, less polished texts as well as longer, more familiar ones: Henry VI Part II and III, Romeo and Juliet, Henry V, Hamlet, and The Merry Wives of Windsor. Shakespeare, Court Dramatist argues that they are not cut down from those familiar versions, but poorly-reported originals which Shakespeare revised for court performance into what we know best today. More localised revisions in such plays as Titus Andronicus, Richard II, and Henry IV Part II can also best be explained in this context. The court, Richard Dutton argues, is what made Shakespeare Shakespeare.

This anthology addresses and analyses the transformation of interconnected spaces and spatial entanglements in the Atlantic rim during the era of the slave trade by focusing on the Danish possessions on the Gold Coast and their Caribbean islands of Saint Thomas, Saint Jan and Saint Croix as well as on the Swedish Caribbean island of Saint Barthelemy. The first part of the anthology addresses aspects of interconnectedness in West Africa, in particular the relationship between Africans and Danes on the Gold Coast. The second part of this volume examines various aspects of interconnectedness, creolisation and experiences of Danish and Swedish slave rules in the Caribbean. *Ports of Globalisationis now available in paperback for individual customers.

Beginning around 1559 and continuing through 1642, writers in England, Scotland, and France found themselves pre-occupied with an unusual sort of crime, a crime without a name which today we call 'terrorism'. These crimes were especially dangerous because they were aimed at violating not just the law but the fabric of law itself; and yet they were also, from an opposite point of view, especially hopeful, for they seemed to have the power of unmaking a systematic injustice and restoring a nation to its 'ancient liberty'. The Bible and the annals of classical history were full of examples: Ehud assassinating King Eglon of Moab; Samson bringing down the temple in Gaza; Catiline arousing a conspiracy of terror in republican Rome; Marcus Brutus leading a conspiracy against the life of Julius Caesar. More recent history provided examples too: legends about Mehmed II and his concubine Irene; the assassination in Florence of Duke Alessandro de 'Medici, by his cousin Lorenzino. Terrorism Before the Letter recounts how these stories came together in the imaginations of writers to provide a system of 'enabling fictions', in other words a 'mythography', that made it possible for people of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to think (with and about) terrorism, to engage in it or react against it, to compose stories and devise theories in response to it, even before the word and the concept were born. Terrorist violence could be condoned or condemned, glorified or demonised. But it was a legacy of political history and for a while an especially menacing form of aggression, breaking out in assassinations, abductions, riots, and massacres, and becoming a spectacle of horror and hope on the French and British stage, as well as the main theme of numerous narratives and lyrical poems. This study brings to life the controversies over 'terrorism before the letter' in the early modern period, and it explicates the discourse that arose around it from a rhetorical as well as a structural point of view. Kenneth Burke's 'pentad of motives' helps organise the material, and show how complex the concept of terrorist action could be. Terrorism is usually thought to be a modern phenomenon. But it is actually a foundational figure of the European imagination, at once a reality and a myth, and it has had an impact on political life since the beginnings of Europe itself. Terrorism is a violence that communicates, and the dynamics of communication itself reveal it special powers and inevitable failures.

Most histories of European appropriation of indigenous territories have, until recently, focused on conquest and occupation, while relatively little attention has been paid to the history of treaty-making. Yet treaties were also a means of extending empire. To grasp the extent of European legal engagement with indigenous peoples, Empire by Treaty: Negotiating European Expansion, 1600-1900 looks at the history of treaty-making in European empires (Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, French and British) from the early 17th to the late 19th century, that is, during both stages of European imperialism. While scholars have often dismissed treaties assuming that they would have been fraudulent or unequal, this book argues that there was more to the practice of treaty-making than mere commercial and political opportunism. Indeed, treaty-making was also promoted by Europeans as a more legitimate means of appropriating indigenous sovereignties and acquiring land than were conquest or occupation, and therefore as a way to reconcile expansion with moral and juridical legitimacy. As for indigenous peoples, they engaged in treaty-making as a way to further their interests even if, on the whole, they gained far less than the Europeans from those agreements and often less than they bargained for. The vexed history of treaty-making presents particular challenges for the great expectations placed in treaties for the resolution of conflicts over indigenous rights in post-colonial societies. These hopes are held by both indigenous peoples and representatives of the post-colonial state and yet, both must come to terms with the complex and troubled history of treaty-making over 400 years of empire. Empire by Treaty looks at treaty-making in Dutch Colonial Expansion, Spanish-Portuguese border in the Americas, Aboriginal Land in Canada, French Colonial West Africa, and British India.

The Devil in Disguise illuminates the impact of the two British revolutions of the seventeenth century and the shifts in religious, political, scientific, literary, economic, social, and moral culture that they brought about.
It does so through the fascinating story of one family and their locality: the Cowpers of Hertford. Their dramatic history contains a murder mystery, bigamy, a scandal novel, and a tyrannized wife, all set against a backdrop of violently competing local factions, rampant religious prejudice, and the last conviction of a witch in England.
Spencer Cowper was accused of murdering a Quaker, and his brother William had two illegitimate children by his second 'wife'. Their scandalous lives became the source of public gossip, much to the horror of their mother, Sarah, who poured out her heart in a diary that also chronicles her feeling of being enslaved to her husband. Her two sons remained in the limelight. Both were instrumental in the prosecution of Henry Sacheverell, a firebrand cleric who preached a sermon about the illegitimacy of resistance and religious toleration. His parliamentary trial in 1710 provoked serious riots in London. William Cowper also intervened in 1712 to secure the life of Jane Wenham, whose trial provoked a wide-ranging debate about witchcraft beliefs.
The Cowpers and their town are a microcosm of a changing world. Their story suggests that an early 'Enlightenment', far from being simply a movement of ideas sparked by 'great thinkers', was shaped and advanced by local and personal struggles.

This fascinating collection of primary source documents furnishes the accounts-in their own words-of those who initiated, advanced, or lived through the Reformation. Starting in 1500, Europe transformed from a united Christendom into a continent bitterly divided between Catholicism and Protestantism by the end of the century. This illuminating text reveals what happened during that period by presenting the social, religious, economic, political, and cultural life of the European Reformation of the 16th century in the words of those who lived through it. Detailed and comprehensive, the work includes 60 primary source documents that shed light on the character, personalities, and events of that time and provides context, questions, and activities for successfully incorporating these documents into academic research and reading projects. A special section provides guidelines for better evaluating and understanding primary documents. Topics include late medieval religion, Martin Luther, reformation in Germany and the Peasants' War, the rise of Calvinism, and the English Reformation. Supports common core standards for English language arts/history and social studies by promoting critical thinking Covers the people and events of the period in Germany, France, Italy, the British Isles, and elsewhere in Europe Defines unfamiliar terms alongside of the documents that contain them Features a chronology listing important dates and events pertaining to the Protestant Reformation