The Knights of St John of Jerusalem, also known as the Hospitallers, were a military religious order, subject to monastic vows and discipline but devoted to the active defence of the Holy Land. After evacuating the Holy Land at the beginning of the fourteenth century, they occupied Rhodes, which they held into the sixteenth century, when their headquarters moved to Malta. Branches of the order existed throughout Europe, and it is the English branch in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that is examined here. Among the major subjects researched by O'Malley are the recruitment of members of the Hospital and their family ties; the operation of the order's career structure; the administration of its estates; its provision of spiritual and charitable services; and the publicity and logistical support it provided for the holy war carried on by its headquarters against the Ottoman Turks. It is argued that the English Hospitallers in particular took their military and financial duties to the order very seriously, making a major contribution to the Hospital's operations in the Mediterranean as a result. They were able to do so because they were wealthy, had close family and other ties with gentle and mercantile society, and above all because their activities had royal support. Where this was lacking or ineffective, as in Ireland, the Hospital might become the plaything of local interests eager to exploit its estates, and its wider functions might be neglected. Consequently the heart of the book lies in an extended discussion of the relationship between senior Hospitaller officers and the governing authorities of Britain and Ireland. It is concluded that rulers were generally supportive of the order's activities, but within strict limits, particularly in matters concerning appointments, the size of payments to the east, and the movement and foreign allegiances of senior brethren. When these limits were breached, or at times of political or religious sensitivity such as the 1460s and 1530s, the Hospital's personnel and estates would suffer. In addition, more general areas of historical debate are illuminated such as those concerning the relationship between late medieval societies and the religious orders; 'British' attitudes to Christendom and holy war, and the rights of rulers over their subjects. This is the first such book to be based on archival records in both Britain and Malta, and will make a major contribution to understanding the order's European network, its place in the ordering of Latin Christendom, and in particular its role in late medieval British and Irish society.

This is the first biography in ninety years of Reginald Pole (1500SH1558), one of the most important international figures of the sixteenth century. Pole's career is followed as protégé and then harshest critic of Henry VIII, as cardinal and papal diplomat, legate of Viterbo, a nearly successful candidate for pope, and finally as legate to England, archbishop of Canterbury, architect of the English Counter-Reformation, and victim of both Pope Paul IV and of himself.

The comprehensive defeat of the Jacobite Irish in the Williamite conflict, a component within the pan-European Nine Years' War, prevented the exiled James II from regaining his English throne, ended realistic prospects of a Stuart restoration and partially secured the new regime of King William III and Queen Mary created by the Glorious Revolution. The principal events - the Siege of Londonderry, the Battles of the Boyne and Aughrim, and the two Sieges and Treaty of Limerick - have subsequently become totems around which opposing constructions of Irish history have been erected. John Childs, one of the foremost authorities on warfare in Early Modern Britain and Europe, cuts through myth and the accumulations of three centuries to present a balanced, detailed narrative and chronology of the campaigns. He argues that the struggle was typical of the late seventeenth-century, principally decided by economic resources and attrition in which the small war' comprising patrols, raids, occupation of captured regions by small garrisons, police actions against irregulars and attacks on supply lines was more significant in determining the outcome than the set piece battles and sieges.

"In this book, Love emerges from confusion even as, in the description of the ancient poets, he sprang from the womb of Chaos. And although it is many years old, and of an earlier date than all my others, it is eminently youthful in appearance and hopes to please like a thing newmade." --Torquato Tasso (1544-95).

History students and Victorian enthusiasts looking for comprehensive information on dining practices of Victorian America will find this book a vital resource. Revealing the history of 19th-century dining, clothing, and etiquette, the volume includes sample menus and explicit instructions explaining how to recreate a dinner, tea, breakfast, or lunch in the 21st century. Collectors of china, crystal, and silver will also find this book helpful because it provides a photograph of each piece of tableware that was used, with a history and description of the item.

After explaining the different dining styles and the way they evolved into rituals of the Victorian era, a formal dinner is examined course by course. The Schollanders present the history and uses of various wines and show they were matched with different foods. They also explain the evolution of silver, crystal, and china pieces. Additionally the book includes an explanation of the seating order at the Victorian table, correct Victorian table manners, invitations and menu cards, correct dress for dinner guests, correct table settings, the role of servants, and step-by-step instructions for recreating a formal Victorian dinner, tea, breakfast, or lunch.

The explorations of 18th-century travellers to the "European frontiers" were often geared to define the cultural, political and historical boundaries of "European civilization". In an age when political revolutions shocked nations into reassessing what separated the civilized from the barbaric, how did literary travellers contemplate the characteristics of their continental neighbours? Focusing on the writings of British travellers, we see how a new view of Europe was created, one that juxtaposed the customs and living conditions of populations in an attempt to define "modern" Europe against a "yet unenlightened" Europe.

Michigan has long been proud of its military service, but many of its early accomplishments are unknown to most of the state's residents. This book fills the void in our knowledge by bringing together an impressive array of information on Michigan's armed forces from 1775 to 1860. Here we find the name rank, unit, and dates of service for all known Michigan men who served in the Revolutionary War, Indian Wars, War of 1812, Black Hawk War, Toledo War, Patriot War, and the Mexican-American War. Accompanying histories explain the reasons behind the conflicts and include maps showing all theaters of operations for Michigan troops. The in-depth accounts of the state's role in these hostilities often serve as the first serious and comprehensive studies of the contributions made by its citizens in these events.

The book's many points of interest include its treatment of the dramatic Revolutionary War period, when local Indians, British garrisons at Detroit and Mackinac, and a few Michigan men, well placed, held sway over most of the old Northwest. The book also documents "foreigners" who fought for Michigan's cause, with a disproportionate number of soldiers of French descent serving during the War of 1812, and of Irish ancestry serving in the Mexican-American War. Specific information on names of Native American soldiers is not available, but their general roles as combatants are noted. Ultimately, this book stands as a fitting memorial to the many men who took up arms on behalf of Michigan.

Enlightenment Geography is the first detailed study of the politics of British geography books and of related forms of geographical knowledge in the period from 1650 to 1850. The definition and role of geography in a humanist structure of knowledge are examined and shown to tie it to political discourse. Geographical works are shown to have developed Whig and Tory defences of the English church and state, consonant with the conservatism of the English Enlightenment. These politicizations were questioned by those indebted to the Scottish Enlightenment. Enlightenment Geography questions broad assumptions about British intellectual history through a revisionist history of geography.

It is virtually impossible to generalize about the degree to which women in early America were free. What, if anything, did enslaved black women in the South have in common with powerful female leaders in Iroquois society? Were female tavern keepers in the backcountry of North Carolina any more free than nuns and sisters in New France religious orders? Were the restrictions placed on widows and abandoned wives at all comparable to those experienced by autonomous women or spinsters? Bringing to light the enormous diversity of women's experience, Women and Freedom in Early America centers variously on European-American, African-American, and Native American women from 1400 to 1800. Spanning almost half a millenium, the book ranges the colonial terrain, from New France and the Iroquois Nations down through the mainland British-American colonies. By drawing on a wide array of sources, including church and court records, correspondence, journals, poetry, and newspapers, these essays examine Puritan political writings, white perceptions of Indian women, Quaker spinsterhood, and African and Iroquois mythology, among many other topics. Larry Eldridge is Assistant Professor of History at the College of Arts and Sciences at Widener University and author of the acclaimed A Distant Heritage: The Growth of Free Speech in Early America, also from NYU Press.

This study shows how theater was an important feature of convent life from the early fifteenth century, probably in all of Catholic Europe and its colonies. For this study, mainly devoted to Tuscany, the author has found an extensive corpus of theatrical works of convent provenance, which argues for the widespread practice of theater in the convents. She traces its chief characteristics--what the nuns' own writings tell us about their literacy and that of their audiences, and how their lives and work intersect with secular society and literary culture.

This is a lively narrative account, based on previously unused material, of the events that marked the troubled relationship between Louis XV, the clergy of France, and the Parlement of Paris in the mid-eighteenth century. The author shows how religious disputes drove a wedge between the King and the leading magistrates of his kingdom, leading to the exile of the Parlement in 1753-4. He describes the way in which legal and procedural conflicts gave rise to a debate about the nature of the Monarchy itself, the exercise of royal authority, and the rights of the subject under the protection of law. Debates inside the Parlement are analysed, using the reports of highly placed government spies and agents, and new light is shed on the part played by the King.

E.A. Wrigley, the leading historian of industrial England, exposes the inadequacy of what was once accepted wisdom regarding England's industrial revolution and suggests what he believes should replace it. He examines the issues from three viewpoints: economic growth; the transformation of the urban-rural balance; and demographic change in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In addition, he shows why England's early modern economy and society grew faster and more dynamically than its continental neighbors.

This is the first annotated critical edition of works of Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626), a writer recognized by literary critics, historians, and theologians as one of the most important figures in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Peter McCullough, a leading expert on religious writing in the early modern period, presents fourteen complete sermons and lectures preached by Andrewes across the whole range of his adult career, from Cambridge in the 1580s to the court of James I and VI in the 1620s. Through a radical reassessment of Andrewes's life, influence, and surviving texts, the editor presents Andrewes as his contemporaries saw, heard, and read him, and as scholars are increasingly recognizing him: one of the most subtle, yet radical critics of mainstream Elizabethan Protestantism, and a literary artist of the highest order.
The centuries-old influence of William Laud's authorized edition of Andrewes (1629) is here complicated and contextualized by the full use for the first time of the whole range of Andrewes's works printed before and after his lifetime, as well as manuscript sources. The edition also showcases the aesthetic brilliance of Andrewes's remarkable prose, and suggests new ways for scholars to carry forward the modern literary appreciation of Andrewes famously begun by T. S. Eliot. A full introductory essay sets study of Andrewes on a new footing by placing his works in the context of his life and career, surveying the history of responses to his writings, and summarizing the history of the transmission of his texts. The texts here are edited to high modern critical standards. The exhaustive commentary sets each selection in its historical context, documentsAndrewes's myriad sources, glosses important and unfamiliar words and allusions, and translates his frequent quotations from the ancient Biblical languages.

Through an exploration of overlapping concepts of noble honour amongst English and Irish elites, this book provides a cultural analysis of 'British' high politics in the early modern period. Analysing English- and Irish-language sources, Brendan Kane argues that between the establishment of the Irish kingdom under the English Crown in 1541 and the Irish rebellion of 1641, honour played a powerful role in determining the character of Anglo-Irish society, politics and cultural contact. In this age, before the rise of a more bureaucratic and participatory state, political power was intensely personal and largely the concern of elites. And those elites were preoccupied with honour. By exploring contemporary 'honour politics', this book brings a cultural perspective to our understanding of the character of English imperialism in Ireland and of the Irish responses to it. In so doing it highlights understudied aspects of the origins of the 'British' state.

Although the history of the book is a booming area of research, the journeymen who printed books in the sixteenth century have remained shadowy figures because they were not thought to have left any significant traces in the archives. Clive Griffin, however, uses Inquisitional documents from Spain and Portugal to reveal a clandestine network of Protestant-minded immigrant journeymen who were arrested by the Holy Office in Spain and Portugal in the 1560s and 1570s at a time of international crisis. A startlingly clear portrait of these humble men (and occasionally women) emerges allowing the reconstruction of what Namier deemed one of history's greatest challenges: 'the biographies of ordinary men'. We learn of their geographical and social origins, educational and professional training, travels, careers, standard of living, violent behaviour, and even their attitudes, beliefs, and ambitions.
In the course of this study, many other subjects are addressed, among them: popular culture and religion; the history of skilled labour, the history of the book, and of reading and writing; the Inquisition; foreign and itinerant workers and the xenophobia they encountered; and the 'double lives' of lower-class Protestants living within a uniquely vigilant Catholic society.

If you drive through Mpumalanga with an eye on the landscape flashing by, you may see, near the sides of the road and further away on the hills above and in the valleys below, fragments of building in stone as well as sections of stone-walling breaking the grass cover. Endless stone circles, set in bewildering mazes and linked by long stone passages, cover the landscape stretching from Ohrigstad to Carolina, connecting over 10 000 square kilometres of the escarpment into a complex web of stone-walled homesteads, terraced fields and linking roads. Oral traditions recorded in the early twentieth century named the area Bokoni - the country of the Koni people. Few South Africans or visitors to the country know much about these settlements, and why today they are deserted and largely ignored. A long tradition of archaeological work which might provide some of the answers remains cloistered in universities and the knowledge vacuum has been filled by a variety of exotic explanations - invoking ancient settlers from India or even visitors from outer space - that share a common assumption that Africans were too primitive to have created such elaborate stone structures. Forgotten World defies the usual stereotypes about backward African farming methods and shows that these settlements were at their peak between 1500 and 1820, that they housed a substantial population, organised vast amounts of labour for infrastructural development, and displayed extraordinary levels of agricultural innovation and productivity. The Koni were part of a trading system linked to the coast of Mozambique and the wider world of Indian Ocean trade beyond. Forgotten World tells the story of Bokoni through rigorous historical and archaeological research, and lavishly illustrates it with stunning photographic images.

An acclaimed book and widely acknowledged classic, The Middle Ground steps outside the simple stories of Indian-white relations - stories of conquest and assimilation and stories of cultural persistence. It is, instead, about a search for accommodation and common meaning. It tells how Europeans and Indians met, regarding each other as alien, as other, as virtually nonhuman, and how between 1650 and 1815 they constructed a common, mutually comprehensible world in the region around the Great Lakes that the French called pays d'en haut. Here the older worlds of the Algonquians and of various Europeans overlapped, and their mixture created new systems of meaning and of exchange. Finally, the book tells of the breakdown of accommodation and common meanings and the re-creation of the Indians as alien and exotic. First published in 1991, the 20th anniversary edition includes a new preface by the author examining the impact and legacy of this study.

The Book of the Courtier, Baldassare Castiglione's classic account of Renaissance court life, offers profound insight into the refined behavior which defined the era's ruling class. The courtly customs and manners of Italy to a great extent characterized the Renaissance, which elevated art and expression to new heights. Baldassare Castiglione published this book with the intention of chronicling the manners, customs and traditions which underpinned how courtiers, nobles, and their servants, behaved. Although ostensibly a book of etiquette and good conduct, Castiglione's treatise carries enormous historical value. He derived his observations directly from the many gatherings and receptions conducted by society's elite. Conversations with the officials, diplomats and nobility of the era further enhanced the accuracy of this book, imbuing it with an authenticity seldom seen elsewhere.

A ready reference for general readers, undergraduate and graduate students, teachers, and scholars, this volume contains 320 entries by 80 experts, covering a broad range of topics, plus a lengthy chronology and extensive bibliography. The entries are based on current scholarship and are followed by pertinent references. Among the items included are biographies of kings and queens, ministers, opposition leaders, ecclesiastics, and literary figures; entries on the army, navy, courts, and other institutions; local government and officials; important court cases and documents, such as the Great Contract, Petition of Right, and Bill of Rights; and controversial examples of the Royal prerogative, such as the dispensing and suspending of powers. The volume also covers the Civil Wars, Glorious Revolution, and other rebellions; the Dutch, French, and Spanish Wars; and diplomatic events. Anglicanism, Puritanism, and other religious topics are included as well as political groups, such as the Cavaliers and Roundheads, and radicals like the Diggers and Fifth Monarchists. Social and economic topics include agriculture, mercantilism, poor laws, population, and taxation. The dictionary also covers cultural topics, conceptual topics such as divine right, and topics on women. Although the book focuses on England, it also includes entries on Ireland, Scotland, and Wales and topics relating to those areas.