Roman Tales: A Reader's Guide to the Art of Microhistory explores both the social and cultural life of Renaissance Rome and the mind-set and methods of microhistory. This book draws the reader deep into eight stories: a Christian-Jewish picnic plus an ill-aimed stone fight, an embassy-driven attack on Rome's police, a magic prophetic mirror, an immured mad hermit, a stolen dwarf, and the bizarre misadventures of a stolen roll of velvet, a truly odd elopement, and a thieving child who treats his cronies to dinner at the inn. It meditates on the resources and lacunae that shape the telling of these stories and, through them, it models an historical method that contrives to turn the limits of our knowledge into an advantage by writing honestly and movingly, to bring a dead past back to life, exemplifying and stretching the genre of microhistory. It also discusses strategies for teaching through intensive use of old documents, with a particular focus on criminal tribunal papers. Engagingly written, Roman Tales outlines the main principles of microhistorical research and draws the reader outwards towards a wider exploration and discovery of sixteenth-century Rome. It is ideal for researchers of microhistory, and of medieval and early modern Italy.

Spain and the Irish Mission, 1609-1707 examines Spanish confessional policy in 17th-century Ireland. Cristina Bravo Lozano provides an innovative perspective on Spanish-Irish relations during a crucial period for Early Modern European history. Key historical actors and events are brought to the fore in her account of the missionary networks created around the Irish Catholic exile in the Iberian Peninsula. She presents a comprehensive study of this form of royal patronage, the changes and challenges Irish Catholicism had to face after the peace of London (1604) and the role that Irish missionaries played in preserving its place within the framework of Anglo-Spanish relations.

The theme of conspiracy is central to Machiavelli's writing. His work offers observations and analysis of conspiracy as part of the armoury of the Renaissance politician. Surprisingly, the theme has not yet received the attention it merits. This volume corrects an interpretation which reduces Machiavelli's position to one of censorious observer of conspiracies. Quite to the contrary, as Campi demonstrates, Machiavelli developed an anatomy of conspiracy and provided a practical manual for coup d'etat" and violent seizure of power.

Called by her contemporaries the "Tenth Muse," Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz (1648-1695) has continued to stir both popular and scholarly imaginations. While generations of Mexican schoolchildren have memorized her satirical verses, only since the 1970s has her writing received consistent scholarly attention., focused on complexities of female authorship in the political, religious, and intellectual context of colonial New Spain. This volume examines those areas of scholarship that illuminate her work, including her status as an iconic figure in Latin American and Baroque letters, popular culture in Mexico and the United States, and feminism. By addressing the multiple frameworks through which to read her work, this research guide serves as a useful resource for scholars and students of the Baroque in Europe and Latin America, colonial Novohispanic religious institutions, and women's and gender studies. The chapters are distributed across four sections that deal broadly with different aspects of Sor Juana's life and work: institutional contexts (political, economic, religious, intellectual, and legal); reception history; literary genres; and directions for future research. Each section is designed to provide the reader with a clear understanding of the current state of the research on those topics and the academic debates within each field.

The Routledge Handbook of Material Culture in Early Modern Europe marks the arrival of early modern material culture studies as a vibrant, fully-established field of multi-disciplinary research. The volume provides a rounded, accessible collection of work on the nature and significance of materiality in early modern Europe - a term that embraces a vast range of objects as well as addressing a wide variety of human interactions with their physical environments. This stimulating view of materiality is distinctive in asking questions about the whole material world as a context for lived experience, and the book considers material interactions at all social levels. There are 27 chapters by leading experts as well as 13 feature object studies to highlight specific items that have survived from this period (defined broadly as c.1500-c.1800). These contributions explore the things people acquired, owned, treasured, displayed and discarded, the spaces in which people used and thought about things, the social relationships which cluster around goods - between producers, vendors and consumers of various kinds - and the way knowledge travels around those circuits of connection. The content also engages with wider issues such as the relationship between public and private life, the changing connections between the sacred and the profane, or the effects of gender and social status upon lived experience. Constructed as an accessible, wide-ranging guide to research practice, the book describes and represents the methods which have been developed within various disciplines for analysing pre-modern material culture. It comprises four sections which open up the approaches of various disciplines to non-specialists: 'Definitions, disciplines, new directions', 'Contexts and categories', 'Object studies' and 'Material culture in action'. This volume addresses the need for sustained, coherent comment on the state, breadth and potential of this lively new field, including the work of historians, art historians, museum curators, archaeologists, social scientists and literary scholars. It consolidates and communicates recent developments and considers how we might take forward a multi-disciplinary research agenda for the study of material culture in periods before the mass production of goods.

This fresh exploration of the life, work and writing of Archbishop Pole, focuses particularly on Pole's final years (1556-58) as Archbishop of Canterbury. Fully integrating Pole's English and Continental European experiences, John Edwards places these in their historical context and signposts lessons for contemporary issues and concerns. Stressing the events and character of Pole's 'English' life, up to his exile in the 1530s, as well as in his final years in England (1554-58), this book explores his close relationship, both genealogical and emotional, with Henry VIII and Mary I. Portraying Pole as a crucial figure in the Catholic-Protestant division, which still affects Britain today, this book details the first, and so far last, attempt to restore Roman Catholicism as the 'national religion' of England and Wales by telling the life-story of the hinge figure in forging English religious and political identity for several centuries. The final section of this book draws together important and illuminating source material written by Pole during his years as Archbishop of Canterbury.

Originally published in 1982, this book tackles the underlying problem of what is meant by 'the Renaissance' and outlines those social, economic and topographical factors which triggered it off. It covers a number of subjects, the family, war, trade, religion and art but recognizing that the Renaissance was essentially an urban growth it focusses on 7 great Italian cities: Florence, Rome, Venice, Milan, Urbino, Mantua and Ferrara. It also includes studies of some extraordinary Renaissance individuals: Federigo Montefeltro, Isabella d'Este, Machiavelli, Baldasssare Castiglione, and the Medici clan, among others.

Originally published in 1968 this book is an unforgettable portrait of an impoverished orphaned daughter of the Medici, pitchforked at the age of fourteen into her royal destiny and having to bear the rivalry of Diane de Poiters and the description 'the Florentine shopkeeper' who nevertheless became one of the most powerful characters in the shaping of sixteenth century Europe.

Originally published in 1967, this book discusses some key writers of the Renaissance: Machiavelli, Castiglione, Bacon and Hobbes and compares their work by relating it that of others in England and elsewhere. Chapters on Bacon contain references to Galileo and Descartes; the chapter on Castiglione also touches on Montaigne. The book also contrasts various currents of thought in the Renaissance with their medieval counterparts or forerunners. The volume isolates the great themes, or revolutionary shifts in as they manifest themselves in the work of important writers and thinkers.

Originally published in 1962, the second volume of how the psychological structure of German politics evolved deals with the age of monarchical absolutism and intellectual enlightenment, i.e. the last one and a half centuries of the Roman-German Empire. It traces the political principles which inspired the leading statesmen, the advocates of reforms and their adversaries, as well as the various social groups. This is a history of ideal and ideologies, of public opinions and of the ideas which a people holds of itself and other peoples and vice versa. It paved the way for an unprejudiced view of nations by comparing their thought and actions under comparable circumstances and investigating parallels and differences from a sociological point of view.

Originally published in 1968 this collection of essays is authored by scholars from the UK, Europe and the U. S. A. and covers Renaissance art, prose and poetry including discussions on the work of Montaigne, Rabelais, Flaubert and Baudelaire.

The centerpiece of Emilie Du Chatelet's philosophy of science is her Foundations of Physics, first published in 1740. The Foundations contains epistemology, metaphysics, methodology, mechanics, and physics, including such pressing issues of the time as whether there are atoms, the appropriate roles of God and of hypotheses in scientific theorizing, how (if at all) bodies are capable of acting on one another, and whether gravity is an action-at-a-distance force. Du Chatelet sought to resolve these issues within a single philosophical framework that builds on her critique and appraisal of all the leading alternatives (Cartesian, Newtonian, Leibnizian, and so forth) of the period. The text is remarkable for being the first to attempt such a synthetic project, and even more so for the accessibility and clarity of the writing. This book argues that Du Chatelet put her finger on the central problems that lay at the intersection of physics and metaphysics at the time, and tackled them drawing on the most up-to-date resources available. It will be a useful source for students and scholars interested in the history and philosophy of science, and in the impact of women philosophers in the early modern period.

The Enlightenment is generally painted as a movement of ideas and society lasting from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century, but this book argues that the Enlightenment is an essential component of modernity itself. In the course of the study, Martin Davies offers an original world-view and a critique of some recent interpretations of the Enlightenment.

First published in 1995, Charles I is a psychological portrait of the 'monarch of the Civil Wars,' Charles I. Challenging conventional interpretations of the king, as well as questioning orthodox historical assumptions concerning the origins and development of the Civil Wars, the book establishes itself as a definitive biography. Addressing and analysing the furious historiographical debates which have surrounded the period, Carlton offers a fresh and lucid perspective. This book will be of interest to students of literature and history.

Monarchy and Matrimony is the first comprehensive study of Elizabeth I's courtships. Susan Doran argues that the cult of the Virgin Queen' was invented by her ministers, and that Elizabeth was forced into celibacy by political necessity.
Doran's detailed examination of the different suits is based on extensive archival research across Europe. Rather than focusing on Elizabeth's personality and image, she views the question within a wider political and religious context. She shows how the question of Elizabeth's marriage was divisive for England, affecting both political life and international relations, and provoking popular propaganda in the form of plays, poetry and paintings.

This book explores the main currents of European thought between 1350 and 1992, which it approaches in two principal ways: culture as produced by place and the progressive unmooring of thought from previously set religious and philosophical boundaries. The book reads the period against spatial thought's history (spatial sciences such as geography or Euclidean geometry) to argue that Europe cannot be understood as a continent in intellectual terms or its history organized with respect to traditional spatial-geographic categories. Instead we need to understand European intellectual history in terms of a culture that defined its own place, as opposed to a place that produced a given culture. It then builds on this idea to argue that Europe's overweening drive to know more about humanity and the cosmos continually breached the boundaries set by venerable religious and philosophical traditions. In this respect, spatial thought foregrounded the human at the unchanging's expense, with European thought slowly becoming unmoored, as it doggedly produced knowledge at wisdom's expense. Michael J. Sauter illustrates this by pursuing historical themes across different chapters, including European thought's exit from the medieval period, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment and Romanticism, the Industrial Revolution, and war and culture, offering a thorough overview of European thought during this period. The book concludes by explaining how contemporary culture has forgotten what early modern thinkers such as Michel de Montaigne still knew, namely, that too little skepticism toward one's own certainties makes one a danger to others. Offering a comprehensive introduction to European thought that stretches from the late fourteenth to the late twentieth century, this is the perfect one-volume study for students of European intellectual history.

In early modern times, religious affiliation was often communicated through bodily practices. Despite various attempts at definition, these practices remained extremely fluid and lent themselves to individual appropriation and to evasion of church and state control. Because bodily practices prompted much debate, they serve as a useful starting point for examining denominational divisions, allowing scholars to explore the actions of smaller and more radical divergent groups. The focus on bodies and conflicts over bodily practices are the starting point for the contributors to this volume who depart from established national and denominational historiographies to probe the often-ambiguous phenomena occurring at the interstices of confessional boundaries. In this way, the authors examine a variety of religious living conditions, socio-cultural groups, and spiritual networks of early modern Europe and the Americas. The cases gathered here skillfully demonstrate the diverse ways in which regional and local differences affected the interpretation of bodily signs. This book will appeal to scholars and students of early modern Europe and the Americas, as well as those interested in religious and gender history, and the history of dissent.

In the sixteenth century, the Ottoman court in Constantinople emerged as the axial centre of early modern diplomacy in Eurasia. Diplomatic Cultures at the Ottoman Court, c.1500-1630 takes a unique approach to diplomatic relations by focusing on how diplomacy was conducted and diplomatic cultures forged at a single court: the Sublime Porte. It unites studies from the perspectives of European and non-European diplomats with analyses from the perspective of Ottoman officials involved in diplomatic practices. It focuses on a formative period for diplomatic procedure and Ottoman imperial culture by examining the introduction of resident embassies on the one hand, and on the other, changes in Ottoman policy and protocol that resulted from the territorial expansion and cultural transformations of the empire in the sixteenth century. The chapters in this volume approach the practices and processes of diplomacy at the Ottoman court with special attention to ceremonial protocol, diplomatic sociability, gift-giving, cultural exchange, information gathering, and the role of para-diplomatic actors.

Britain and its Neighbours explores instances and periods of cultural contact and exchanges between communities in Britain with those in other parts of Europe between c.500 and 1700. Collectively, the twelve case studies highlight certain aspects of cultural contact and exchange and present neglected factors, previously overlooked evidence, and new methodological approaches. The discussions draw from a broad range of disciplines including archaeology, history, art history, iconography, literature, linguistics, and legal history in order to shine new light on a multi-faceted variety of expressions of the equally diverse and long-standing relations between Britain and its neighbours. Organised chronologically, the volume accentuates the consistency and continuity of social, cultural, and intellectual connections between Britain and Continental Europe in a period that spans over a millennium. With its range of specialised topics, Britain and its Neighbours is a useful resource for undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars interested in cultural and intellectual studies and the history of Britain's long-standing connections to Europe.

Britain and its Neighbours explores instances and periods of cultural contact and exchanges between communities in Britain with those in other parts of Europe between c.500 and 1700. Collectively, the twelve case studies highlight certain aspects of cultural contact and exchange and present neglected factors, previously overlooked evidence, and new methodological approaches. The discussions draw from a broad range of disciplines including archaeology, history, art history, iconography, literature, linguistics, and legal history in order to shine new light on a multi-faceted variety of expressions of the equally diverse and long-standing relations between Britain and its neighbours. Organised chronologically, the volume accentuates the consistency and continuity of social, cultural, and intellectual connections between Britain and Continental Europe in a period that spans over a millennium. With its range of specialised topics, Britain and its Neighbours is a useful resource for undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars interested in cultural and intellectual studies and the history of Britain's long-standing connections to Europe.

A classic of British history that has been read by thousands of students, historians and general readers Trevelyan was one of the leading historians of the first part of the Twentieth century Includes a new foreword by Peter Gaunt

An acclaimed account of family and community in medieval England and Laslett's best-known and most influential book A renowned scholar Laslett was also pioneer in bringing history to a wider audience, writing and presenting radio and TV programmes and founding the Open University in the 1960s This Routledge Classics edition includes a new Foreword by Kevin Schurer, helpfully placing Laslett and his book in context

This edited collection of essays focuses on the topic of protest during the Enlightenment of the long eighteenth century (roughly 1670-1833). Resistance in the eighteenth century was extensive, and the act of protest to foment meaningful societal change took on many forms from the circulation of ballads, swearing of oaths, to riots and work stoppages, or the composition of essays, novels, posters, caricatures, political cartoons, as well as theater and opera. The contributors to this volume examine the causes of protest as well as the broad ways in which common artifacts such as poles, trees, drums, conchs, and songs acted as flashpoints for conflict and vehicles of protest. Rather than approaching the topic with strict geographical, temporal, and structural limitations, this book focuses on the time period from an international perspective and an interdisciplinary scope. Because of its wide scope, this book is an important contribution to the subject that will be of interest to both faculty and students of the history of protest, resistance and the changes that these forces bring as it also reminds us that the protests of today are rooted in historical resistances of the past.

Originally published in 1984 Reproductive Ritual examines fertility and re-production in pre-industrial England. The book discusses both through anthropological research and reviews of contemporary literature that conscious family limitation was practised before the nineteenth century. The volume describes a surprising number of rules, regulations, taboos, injunctions, charms and herbal remedies used to affect pregnancy, and shows the extent to which individual women and men were concerned with controlling the size of their families. The fertility levels in England - as in Western Europe as a whole - were a very long way from the biological maximum in these centuries, and the book discusses the various reasons why this was so. The book reviews traditional ideas concerning the relationship between procreation and pleasure, drawn from a range of contemporary sources and discusses ways in which earlier generations sought both to promote and limit fertility. The book also examines abortion and shows how much evidence there is for its actual practice during the period and of traditional views towards it. This book provides a detailed understanding of historical attitudes towards conception family planning in pre-industrial England.

This book investigates the construction of identity and the precarity of the self in the work of the Calvinist Fulke Greville (1554-1628) and the Jesuit Robert Southwell (1561-1595). For the first time, a collection of original essays unites them with the aim to explore their literary production. The essays collected here define these authors' efforts to forge themselves as literary, religious, and political subjects amid a shifting politico-religious landscape. They highlight the authors' criticism of the court and underscore similarities and differences in thought, themes, and style. Altogether, the essays in this volume demonstrate the developments in cosmology, theology, literary conventions, political ideas, and religious dogmas, and trace their influence in the oeuvre of Greville and Southwell.