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Books > Humanities > History > World history > 1500 to 1750
What role did women play in the pre-industrial European economy? Sheilagh Ogilvie tackles this question in an original way, using a rich body of new evidence. By examining women's contribution to a particular pre-industrial economy - the German state of Württemberg - Ogilvie casts doubt on most of the extensive literature about pre-industrial women's work. She also refutes the theory of 'social capital' which claims that traditional networks, like guilds with their shared norms, benefited everyone. She shows how network insiders benefited at the expense of outsiders, especially women. The result was a 'bitter living' - not only for women, but for everyone.
Cultural exchange, the dynamic give and take between two or more cultures, has become a distinguishing feature of modern Europe. This was already an important feature to the elites of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and it played a central role in their fashioning of self. The cultures these elites exchanged and often integrated with their own were both material and immaterial; they included palaces, city-dwellings, paintings, sculptures, ceramics, dresses and jewellery, but also gestures, ways of sitting, standing and walking, and dances. In this innovative and well-illustrated 2007 volume all this lively exchange is traced from Bruges, Augsburg and Istanbul to Italy; from Italy to Paris, Amsterdam, Dresden, Novgorod and Moscow; and even from Brazil to Rouen. This volume, which reveals how a first European identity was forged, will appeal to cultural and art historians, as well as social and cultural anthropologists.
This 1995 book explores what the Victorians said about the Stuart past, with particular emphasis on changing interpretations of Cromwell and the Puritans. It analyses in detail the historical writings of Henry Hallam, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Thomas Carlyle and Samuel Rawson Gardiner, placing them in a context that stresses the importance of religious controversy for the nineteenth century. The book argues that the Victorians found the Stuart past problematic because they perceived a connection between the religious disputes of the seventeenth century and the sectarian discord of their own age. Cromwell and the Puritans became an acceptable part of the national past only as the English state lost its Anglican exclusiveness. The tendency to accommodate Cromwell and the Puritans, particularly in the work of Gardiner, thus reflected a process of nation building that sought to remove sectarian divisions and which reached its climax as the Victorian age came to its close.
Widely regarded as America's most important Chief Justice, John Marshall influenced our constitutional, political, and economic development as much as any American. He handed down landmark decisions on judicial review, federal-state relations, contracts, corporations, and commercial regulation during a thirty-four year tenure that encompassed five presidencies, a second war of independence, the demise of the first American party system, and the advent of Jacksonianism and market capitalism. This is the first interpretive study of Marshall's early life that emphasizes the formative influences on him before he joined the Court. By that time his character and attitudes were fully formed through his childhood in the Virginia gentry, his service in the state militia and Continental Army, and his work as a prominent lawyer, a Federalist, and a diplomat. Drawing heavily on Marshall's own writings, this study views his pre-Supreme Court life as a cumulative experience that formed the identity and value system that he brought to bear on his experiences as Chief Justice. Robarge examines Marshall's social and political "education" in the unique milieu of late 18th century Virginia for its own intrinsic interest, as well as for its relationship to his profound contribution to the Court. The events and situations that shaped Marshall's personality and attitudes directly influenced his leadership style. They also had a deep impact upon his efforts to establish an independent judiciary, to unify the nation through territorial expansion and a legal "common market," and to revive the moribund Federalist party as a balance to the dominant Republicans led by the cousin he detested, Thomas Jefferson.
This book exposes the 'hidden' history of marital violence and explores its place in English family life between the Restoration and the mid-nineteenth century. In a time before divorce was easily available and when husbands were popularly believed to have the right to beat their wives, Elizabeth Foyster examines the variety of ways in which men, women and children responded to marital violence. For contemporaries this was an issue that raised central questions about family life: the extent of men's authority over other family members, the limitations of women's property rights, and the problems of access to divorce and child custody. Opinion about the legitimacy of marital violence continued to be divided but by the nineteenth century ideas about what was intolerable or cruel violence had changed significantly. This accessible study will be invaluable reading for anyone interested in gender studies, feminism, social history and family history.
This book is a reconstruction of the kingship and politics of the third Tudor king of England, Edward VI (born 1537), who reigned between 1547 (from the age of nine) until his death in 1553. The reign has often been interpreted as a period of political instability, mainly because of the king's age. This book explores how the reign was remarkably stable; and also how, during the reign of Elizabeth I (1558-1603) the Edwardian idea of what it was to be a monarch--and many of the same men who had served Edward VI as councillors and courtiers--dominated Tudor politics.
The Edict of Nantes of 1598 is traditionally celebrated as an enlightened act of religious toleration ending the long and bloody conflict of the French religious wars. It is often forgotten, however, that it was preceded by a series of increasingly elaborate royal edicts which sought to pacify the country and to reconcile Protestant and Catholic. This book provides the first comprehensive overview of the process of peacemaking to cover the whole period of the wars throughout the French kingdom. It re-examines the sometimes fraught relationship between the crown and its subjects: the nobility, regional authorities, and urban communities, as well as confessional groups dissatisfied with royal policy. Through a wide-ranging and close analysis of archival sources, it re-evaluates both the role of royal authority and of local agency in the peace process, and provides a new perspective on the political, religious, social and cultural history of the conflict.
The foundation of the English state from the reigns of the Tudors to the age of Queen Victoria was a partnership between the crown and the country gentlemen who exercised administration and justice in the localities. This book is about a formative period in the making of that partnership. Anthony Fletcher suggests that the gentry's vigorous response to a gathering social crisis in the early decades of the seventeenth century enabled them to strengthen their nearly dominant hold upon local power. Although reform in the provinces, directed towards improving the efficiency and effectiveness of government, was not a tidy or even an entirely consistent process, there was enough continuity of administrative effort to ensure that by the reign of Queen Anne the enforcement of order had been streamlined in many respects. This book - the first synthesis of work done in the last two decades on local government - also provides fresh archival data on a number of counties. Fletcher begins with an account of the men who held office as justices of the peace and of their relationships with the Council in London and with the villagers they governed. He then explores in detail the world of the magistrate at work, paying particular attention to initiatives directed towards increasing the tempo of government and to the making of magisterial policy. In the second half of the book, Fletcher utilizes three case studies - of poverty, behaviour, and the militia - to explain the obstacles in the way of reform and assess how it was sometimes achieved. By analyzing the patterns, style, and impetus of the government that magistrates and deputy lieutenants achieved, Fletcher is able to explore fundamental changes in the nature and extent of gentry control and in the attitudes of the gentry to the public service. His book is an important and original contribution to Stuart and Restoration history. Anthony Fletcher has been Professor of History at the Universities of Sheffield, Durham and Essex, and Director of the Victoria County History Project at London University. His books include 'Gender, Sex, and Subordination in England, 1500-1800', published by Yale.
"Divided into three sections on cosmetics, clothes and hairstyling, this book explores how early modern women regarded beauty culture and in what waysskin, clothes and hair could be used to represent racial, class and gender identities, and to convey political, religious and philosophical ideals"--
Definitive account of the English garrison at Calais - the largest contemporary force in Europe - in the wider context of European warfare in the middle ages. This is the book on the Calais garrison we have been waiting for. COLIN RICHMOND For over 200 years, following its capture by Edward III in 1347, the town of Calais was in English hands; after 1453 it remained the last English possession on the continent, a commercial, cultural, diplomatic and military frontier, until its recapture by the French in 1558. This book - the first full-length study so to do - examines the Calais garrison, the largest standing military force available to the English crown. Based on extensive archival research, it covers recruitment and service in the garrison, the problems of pay and logistics, the weaponry and tactics used, and the chivalric and professional ethos among the soldiers. It also investigates the effectiveness of English arms against their European counterparts, through a detailed study of the failed Burgundian siege of 1436 and the successful French siege of 1558. Overall, it reaffirms the importance of Calais to successive medieval and early modern English kings, and challenges the perceived notion that England lagged behind its northwest European rivals in terms of military technology and effectiveness. The Calais garrison is placed in the wider context of the development of European warfare in general during this period. Dr DAVID GRUMMITT is Lecturer in British History, University of Kent.
This is an exciting new biography of Thomas Cardinal Wolsey, one of the most powerful men in English history whose impact was as great in Church affairs as those of the State. The accession of Henry VIII provided the catalyst for Wolsey's dramatic rise to power and in 1514 he received first the bishopric of Lincoln and then the archbishopric of York. A month after his receipt of the coveted Cardinal's hat in 1515, Wolsey became lord chancellor, making him the king's principal minister and England's senior judge, despite having no formal education in the law.His greatest diplomatic achievements included the 1518 treaty of London (the 'universal peace'), in which he played the quasi-papal role of engineering an accord between most of the states of Europe and secured the betrothal of Princess Mary with the infant dauphin. Thanks to Wolsey, England enjoyed unprecedented influence among the states of Europe, and never more so than in 1520, when the cardinal masterminded the spectacular Anglo-French summit meeting at the Field of the Cloth of Gold.Wolsey's pan-European vision ensured that he was well aware of the threat posed by Martin Luther's theological revolution and campaign against clerical abuses. He therefore sought to nip English heresy in the bud by taking decisive action against known religious radicals and by founding Cardinal College (now Christ Church), Oxford, with a view to forming well-educated priests who would combat heresy and institute ecclesiastical reform from within the hierarchy. Among England's senior churchmen, only Wolsey might have executed such a strategy, but circumstances were combining to thwart his plans. It was ironic that Wolsey, the arbiter of European interstate relations, was frustrated and ultimately disgraced by the essentially domestic problem of the king's determination that Anne Boleyn should be his wife and the mother of his legitimate heir. Stella Fletcher has written an engaging and dramatic biography of this colossus of the Tudor age.
This book provides a political narrative of the rise and fall of the Tudor monarchy - key to understanding the history of the years 1450 to 1660. The theme is the relationship between the Crown and the aristocracy and how a partnership was created partly by the actions of the Crown and partly by the changing composition and attitudes of the political nation. It begins with the chaos of factional quarrels which was the political life of England under Henry VI in the 1450s and then examines the rebuilding of the strength of royal government under Edward IV, Henry VII and Henry VIII. That government was tested in various ways under Edward VI and Mary, reached its peak under Elizabeth, and declined under James I. The partnership finally broke down in the civil war of the 1640s and the Tudor monarchy collapsed. This is the life cycle of a political system created out of necessity and fashioned by a mixture of vision and circumstance. After its collapse the Republic failed to create a viable alternative, but the resurrection of the old system after 1660 was more apparent than real.
Elizabeth I is probably the most famous English woman ever to have lived. She has been celebrated as a great stateswoman, during whose reign England acquired some degree of security in the troubled European arena and at the same time began to lay the foundations for its future empire. She presided over a country undergoing a cultural renaissance previously unimagined. By the time of her death at the age of seventy in 1603, she was being heralded as rival to the Virgin Mary, as a second Queen of Earth and Heaven, as a woman more than mortal women. She has provided subject-matter for innumerable books: seventy biographies have appeared since 1890 and it is impossible to list the enormous number of historical novels based on some part of her life.However, among the many books written about Elizabeth I there is none like this one: Bassnett looks at the life and achievements of Elizabeth from a twentieth-century feminist perspective and considers her as writer, politician, scholar and woman. As a result she succeeds in presenting a more rounded portrait of a figure who has fascinated successive generations but whose private and public life has frequently been the subject of fantasy and speculation.
One of the most beautiful maps to survive the Great Age of Discoveries, the 1513 world map drawn by Ottoman admiral Piri Reis is also one of the most mysterious. Gregory McIntosh has uncovered new evidence in the map that shows it to be among the most important ever made. This detailed study offers new commentary and explication of a major milestone in cartography. Correcting earlier work of Paul Kahle and pointing out the traps that have caught subsequent scholars, McIntosh disproves the dubious conclusion that the Reis map embodied Columbus's Third Voyage map of 1498, showing that it draws instead on the Second Voyage of 1493-1496. He also refutes the popular misinterpretation that Reis's depictions of Antarctica are evidence of either ancient civilizations or extraterrestrial visitation. McIntosh brings together all that has been previously known about the map and also assembles for the first time the translations of all inscriptions on the map and analyzes all place-names given for New World and Atlantic islands. His work clarifies long-standing mysteries and opens up new ways of looking at the history of exploration.
Nowhere is the mid-20th century 'historiographical revolution' in Irish history better represented than in the writings of J. G. Simms, one of the most prolific historians of this generation. In a stream of books and papers from the early 1950s to his death in 1979, Simms tackled some of the most vexed and vexing questions in all Irish history: the wars, confiscations, persecutions and politics of the later 17th century. Topics such as Cromwell's sieges, the 'Glorious Revolution' and its aftermath, the later passage of the infamous 'penal laws' against Catholics are all episodes close to the heart of modern myth-makers, and yet all are described by Simms with fairness and exemplary clarity. This is a collection of his key essays, all of which remain a valuable resource for scholars of war and politics in early modern Ireland.
This interdisciplinary work, the first of two volumes, presents essays on various aspects of disease, medicine, and healing in different locations in and around the Indian Ocean from the ninth century to the early modern period. Themes include theoretical explanations for disease, concepts of fertility, material culture, healing in relation to diplomacy and colonialism, public health, and the health of slaves and migrant workers. Overall, the books argue that, throughout the period of study, the Indian Ocean has been the site of multiple interconnected medical interactions that may be viewed in the context of the environmental factors connecting the region. The two volumes are the first to use the Indian Ocean World as a geographical and conceptual framework for the study of disease. It will appeal to academics and graduate students working in the fields of medical and scientific history, as well as in the growing fields of Indian Ocean studies and global history.
In 1644 the Qing dynasty seized power in China. Its Manchu elite were at first seen by most of their subjects as foreigners from beyond the Great Wall, and the consolidation of Qing rule presented significant cultural and political problems, as well as military challenges. It was the Kangxi emperor (r. 1662-1722) who set the dynasty on a firm footing, and one of his main stratagems to achieve this was the appropriation for imperial purposes of the scientific knowledge brought to China by the Jesuit mission (1582-1773). For almost two centuries, the Jesuits put the sciences in the service of evangelization, teaching and practising what came to be known as 'Western learning' among Chinese scholars, many of whom took an active interest in it. After coming to the throne as a teenager, Kangxi began his life-long intervention in mathematical and scientific matters when he forced a return to the use of Western methods in official astronomy. In middle life, he studied astronomy, musical theory and mathematics, with Jesuits as his teachers. In his last years he sponsored a great compilation covering these three disciplines, and set several of his sons to work on this project. All of this activity formed a vital part of his plan to establish Manchu authority over the Chinese. This book explains why Kangxi made the sciences a tool for laying the foundations of empire, and to show how, as part of this process, mathematics was reconstructed as a branch of imperial learning.
"The Free and Open Press ought to be required reading whenever
anyone questions the meaning of the Founding Fathers, the framers
of the Constitution, or other early American icons of
liberty." "Robert W. T. Martin revitalizes a debate over the status of
press rights in eighteenth-century America that had grown tiresome
over the past 20 years...all scholars of American political thought
and constitutional development should read this book." "Martin uses a number of fresh quotations and a helpful
arranging and packaging of many ideas on a momentous topic." "Martin is not the first to examine that familiar topic, but his
is the most heavily contextualized discussion of the topic yet and
the most ambitious in scope." "In a welcome contrast to many recent studies (and museum
exhibitions), Martin sees a clear, prima facie party distinction on
the issue of press freedom." The current, heated debates over hate speech and pornography were preceded by the equally contentious debates over the "free and open press" in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Thus far little scholarly attention has been focused on the development of the concept of political press freedom even though it is a form of civil liberty that was pioneered in the United States. But the establishment of press liberty had implications that reached far beyond mere free speech. In this groundbreaking work, Robert Martin demonstrates that the history of the "free and open press" is in many ways the story of the emergence and first realexpansions of the early American public sphere and civil society itself. Through a careful analysis of early libel law, the state and federal constitutions, and the Sedition Act crisis Martin shows how the development of constitutionalism and civil liberties were bound up in the discussion of the "free and open press." Finally, this book is a study of early American political thought and democratic theory, as seen through the revealing window provided by press liberty discourse. It speaks to broad audiences concerned with the public square, the history of the book, free press history, contemporary free expression controversies, legal history, and conceptual history.
Based upon a wide range of historical and literary sources, An Apprenticeship in Arms is a scholarly study of the military experiences of peers and gentlemen from the British Isles who volunteered to fight in the religious and dynastic wars of mainland Europe, as well as the ordinary men who were impressed to serve in the ranks from the time of the English intervention in the Dutch war of independence in 1585 to the death of the soldier-king William III in 1702. This apprenticeship in arms exposed these men to the technological innovations of the military revolution, laid the foundations for a fledgling professional officer class based upon merit and established a fund of military expertise. This remilitarization of aristocratic culture and society was completed by 1640, and provided numerous experienced military officers for the various armies of the civil wars and, subsequently, for the embryonic British army after William III invaded and conquered the British Isles and committed the Three Kingdoms to the armed struggle against Louis XIV during the Nine Years War. Conflicts between amateur aristocrats and so-called 'soldiers of fortune' led to continuing debates about the relative merits of standing armies and a select militia; the individual pursuit of honour and glory by such amateurs also obscured the more rational military and political objectives of the modern state, subverted military discipline, and delayed the process of the professionalization of the officer corps of the British army.
The 1670s were the heyday of Restoration England - a period of
experimentation, politicization, and strife. This decade was a
crucial period in England's history, yet surprisingly little has
been written about it. This book - the first full-length study of
the period - fills this gap in the literature by exploring the
richness and complexity of the decade, and by challenging existing
assumptions about it. For those new to the period this book contains the full story of politics, war, and religion, as well as a clear account of the popish plot and exclusion crises. More than this, however, it is indispensable for anyone who wants to fully understand Restoration history, literature or society. Drawing on maps, sermons, diaries, tracts, news and a range of literary sources to explore subjects as diverse as prostitution, piety, wit, cartography, commerce, heroism, and the 'talk of the town', "England in the 1670s" paints a revealing and vibrant portrait of a society grappling with change. |
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