This core textbook gathers an international team of historians to present a comprehensive account of the central themes in the histories of Britain, British America, and the British Caribbean seen in Atlantic perspective. This collection of individual essays provides an accessible overview of essential themes, such as the state, empire, migration, the economy, religion, race, class, gender, politics, and slavery. This new and revised edition brings this text up to date with recent work in the field of Atlantic history and extends its scope to cover themes not treated in the first edition, notably the history of science and global history. Placing the British Atlantic world in imperial and global contexts, this book offers an indispensable survey of one of the liveliest fields of current historical enquiry. This text is a primary resource for both undergraduate and postgraduate students of History, particularly those taking modules on Early Modern British History, Colonial American History, Early American History, Caribbean History, Atlantic History and World History. Together, the essays also provide a useful starting point for researchers in British, American, imperial and Atlantic history.

The first book to examine Queen Elizabeth I as a "learned prince," "Learned Queen" reveals a rather startling phenomenon: Elizabeth's educated status was crucial to England's burgeoning role as an international power. Examining Elizabeth's own demonstrations of erudition alongside literary works of such political luminaries as Sir Philip Sidney and Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, this book reveals how poetry, foreign relations, and intellectual culture are far more integrated than we have hitherto imagined. From these connections emerges a methodology that places Elizabethan political culture and poetry fully on the transnational stage.

In Search of the Way is a history of intellectual and religious developments in Japan during the Tokugawa period, covering the years 1582-1860. It begins with an explanation of the fate of Christianity, and proceeds to cover the changing nature of the relationship between Buddhism and secular authority, new developments in Shinto, and the growth of 'Japanese studies'. The main emphasis, however, is on the process by which Neo-Confucianism captured the imagination of the intellectual class and informed debate throughout the period. This process was expressed in terms of a never-ending search for the Way, a mode and pattern of existence that could provide not only order for society at large, but self-fulfilment for the individual. The narrative traces how ideas and attitudes changed through time, and is based on the premise that the Tokugawa period is important in and of itself, not merely as a backdrop to the Meiji Restoration of 1868.

What happened to the medieval romance genre during and after the Protestant Reformation in England? Who read these works; who printed them; and what did they mean to the varied audiences encountering them? Through a cross-temporal study using book history, reception history and cultural memory studies, this book argues that the medieval romances printed across the early modern period provided a flexible space for post-Reformation readers to negotiate their relationships with the recent 'medieval' past, a past that was becoming, for some, increasingly distanced from the present. In exploring the complex entanglements of time and technology that accrue on the pages of the post-Reformation romance book, Difficult Pasts offers an interdisciplinary framework for better understanding the role of physical books and imaginative forms in grappling with a 'difficult' past. -- .

Recent debate over the English Reformation has turned around how Catholic the nation was before the Reformation. Most scholars now believe that there was little popular support for the change in religion imposed by Henry VIII. And yet, by the end of Elizabeth's reign England was clearly Protestant. It had abandoned much of its late Medieval culture and replaced it with a new formulation. The book explores how the English, over three generations, adapted to the religious changes and, in the process, radically reconstructed their culture.

Using personal histories, the author explores how individuals and the institutions in which they lived and worked, such as families, universities, towns, guilds, and Inns of Court, refashioned themselves in the face of the rapid social, ideological, political and economic changes brought about by the Reformation. Tracing these responses across three generations, the author emphasizes the way generational interaction and self interest interrelated to adapt to new circumstances, creating, by the late sixteenth century, a multi-theological culture that exalted nationalism and valued the individual conscience.

The first expansive study of how when the Popish Plot of 1678 came to light, fears of an Irish Catholic rebellion amongst Ireland's uneasy Protestant elite, who dominated over the Catholic majority population, were manipulated in England in an attempt to block the Catholic Duke of York from succeeding to the throne.

Moving beyond the preoccupation of honour and its associations with violence and sexual reputation, Courtney Thomas offers an intriguing investigation of honour's social meanings amongst early modern elites in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. If I Lose Mine Honour I Lose Myself reveals honour's complex role as a representational strategy amongst the aristocracy. Thomas' erudite and detailed investigation of multi-generational family papers as well as legal records and prescriptive sources develops a fuller picture of how the concept of honour was employed, often in contradictory ways in daily life. Whether considering economic matters, marriage arrangements, supervision of servants, household management, mediation, or political engagement, Thomas argues that while honour was invoked as a structuring principle of social life its meanings were diffuse and varied. Paradoxically, it is the malleability of honour that made it such an enduring social value with very real meaning for early modern men and women.

This is the first scholarly study of the political and economic relationship between Louis XIV and the parlements of France, the Parlement of Paris and all the provincial tribunals. The author explains how the king managed to impose strict political discipline for which this reign, and only this reign, is known. Hurt shows that the king built upon that discipline to extract large sums of money from the judges in the parlements, thus damaging their economic interests. When the king died in 1715, the regent, Philippe d'Orleans, after a brief attempt to befriend the parlements through compromise, resorted to the authoritarian methods of Louis XIV and perpetuated the Sun King's political and economic legacy. This study calls into question current revisionist understanding of Louis XIV and insists that absolute government had a harsh reality at its core. Based upon extensive archival research, this remarkable book will be of interest to all students of the history of early modern France and the monarchies of Europe. -- .

The political, social, and economic problems of southern Africa cannot be resolved until nations of this critical region effect educational reform. But this process requires more than change in the educational system; it involves the thrust for social transformation in national institutions. This unique study addresses key issues relative to both educational reform and social change in southern Africa. Topics discussed include the need for educational reform; approaches to educational reform; and the results of such reform on the individual and society. A bibliography and an index complete the text.

For German townsmen, life during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was characterized by a culture of arms, with urban citizenry representing the armed power of the state. This book investigates how men were socialized to the martial ethic from all sides, and how masculine identity was confirmed with blades and guns.

This is a fresh look at the impact of the English Reformation at parish level. It provides a perceptive exploration of the role of the Catholic priesthood in the church and in the life of the community. Using a wide range of contemporary sources, Dr Marshall demonstrates how the practical consequences of the Reformation undermined the fragile modus vivendi that had sustained the late medieval system.

This book provides a uniquely detailed case study of the origins of millenarianism within the vast opera of one of its earliest and most influential Calvinist exponents: the Herborn encyclopedist Johann Heinrich Alsted (1588-1638). The young Alsted, it emerges, looked forward not to the millennium of Apocalypse 20 but to a brief, final period of enhanced illumination described in a poorly understood central European tradition of astrological, alchemical, spiritualist, and generally occult' prophetic speculation. It was the disasters following the Bohemian Revolt of 1618 which forced Alsted to recast these expectations as the more exclusively scriptural expectation of a literal millennium; and the material for this revision was found in a protracted dispute over the millennium between senior theologians in Herborn and Heidelberg and a little-known work on the conversion of the Jews by one of the figures most probably behind the composition of the Rosicrucian manifestos. Based on study of the full range of Alsted's works, his diverse sources, and widely dispersed manuscript material, the result is the first English book on 17th-century continental millenarianism and the first monograph in any language exclusively devoted to the origins of the doctrine within mainstream Protestantism.

This comprehensive study traces the history of over forty royal free towns from the sixteenth century to 1848 in the territories of what today are Hungary, Slovakia, and Romania. Szelenyi argues that these towns have been a neglected feature of national meta-narratives in Eastern Europe because their dwellers were often German speakers. He calls for a serious reevaluation of urban development in Eastern Europe and for a new meta-narrative that focuses on the region through the lenses of the numerous ethnic diasporas.

John Caius (1510-1573), second founder of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, was an English scholar with an international reputation in his lifetime as a naturalist, historian and medical writer. His Autobibliography is a major contribution to the history of English culture in the middle years of the sixteenth century and has been translated into English for the first time in this book. Beginning with an in-depth introduction to John Caius' life and works, An Autobibliography by John Caius provides a wealth of information to support and accompany the translation of this significant text. In his Autobibliography, Caius lists the books that he wrote but also details the circumstances of their writing. He describes his travels in Italy in search of manuscripts of the ancient Greek doctor Galen of Pergamum as well as giving an insight into his personal life, including his vigorously conservative views, whether on medicine, spelling and pronunciation, or on Cambridge University. His religious views, which led to the ransacking of his rooms by a Cambridge mob, are explored in detail in Appendix II of this book. In Appendix I, recent discoveries of books owned and annotated by Caius are used to supplement what he says about his activities, as well as to trace at least one of his lost works in Italy and Denmark. The resulting picture throws light on European medicine in the sixteenth century, as well as on the humanistic culture that linked learned men and women across Renaissance Europe.

Art history has enriched the study of material culture as a scholarly field. This interdisciplinary volume enhances this literature through the contributors' engagement with gender as the conceptual locus of analysis in terms of femininity, masculinity, and the spaces in between. Collectively, these essays by art historians and museum professionals argue for a more complex understanding of the relationship between objects and subjects in gendered terms. The objects under consideration range from the quotidian to the exotic, including beds, guns, fans, needle paintings, prints, drawings, mantillas, almanacs, reticules, silver punch bowls, and collage. These material goods may have been intended to enforce and affirm gendered norms, however as the essays demonstrate, their use by subjects frequently put normative formations of gender into question, revealing the impossibility of permanently fixing gender in relation to material goods, concepts, or bodies. This book will appeal to art historians, museum professionals, women's and gender studies specialists, students, and all those interested in the history of objects in everyday life.

Selecting journals that speak for a very large number of topics addressed by the conservative press, this volume profiles selected conservative journals published since 1787. The conservative press has scarcely spoken with a single voice, whether the topics treated or even the time inhabited are the same or different. Yet, these journals testify to the persistent vigor and importance of conservatism. Together they provide a focused survey of the history of American conservative thought from the late 18th Century to the late 19th Century. Along with the companion volume covering the 20th Century conservative press, the book provides an important resource on conservative thought in America.

Despite the disparities in conservative intellectual thought, the journals covered, even the more idiosyncratic and extreme, are connected by their core values of conservatism. The book is organized into sections reflecting these connections. The first section covers journals associated with Federal, Whig, or, in the Civil War era, Northern Democratic political interests. A later section includes journals sharing an attachment to Southern conservative values during the antebellum and Reconstruction periods. Two sections deal, respectively, with 19th Century Orthodox Protestant periodicals and 19th Century Catholic and Episcopal journals, and yet another section discusses journals united by a major focus on literary topics and cultural connections.

"Looking East" explores early modern English attitudes toward the Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth century. To a nation just arriving on the international scene, the Ottoman Empire was at once the great enemy and scourge of Christendom, and at the same time the fabulously wealthy and magnificent court from which the sultan ruled over three continents with his great and powerful army. By taking the imaginative, literary and poetic writing about the Ottoman Turks and putting it alongside contemporary historical documents, the book shows that fascination with the Ottoman Empire shaped how the English thought about and represented their own place within the world as a nation with increasing imperial ambitions of its own.

This collection makes available for the first time a rich archive of materials that illuminate the history of racial thought and practices in sixteenth and seventeenth century England. A comprehensive introduction shows how these writings on religion, skin color, sexual and marital practices, geography, and the human body are crucial for understanding the pre-Enlightenment lineages of racial categories.

The province of Roussillon was acquired by France in 1659, just as Louis XIV reached his majority. The region was peopled by Catalans, a group with their own language, religious values, political traditions, and cultural patterns. Louis XIV and his ministers sought to accomplish two goals in the province. First they wanted to compel the Roussillonnais to accept French political supremacy as legitimate, and second they desired to eradicate the Catalan cultural identity in the province. This study examines the means by which the French chose to pursue their goals, and the methods of resistance employed by the inhabitants of Roussillon. It concludes with an examination of why the French ultimately failed to acculturate the province despite their success in asserting their political authority.

This ambitious and important book is a richly detailed account of the ideas and activities in the early-modern 'secret state' and its agencies, spies, informers and intelligencers, under the English Republic and the Cromwellian protectorate. The book investigates the meanings this early-modern Republican state acquired to express itself, by exploring its espionage actions, the moral conundrums, and the philosophical background of secret government in the era. It considers in detail the culture and language of plots, conspiracies, and intrigues and it also exposes how the intelligence activities of the Three Kingdoms began to be situated within early-modern government from the Civil Wars to the rule of Oliver Cromwell. It introduces the reader to some of the personalities who were caught up in this world of espionage, from intelligencers like Thomas Scot and John Thurloe to the men and women who became its secret agents and spies. The book includes stories of activities not just in England, but also in Ireland and Scotland, and it especially investigates intelligence and espionage during the critical periods of the British Civil Wars and the important developments which took place under the English Republic and Oliver Cromwell in the 1650s. The book will appeal to historians, students, teachers, and readers who are fascinated by the secret affairs of intelligence and espionage. -- .

The current debate about the best methods of European organization - central or regional - is influenced by an awareness of regional identity, which offers an alternative to the rigidities of organization by nation-state. Yet where does the sense of regionalism come from? What are the distinctive factors that transform a geographical area into a particular 'region'? Tom Scott addresses these questions in this study of one apparently 'natural' region - the Upper Rhine - between 1450 and 1600. This region has been divided between three countries and so historically marginalized, yet Dr Scott is able to trace the existence of a sense of historical regional identity cutting across national frontiers, founded on common economic interests. But that identity was always contingent and precarious, neither 'natural' nor immutable.

The School of Salamanca in the Affairs of the Indies explores the significance of Salamancans, such as Vitoria and Soto, and related thinkers, such as Las Casas and Sepulveda, in the formation of the early modern political order. It also analyses early modern understandings of political order, with a focus both on the decline of the medieval universal world through the independence and secularization of political community and the establishment of continuous and imbalanced relations between various European and non-European political communities. Through its investigation, this book highlights how Salamancans and related thinkers clearly distinguished their understandings of political order from medieval thought, and did so in a different way to contemporary and later thinkers, such as Machiavelli, Luther, Bodin, and Grotius, particularly with regards to the Indies, "barbarian" worlds. It also reveals the strong contribution of the School of Salamanca in early modern political thought, both internally and externally. Salamancans imposed moral restrictions against "interior barbarism," that is, power beyond law, and included "exterior barbarism," that is, "barbarian" societies, in the common political order. Situating the School of Salamanca in the mainstream history of European political thought, The School of Salamanca in the Affairs of the Indies is ideal for academics and postgraduate students of intellectual history and of Spanish colonial expansion.