What kind of political representation existed in the Ancien Regime? Which social sectors were given a voice, and how were they represented in the institutions? These are some of the issues addressed by the authors of this book from different institutional angles (monarchies and republics; parliaments and municipalities), from various European territories and finally from a connected and comparative perspective. The aim is twofold: analyse the different mechanisms of political representation before Liberalism, their strengths and limitations; value the processes of oligarchisation and the possible mismatch between a libertarian model and a reality which was far from its idealised image.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This book presents a uniquely broad and pioneering history of premodern toxicology by exploring how late medieval and early modern (c. 1200-1600) physicians discussed the relationship between poison, medicine, and disease. Drawing from a wide range of medical and natural philosophical texts-with an emphasis on treatises that focused on poison, pharmacotherapeutics, plague, and the nature of disease-this study brings to light premodern physicians' debates about the potential existence, nature, and properties of a category of substance theoretically harmful to the human body in even the smallest amount. Focusing on the category of poison (venenum) rather than on specific drugs reframes and remixes the standard histories of toxicology, pharmacology, and etiology, as well as shows how these aspects of medicine (although not yet formalized as independent disciplines) interacted with and shaped one another. Physicians argued, for instance, about what properties might distinguish poison from other substances, how poison injured the human body, the nature of poisonous bodies, and the role of poison in spreading, and to some extent defining, disease. The way physicians debated these questions shows that poison was far from an obvious and uncontested category of substance, and their effort to understand it sheds new light on the relationship between natural philosophy and medicine in the late medieval and early modern periods.

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 book explores the political and religious world of early Bourbon France, focusing on the search for stable accord that characterised its political and religious life. Chapters examine developments that shaped the Bourbon realm through the century: assertions of royal authority, rules of political negotiation, and the evolution of "Devot "piety.

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 documents assembled in this volume were selected by Sir John Neale and many of them were used in his study of the House of Commons and in his two-volume study of Elizabeth's parliaments. They may be divided into the diaries or journals complied by individual members on the one hand, and on the other, separate accounts of speeches intended for, or delivered, in Parliament, and of other proceedings relating to single issues. The principles on which this compilation has been presented are consistent with those followed in the first volume, subject to the modification adopted in the second.

The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth is often considered an "aberration" where monarchy was reduced by the nobility to impotence. This collection assesses the institution and idea of monarchy within the Commonwealth's mixed form of government, with emphasis on the perspectives from the Lithuanian and Prussian components of the Commonwealth, and on international comparisons.

Two hundred years ago in Florida, the valleys of the St. Marys and the St. Johns seethed with intrigue as a band of settlers audaciously conspired to overthrow the Spanish colonial government. Long a specialist in Florida history, Congressman Charles E. Bennett in this book traces France's attempt to gain control of Florida in 1793-95 by supporting this abortive rebellion.

From a wilderness inhabited only by Indians Florida evolved into a region of wealth in Indian trade and one of political importance to rival European factions. Discovered by Spain in the early sixteenth century, Florida's northern frontier was colonized in the late 1700s, mainly by Anglo-Saxons who were unhappy living under Spanish rule.

Initially supported by the French, a group of the colonists plotted a revolt, which was officially repudiated by France in 1794 when its governing power changed hands. The Anglo-Saxons continued the conspiracy, quietly encouraged by the French. Eventually arrested and tried by the Spanish, many of these men were landowners who had sworn loyalty to Spain. Bennett has recreated this intriguing scenario through translations of the original Spanish documents of the criminal proceedings against these revolutionaries and through their personal correspondence.

Bennett places these events in the contemporary scene of European and American affairs: the United States playing the careful and ambiguous role of a neutral, marking the beginnings of an American foreign policy; France, in revolt at home and at war with Spain, struggling to gain a foothold in the New World; and Spain, trying to maintain its weakening hold in North America. The territorial ambitions of these three nations mirrored ideological and political conflicts in Europe and helped to shape the two-party system in the United States.

The Writing of Rural England 1500-1800 documents and contextualizes the conflicting representations of rural life during a crucial period of social, economic and cultural change. It highlights the dialogues and tensions between agriculture and aesthetics, economics and morality, men and women, leisure and labor. By drawing on both canonical and marginal texts, it argues that early-modern writing not only reflected but played a part in constructing the cultural meanings of the English countryside with which we continue to live.

Within a year of its victory over King Charles I in 1646, the New Model Army became a powerful force in English politics when it defied Parliament's orders to disband and set up its own democratic institution, the General Council of the Army. Its soldiers elected "agitators" as their spokesmen, who met with the generals to discuss not only the grievances of the army but also the settlement of the kingdom--contesting the very foundations of political authority. Shedding new light on the origins and proceedings of the agitators, Soldiers and Statesmen offers a reinterpretation of a critical turning point in the Great Rebellion, and suggests that the army which eventually brought the king to the scaffold would have restored him to his throne if he had given more weight to its offers.

This is the first dedicated study of the musical patronage of Roman baronial families in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Patronage - the support of a person or institution and their work by a patron - in Renaissance society was the basis of a complex network of familial and political relationships between clients and patrons, whose ideas, values, and norms of behavior were shared with the collective. Bringing to light new archival documentation, this book examines the intricate network of patronage interrelationships in Rome. Unlike other Italian cities where political control was monocentric and exercised by single rulers, sources of patronage in Rome comprised a multiplicity of courts and potential patrons, which included the pope, high prelates, nobles and foreign diplomats. Morucci uses archival records, and the correspondence of the Orsini and Colonna families in particular, to investigate the local activity and circulation of musicians and the cultivation of music within the broader civic network of Roman aristocratic families over the period. The author also shows that the familial union of the Medici and Orsini families established a bidirectional network for artistic exchange outside of the Eternal City, and that the Orsini-Colonna circle represented a musical bridge between Naples, Rome, and Florence.

Culture does not become 'culture' until it is consumed. This is the radical new interpretation of early modern social history presented in The Consumption of Culture 1600-1800.
Leading specialists from North America and Europe explore topics such as the formation of a culture consuming public, the development of a literary canon, the role of consumption in the formation of the modern state, elite and popular forms of cultural consumption and the place of women as consumers of culture. The result is an important and rich new approach to the study of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

This book investigates how the Children of Paul's (1599-1606) and the Children of the Queen's Revels (1600-13) defined their players as children and, via an analysis of their plays and theatrical practices, it examines early modern theatre as a site in which children have the opportunity to articulate their emerging selfhoods.

Companies which can demonstrate successful business performance accept that information is a valuable asset in contributing to that success. That is the conclusion reached in "Information and Business Performance" which presents the results of research into the relationship between effective information systems and business performance. It sheds new light on the complex relationships between the role of information in business and successful performance, and should be required reading for anyone working in this field.

In this provocative study, David W. Hall argues that the American founders were more greatly influenced by Calvinism than contemporary scholars, and perhaps even the founders themselves, have understood. Calvinism's insistence on human rulers' tendency to err played a significant role in the founders' prescription of limited government and fed the distinctly American philosophy in which political freedom for citizens is held as the highest value. Hall's timely work countervails many scholars' doubt in the intellectual efficacy of religion by showing that religious teachings have led to such progressive ideals as American democracy and freedom.

Through its extensive use of primary source materials and provision of explanations, this book places readers into the context of late 17th-century Salem to shed light on one of the darkest events in American history-the Salem witch trials. The Salem witch trials are one of the most fascinating events in American history. Despite being commonly covered in school curricula, the nature of the trials are often misunderstood. This book enables readers to get unique perspective and insight into the nature of this event through a representative selection of primary source materials, each of which is prefaced with explanatory editorial comments. The result is a work that clarifies the belief systems and religious and social culture of 17th century Massachusetts and places them into a comprehensible context to make sense of how the Salem witch trials came to happen. The book provides an introductory overview of the Salem witch trials, which is followed by an array of primary sources that tell the Salem story in the words of both the accusers and the victims of that episode. Editorial commentary accompanies each of the documents, placing it into its historical framework and clearly explaining archaic terminology and testimony. The primary sources used in this work are drawn from the vast archive of Salem witch trial sources, including court testimonies, court depositions, commentary from journals, miscellaneous court records such as arrest and death warrants, and writings by contemporary critics of the trials. This broad and balanced mix of documents gives students of the Salem witch trials a unique sense of the extent and impact of this event on the people of colonial Massachusetts as well as the complexity of the event. Examines the individual cases of many of the victims of the more than year-long Salem witch trials episode Clarifies the historical context of the belief systems and culture of 17th-century Massachusetts to enable modern readers to grasp how such an unbelievable series of events could have happened in that specific era Introduces contemporary audiences to the meaning of the archaic language and ideas of the late 1600s as used in the primary documents

Print Letters in Seventeenth-Century England investigates how and why letters were printed in the interrelated spheres of political contestation, religious controversy, and news culture-those published as pamphlets, as broadsides, and in newsbooks in the interests of ideological disputes and as political and religious propaganda. The epistolary texts examined in this book, be they fictional, satirical, collected, or authentic, were written for, or framed to have, a specific persuasive purpose, typically an ideological or propagandistic one. This volume offers a unique exploration into the crucial interface of manuscript culture and print culture where tremendous transformations occur, when, for instance, at its most basic level, a handwritten letter composed by a single individual and meant for another individual alone comes, either intentionally or not, into the purview of hundreds or even thousands of people. This essential context, a solitary exchange transmuted via print into an interaction consumed by many, serves to highlight the manner in which letters were exploited as propaganda and operated as vehicles of cultural narrative.

Elizabeth I is one of England's most admired and celebrated rulers. She is also one of its most iconic. This wide-ranging interdisciplinary collection of essays examines the origins and development of the image and myths that came to surround the Virgin Queen. The essays question the prevailing assumptions about the mythic Elizabeth and challenge the view that she was unanimously celebrated in the literature and portraiture of the early modern era. They explain how the most familiar myths surrounding the queen developed from the concerns of her contemporaries and continue to reverberate today. Published to mark the 400th anniversary of the queen's death, this volume will appeal to all those with an interest in the historiography of Elizabeth's reign and Elizabethan, and Jacobean, poets and dramatists.