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.

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.

It is widely recognized that the sixteenth-century Reformation remains one of the most fascinating and exciting areas of scholarship. A central and important question, raised by intensive modern research on the Renaissance and late medieval scholasticism, concerns the intellectual origins of the Reformation. This updated and expanded version of the original, highly-acclaimed edition of 1987 explores the complex intellectual roots of the Reformation, offering a sustained engagement with the ideas of humanism and scholasticism. McGrath demonstrates how the intellectual origins of the Reformation were heterogeneous, and draws out the implications of this finding for our understanding of the Reformation as a whole. McGrath's reading of the Reformation against its complex intellectual background opens up new insights into this highly significant historical phenomenon. Yet this is more than a fascinating exploration in the history of ideas: it is also a defence of the entire enterprise of intellectual history in the face of social historical approaches, and a reaffirmation of the importance of ideas to the development of history.

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.

"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.

Since humans first emerged as a distinct species, they have eaten, fought, prayed, and moved with other animals. In this stunningly original and conceptually rich book, historian Alan Mikhail puts the history of human-animal relations at the center of transformations in the Ottoman Empire from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Mikhail uses the history of the empire's most important province, Egypt, to explain how human interactions with livestock, dogs, and charismatic megafauna changed more in a few centuries than they had for millennia. The human world became one in which animals' social and economic functions were diminished. Without animals, humans had to remake the societies they had built around intimate and cooperative interactions between species. The political and even evolutionary consequences of this separation of people and animals were wrenching and often violent. This book's interspecies histories underscore continuities between the early modern period and the nineteenth century and help to reconcile Ottoman and Arab histories. Further, the book highlights the importance of integrating Ottoman history with issues in animal studies, economic history, early modern history, and environmental history. Carefully crafted and compellingly argued, The Animal in Ottoman Egypt tells the story of the high price humans and animals paid as they entered the modern world.

France and England are often seen as monarchies standing at opposite ends of the spectrum of seventeenth-century European political culture. On the one hand the Bourbon monarchy took the high road to absolutism, while on the other the Stuarts never quite recovered from the diminution of their royal authority following the regicide of Charles I in 1649. However, both monarchies shared a common medieval heritage of sacral kingship, and their histories remained deeply entangled throughout the century. This study focuses on the interaction between ideas of monarchy and images of power in the two countries between the execution of Mary Queen of Scots and the Glorious Revolution. It demonstrates that even in periods when politics were seemingly secularized, as in France at the end of the Wars of Religion, and in latter seventeenth- century England, the appeal to religious images and values still lent legitimacy to royal authority by emphasizing the sacral aura or providential role which church and religion conferred on monarchs.

This edited collection explores the axis where monstrosity and borderlands meet to reflect the tensions, apprehensions, and excitement over the radical changes of the early modern era. The book investigates the monstrous as it acts in liminal spaces in the Renaissance and the era of Enlightenment. Zones of interaction include chronological change - from the early New World encounters through the seventeenth century - and cultural and scientific changes, in the margins between national boundaries, and also cultural and intellectual boundaries.

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.

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 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 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 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.

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.

Multiculturalism has long been linked to calls for tolerance of cultural diversity, but today many observers are subjecting the concept to close scrutiny. After the political upheavals of 1968, the commitment to multiculturalism was perceived as a liberal manifesto, but in the post-9/11 era, it is under attack for its relativizing, particularist, and essentializing implications. The essays in this collection offer a nuanced analysis of the multifaceted cultural experience of Central Europe under the late Habsburg monarchy and beyond. The authors examine how culturally coded social spaces can be described and understood historically without adopting categories formerly employed to justify the definition and separation of groups into nations, ethnicities, or homogeneous cultures. As we consider the issues of multiculturalism today, this volume offers new approaches to understanding multiculturalism in Central Europe freed of the effects of politically exploited concepts of social spaces.

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.

A Times History Book of the Year 2022 A TLS Book of the Year 2022 'Exhilarating and whip-smart' THE SUNDAY TIMES From award-winning writer Edward Wilson-Lee, this is a thrilling true historical detective story set in sixteenth-century Portugal. A History of Water follows the interconnected lives of two men across the Renaissance globe. One of them - an aficionado of mermen and Ethiopian culture, an art collector, historian and expert on water-music - returns home from witnessing the birth of the modern age to die in a mysterious incident, apparently the victim of a grisly and curious murder. The other - a ruffian, vagabond and braggart, chased across the globe from Mozambique to Japan - ends up as the national poet of Portugal. The stories of Damiao de Gois and Luis de Camoes capture the extraordinary wonders that awaited Europeans on their arrival in India and China, the challenges these marvels presented to longstanding beliefs, and the vast conspiracy to silence the questions these posed about the nature of history and of human life. Like all good mysteries, everyone has their own version of events.

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.

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.

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 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.

Based on hitherto unexplored and unpublished legal and business records, this study presents the fullest account so far published of any London printing firm in the reign of James I. In particular it examines the businesses of men associated with that crucial instrument of cultural production-the King's Printing House. This institution stood four-square at the top of the London printing and publishing trade, for it monopolized the right to print the Bible, Book of Common Prayer, and other indispensable works promoted or encouraged by the king. The office of King's Printer, initially owned by Robert Barker, was potentially very lucrative, and so attracted the predatory attentions of the prosperous book-trade partnership of John and Bonham Norton, and John Bill. The stage was set for bitter rivalry between Barker and his opponents, rivalry which involved sharp practice, deceit, bullying, and downright thuggery-with lawsuits to match. Barker was no fool yet he was up against very able, resourceful individuals who understood better than Barker that they were in business to promote the king's politico-cultural programme, and extend his influence at home and abroad. That is exactly what John Norton and John Bill did, and to such good effect and with his unique experience of the domestic and continental book trade, Bill eventually became the greatest London book trader, printer, publisher, disseminator of ideas, and cultural entrepreneur of his generation.

Exam board: OCR Level: A-level Subject: History First teaching: September 2015 First exams: Summer 2016 Target success in OCR A-level History with this proven formula for effective, structured revision; key content coverage is combined with exam preparation activities and exam-style questions to create a revision guide that students can rely on to review, strengthen and test their knowledge. - Enables students to plan and manage a successful revision programme using the topic-by-topic planner - Consolidates knowledge with clear and focused content coverage, organised into easy-to-revise chunks - Encourages active revision by closely combining historical content with related activities - Helps students build, practise and enhance their exam skills as they progress through activities set at three different levels - Improves exam technique through exam-style questions with sample answers and commentary from expert authors and teachers - Boosts historical knowledge with a useful glossary and timeline