Upon declaring independence from Britain in July 1776, the United States Congress urgently needed to establish its credentials as a legitimate government that could credibly challenge the claims of the British Crown. In large measure this legitimacy rested upon setting in place the procedural and legal structures upon which all claims of governmental authority rest. In this book, Aschenbrenner explores the ways in which the nascent United States rapidly built up a system of parliamentary procedure that borrowed heavily from the British government it sought to replace. In particular, he looks at how, over the course of twenty-five years, Thomas Jefferson drew upon the writings of the Chief Clerk of the British Parliament, John Hatsell, to frame and codify American parliamentary procedures. Published in 1801, Jefferson's Manual of Parliamentary Practice for the Use of the Senate of the United States presents rules, instances, citations and commentary as modern readers would expect them to appear, quoting Hatsell and other British authorities numerous times. If the two nations suffered any unpleasant relations in the First War for American Independence - Aschenbrenner concludes - one would be hard pressed to detect it from Jefferson's Manual. Indeed, direct comparison of the House of Commons and the Continental Congress shows remarkable similarities between the ambitions of the two institutions as they both struggled to adapt their political processes to meet the changing national and international circumstances of the late-eighteenth century.

King John's evil reputation has outlasted and proved more enduring than that of Richard III, whose notoriety seemed ensured thanks to Shakespeare's portrayal of him. The paradox is even greater when we realize that this portrait of John endures despite Shakespeare's portrait of him in the play King John, where he hardly comes off as a villain at all. Here Igor Djordjevic argues that the story of John's transformation in cultural memory has never been told completely, perhaps because the crucial moment in John's change back to villainy is a literary one: it occurs at the point when the 'historiographic' trajectory of John's character-development intersects with the 'literary' evolution of Robin Hood. But as Djordjevic reveals, John's second fall in cultural memory became irredeemable as the largely unintended result of the work of three men - John Stow, Michael Drayton, Anthony Munday - who knew each other and who all read a significant passage in a little known book (the Chronicle of Dunmow), while a fourth man's money (Philip Henslowe) helped move the story from page to stage. The rest, as they say, is history. Paying particular attention to the work of Michael Drayton and Anthony Munday who wrote for the Lord Admiral's Men, Djordjevic traces the cultural ripples their works created until the end of the seventeenth century, in various familiar as well as previously ignored historical, poetic, and dramatic works by numerous authors. Djordjevic's analysis of the playtexts' source, and the personal and working relationship between the playwright-poets and John Stow as the antiquarian disseminator of the source text, sheds a brighter light on a moment that proves to have a greater significance outside theatrical history; it has profound repercussions for literary history and a nation's cultural memory.

Post-mortems may have become a staple of our TV viewing, but the long history of this practice is still little known. This book provides a fresh account of the dissections that took place across early modern Europe on those who had died of a disease or in unclear circumstances. Drawing on different approaches and on sources as varied as notes taken at the dissection table, legal records and learned publications, the chapters explore how autopsies informed the understanding of pathology of all those involved. With a broad geography, including Rome, Amsterdam and Geneva, the book recaptures the lost worlds of physicians, surgeons, patients, families and civic authorities as they used corpses to understand diseases and make sense of suffering. The evidence from post-mortems was not straightforward, but between 1500 and 1750 medical practitioners rose to the challenge, proposing various solutions to the difficulties they encountered and creating a remarkable body of knowledge. The book shows the scope and diversity of this tradition and how laypeople contributed their knowledge and expectations to the wide-ranging exchanges stimulated by the opening of bodies.

Dynastic Colonialism analyses how women and men employed objects in particular places across the world during the early modern period in order to achieve the remarkable expansion of the House of Orange-Nassau. Susan Broomhall and Jacqueline Van Gent explore how the House emerged as a leading force during a period in which the Dutch accrued one of the greatest seaborne empires. Using the concept of dynastic colonialism, they explore strategic behaviours undertaken on behalf of the House of Orange-Nassau, through material culture in a variety of sites of interpretation from palaces and gardens to prints and teapots, in Europe and beyond. Using over 140 carefully selected images, the authors consider a wide range of visual, material and textual sources including portraits, glassware, tiles, letters, architecture and global spaces in order to rethink dynastic power and identity in gendered terms. Through the House of Orange-Nassau, Broomhall and Van Gent demonstrate how dynasties could assert status and power by enacting a range of colonising strategies. Dynastic Colonialism offers an exciting new interpretation of the complex story of the House of Orange-Nassau's rise to power in the early modern period through material means that will make fascinating reading for students and scholars of early modern European history, material culture, and gender. This book is highly illustrated throughout. The print edition features the images in black and white, whereas the eBook edition contains the illustrations in colour.

This study considers the figure of the bastard in the context of analogies of the family and the state in early modern England. The trope of illegitimacy, more than being simply a narrative or character-driven issue, is a vital component in the evolving construction and representation of British national identity in prose and drama of the sixteenth and early seventeenth century. Through close reading of a range of plays and prose texts, the book offers readers new insight into the semiotics of bastardy and concepts of national identity in early modern England, and reflects on contemporary issues of citizenship and identity. The author examines play texts of the period including Bale's King Johan, Peele's The Troublesome Reign of John, and Shakespeare's King John, Richard II, and King Lear in the context of a selection of legal, religious, and polemical texts. In so doing, she illuminates the extent to which the figure of the bastard and, more generally the trope of illegitimacy, existed as a distinct discourse within the wider discursive framework of family and nation.

This book provides the first major analysis of the covenanted interest from an integrated three kingdoms perspective. It examines the reaction of the covenanted interest to the actions and policies of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, drawing particular attention to links, similarities and differences in and between the covenanted interest in all three kingdoms. It also follows the fortunes of the covenanted interest and Presbyterian Church government as it built and changed in response to the Royalists and the Independents during the 1650s.

This book examines the role of women in Jewish family negotiations, using the setting of Italy from the end of the Renaissance to the Baroque. In ghettos at night and under the scrutiny of inquisitions, Jews flourished. Life and learning were enriched by Jews from the Iberian Peninsula, the Ottoman Empire, transalpine Europe, west and east, and Catholic neighbors. Rabbinic discourse represented conflicting customs in family formation and dissolution, especially at moments of crisis for women: forced betrothal; physical, mental and financial abuse; polygamy, and abandonment. In this book, case studies illustrate the ambiguity, drama, and danger to which women were exposed, as well as opportunities to make their voices heard and to extricate themselves from situations by forcing a divorce, collecting or seizing assets, and going to Catholic notaries to bequeath their assets outside traditional inheritance, often to other women. Despite intrusion by rabbis, their ability for coercion was limited, and their threats of punishments reflected the rhetoric of weakness rather than realistic options for implementation. The focus of this text is not what the law says, but rather how it enabled individual Jews, especially women, to speak and to act.

In this volume, the author offers a substantial reconsideration of same-sex relations in the early modern period, and argues that early modern writers - rather than simply celebrating a classical friendship model based in dyadic exclusivity and a rejection of self-interest - sought to innovate on classical models for idealized friendship. This book redirects scholarly conversations regarding gender, sexuality, classical receptions, and the economic aspects of social relations in the early modern period. It points to new directions in the application of queer theory to Renaissance literature by examining group friendship as a celebrated social formation in the work of early modern writers from Shakespeare to Milton. This volume will be of interest to scholars of the early modern period in England, as well as to those interested in the intersections between literature and gender studies, economic history and the economic aspects of social relations, the classics and the classical tradition, and the history of sexuality.

This volume examines early modern representations of women's reproductive knowledge through new readings of plays, monstrous birth pamphlets, medical treatises, court records, histories, and more, which are often interpreted as depicting female reproductive bodies as passive, silenced objects of male control and critique. Luttfring argues instead that these texts represent women exercising epistemological control over reproduction through the stories they tell about their bodies and the ways they act these stories out, combining speech and physical performance into what Luttfring calls 'bodily narratives.' The power of these bodily narratives extends beyond knowledge of individual bodies to include the ways that women's stories about reproduction shape the patriarchal identities of fathers, husbands, and kings. In the popular print and theater of early modern England, women's bodies, women's speech, and in particular women's speech about their bodies perform socially constitutive work: constructing legible narratives of lineage and inheritance; making and unmaking political alliances; shaping local economies; and defining/delimiting male socio-political authority in medical, royal, familial, judicial, and economic contexts. This book joins growing critical discussion of how female reproductive bodies were used to represent socio-political concerns and will be of interest to students and scholars working in early modern literature and culture, women's history, and the history of medicine.

Shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize 2018

A Book of the Year for the Evening Standard and the Observer

A black porter publicly whips a white Englishman in the hall of a Gloucestershire manor house. A Moroccan woman is baptised in a London church. Henry VIII dispatches a Mauritanian diver to salvage lost treasures from the Mary Rose. From long-forgotten records emerge the remarkable stories of Africans who lived free in Tudor England…

They were present at some of the defining moments of the age. They were christened, married and buried by the Church. They were paid wages like any other Tudors. The untold stories of the Black Tudors, dazzlingly brought to life by Kaufmann, will transform how we see this most intriguing period of history.

Dreams and Lives in Ottoman Istanbul explores biography writing and dream narratives in seventeenth-century Istanbul. It focuses on the prominent biographer 'Ata'i (d. 1637) and with his help shows how learned circles narrated dreams to assess their position in the Ottoman enterprise. This book demonstrates that dreams provided biographers not only with a means to form learned communities in a politically fragile landscape but also with a medium to debate the correct career paths and social networks in late sixteenth and early seventeenth-century Istanbul. By adopting a comparative approach, this book engages with current scholarly dialogues about life-writing, dreams, and practices of remembrance in Habsburg Spain, Safavid Iran, Mughal India and Ming China. Recent studies have shown the shared rhythms between these contemporaneous dynasties and the Ottomans, and there is now a strong interest in comparative approaches to examining cultural life. This first English-language monograph on Ottoman dreamscapes addresses this interest and introduces a world where dreams changed lives, the dead appeared in broad daylight, and biographers invited their readers to the gardens of remembrance.

"Caste", a word normally used in relation to the Indian subcontinent, is rarely associated with Japan in contemporary scholarship. This has not always been the case, and the term was often used among earlier generations of scholars, who introduced the Buraku problem to Western audiences. Amos argues that time for reappraisal is well overdue and that a combination of ideas, beliefs, and practices rooted in Confucian, Buddhist, Shinto, and military traditions were brought together from the late 16th century in ways that influenced the development of institutions and social structures on the Japanese archipelago. These influences brought the social structures closer in form and substance to certain caste formations found in the Indian subcontinent during the same period. Specifically, Amos analyses the evolution of the so-called Danzaemon outcaste order. This order was a 17th century caste configuration produced as a consequence of early modern Tokugawa rulers' decisions to engage in a state-building project rooted in military logic and built on the back of existing manorial and tribal-class arrangements. He further examines the history behind the primary duties expected of outcastes within the Danzaemon order: notably execution and policing, as well as leather procurement. Reinterpreting Japan as a caste society, this book propels us to engage in fuller comparisons of how outcaste communities' histories and challenges have diverged and converged over time and space, and to consider how better to eradicate discrimination based on caste logic. This book will appeal to anyone interested in Japanese History, Culture and Society.

Drawing on politics, religion, law, literature, and philosophy, this interdisciplinary study is a sequel to Mark Fortier's bookThe Culture of Equity in Early Modern England (Ashgate, 2006). The earlier volume traced the meanings and usage of equity in broad cultural terms (including but not limited to law) to position equity as a keyword of valuation, persuasion, and understanding; the present volume carries that work through the Restoration and eighteenth century in Britain and America. Fortier argues that equity continued to be a keyword, used and contested in many of the major social and political events of the period. Further, he argues that equity needs to be seen in this period largely outside the Aristotelian parameters that have generally been assumed in scholarship on equity.

This book investigates the work of the Elizabethan secretariat during the fascinating decade of the 1590s, when, after the death of Francis Walsingham, the place of principal secretary remained vacant for six years. Through original sources in the collections of the State Papers and Cecil Papers, this study reconstructs the activities of the clerks and secretaries who worked in close contact with the Queen at court. An estimated fifty people, many unidentified, saw to every minute detail of the production of official documents and letters in an array of offices, rooms and locations within and outside the court. The book introduces the staff of the Elizabethan writing offices as a community of shared knowledge with a privileged and constant access to papers of state, working behind the scenes of court display and high politics. While the production of the state papers is explored as a means to re-construct the functioning of the inner mechanisms of state, it also provides a lens through which to access the knowledge of the administration in a pre-bureaucratic age.

While humility is not especially valued in modern Western culture, Jennifer Clement argues here, it is central to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century understandings of Christian faith and behavior, and is vital to early modern concepts of the self. As this study shows, early modern literary engagements with humility link it to self-knowledge through the practice of right reading, and make humility foundational to any proper understanding of human agency. Yet humility has received little critical interest, and has often been misunderstood as a false virtue that engenders only self-abjection. This study offers an overview of various ways in which humility is discussed, deployed, or resisted in early modern texts ranging from the explicitly religious and autobiographical prose of Katherine Parr and John Donne, to the more politically motivated prose of Queen Elizabeth I and the seventeenth-century reformer and radical Thomas Tryon. As part of the wider 'turn to religion' in early modern studies, this study seeks to complicate our understanding of a mainstream early modern virtue, and to problematize a mode of critical analysis that assumes agency is always defined by resistance.

This book uses the work of Bolognese physician and anatomist Gaspare Tagliacozzi to explore the social and cultural history of early modern surgery. It discusses how Italian and European surgeons' attitudes to health and beauty - and how patients' gender - shaped views on the public appearance of the human body. In 1597, Gaspare Tagliacozzi published a two-volume book on reconstructive surgery of the mutilated parts of the face. Studying Tagliacozzi's surgery in context corrects widespread views about the birth of plastic surgery. Through a combination of cultural history, microhistory, historical epistemology, and gender history, this book describes the practice and practitioners considered to be at the periphery of the "Scientific Revolution." Historical themes covered include the writing of individual cases, hegemonic and subaltern forms of masculinity, concepts of the natural and the artificial, emotional communities and moral economies of pain, and the historical anthropology of the culture of beauty and the face and its disfigurements. The book is essential reading for upper-level students, postgraduates, and scholars working on the history of medicine and surgery, the history of the body, and gender and cultural history. It will also appeal to those interested in the history of beauty, urban studies and the Renaissance period more generally.

Cameralism and the Enlightenment reassesses the relationship between two key phenomena of European history often disconnected from each other. It builds on recent insights from global history, transnational history and Enlightenment studies to reflect on the dynamic interactions of cameralism, an early modern set of practices and discourses of statecraft prominent in central Europe, with the broader political, intellectual and cultural developments of the Enlightenment world. Through contributions from prominent scholars across the field of Enlightenment studies, the volume analyzes eighteenth-century cameralist authors' engagements with commerce, colonialism and natural law. Challenging the caricature of cameralism as a German, land-locked version of mercantilism, the volume reframes its importance for scholars of the Enlightenment broadly conceived. This volume goes beyond the typical focus on Britain and France in studies of political economy, widening perspectives about the dissemination of ideas of governance, happiness and reform to focus on multidirectional exchanges across continental Europe and beyond during the eighteenth century. Emphasizing the practice of theory, it proposes the study of the porosity of ideas in their exchange, transmission and mediation between spaces and discourses as a key dimension of cultural and intellectual history.

Dressing Global Bodies addresses the complex politics of dress and fashion from a global perspective spanning four centuries, tying the early global to more contemporary times, to reveal clothing practice as a key cultural phenomenon and mechanism of defining one's identity. This collection of essays explores how garments reflect the hierarchies of value, collective and personal inclinations, religious norms and conversions. Apparel is now recognized for its seminal role in global, colonial and post-colonial engagements and for its role in personal and collective expression. Patterns of exchange and commerce are discussed by contributing authors to analyse powerful and diverse colonial and postcolonial practices. This volume rejects assumptions surrounding a purportedly all-powerful Western metropolitan fashion system and instead aims to emphasize how diverse populations seized agency through the fashioning of dress. Dressing Global Bodies contributes to a growing scholarship considering gender and race, place and politics through the close critical analysis of dress and fashion; it is an indispensable volume for students of history and especially those interested in fashion, textiles, material culture and the body across a wide time frame.

In this study, Murakami overturns the misconception that popular English morality plays were simple medieval vehicles for disseminating conservative religious doctrine. On the contrary, Murakami finds that moral drama came into its own in the sixteenth century as a method for challenging normative views on ethics, economics, social rank, and political obligation. From its inception in itinerate troupe productions of the late fifteenth century, "moral play" served not as a cloistered form, but as a volatile public forum. This book demonstrates how the genre's apparently inert conventions-from allegorical characters to the battle between good and evil for Mankind's soul-veiled critical explorations of topical issues. Through close analysis of plays representing key moments of formal and ideological innovation from 1465 to 1599, Murakami makes a new argument for what is at stake in the much-discussed anxiety around the entwined social practices of professional theater and the emergent capitalist market. Moral play fostered a phenomenon that was ultimately more threatening to 'the peace' of the realm than either theater or the notorious market--a political self-consciousness that gave rise to ephemeral, non-elite counterpublics who defined themselves against institutional forms of authority.

Through a study of a variety of Ottoman and modern Turkish accounts of the Ottoman-Habsburg sieges of Nagykanizsa Castle (1600-01) including official documents, correspondence, histories, and more literary genres such as gazavatnames [campaign narratives], Plural Pasts explores Ottoman literacy practices. By considering the diverse roles that the various accounts served - construction of identities, forging of diplomatic alliances and legitimization of political ideologies and geo-political imaginations - it explores the cultural and socio-political significance the various accounts had for different audiences. In addition, it interweaves theoretical reflection with textual analysis. Using the sieges of Nagykanizsa as a case study, it offers a sophisticated contribution to ongoing historiographical arguments: namely, how historians construct hierarchies of primary sources and judge some to be more truthful, or more valuable, than others; how texts are assigned to particular genres based on perceived epistemological status - as story or history, fact or fiction; and the circular role that historians and their histories play in constructing, reflecting and reinforcing cultural and political imaginaries.

The rise of George Villiers from minor gentry to royal power seemed to defy gravity. Becoming gentleman of the royal bedchamber in 1615, the young gallant enraptured James, Britain’s first Stuart king, royal adoration reaching such an intensity that the king declared he wanted the courtier to become his ‘wife’. For a decade, Villiers was at the king’s side – at court, on state occasions and in bed, right up to James’s death in March 1625.

Almost immediately, Villiers’ many enemies accused him of poisoning the king. A parliamentary investigation was launched, and scurrilous pamphlets and ballads circulated London’s streets. But the charges came to nothing, and were relegated to a historical footnote.

Now, new historical scholarship suggests that a deadly combination of hubris and vulnerability did indeed drive Villiers to kill the man who made him. It may have been by accident – the application of a quack remedy while the king was weakened by a malarial attack. But there is compelling evidence that Villiers, overcome by ambition and frustrated by James’s passive approach to government, poisoned him.

In The King’s Assassin, acclaimed author Benjamin Wooley examines this remarkable, even tragic story. Combining vivid characterization and a strong narrative with historical scholarship and forensic investigation, Woolley tells the story of King James’s death, and of the captivating figure at its centre. What emerges is a compelling portrait of a royal favourite whose charisma overwhelmed those around him and, ultimately, himself.

A wealthy merchant's memoranda of sales reveals a wealth of fascinating detail. Over a period of eleven years from 1529 to his death, the wealthy London alderman, mercer and Merchant Adventurer Sir Thomas Kytson (1485-1540) recorded many of his commercial dealings in his 'Boke of Remembraunce'. This fascinating document, edited here for the first time, provides details not only of his purchases of cloth and the shipments of these to the annual marts held in the Low Countries, but also the sales of fabrics, spices, and other goods imported on the returning ships to Kytson's fellow merchants of London, members of the gentry, and others. Alongside these, there are memoranda of the delivery of materials to Kytson's wife and friends, and of some of his other personal concerns. The volume thus offers a colourful and detailed picture of the private and commercial life of a leading Londoner in the years around the English Reformation. Kytson's own 'Boke' is here collated with a separate record of exports to the Flemish marts in Antwerp and Bergen-op-Zoom kept by the mercer's clerks, and supplemented by an account of transactions at the 'Synxten Mart' at Antwerp in 1536, written by Sir Thomas's nephew, Thomas Washington. The material is complemented with extensive annotation and a comprehensive glossary, an introduction and substantial indices. COLIN J. BRETT'S published writings include volumes for the Somerset Record Society and paperson regional historical topics.

This title was first published in 2001. Looking at German-American relations between 1776 and 1835, this study argues that it was day-to-day commercial contacts, rather than official diplomatic ties that forged the way in establishing good relations between the two countries. Although concerned with trade, this work is not strictly one of economic history, but instead looks at how wider economic trends impacted upon the socio-cultural and political connections.

This book was published in 2003. Thomas Stukeley was one of the most colourful characters of the Elizabethan age, whose exploits brought him fame and notoriety throughout Europe. Described variously as picturesque, quixotic, cloudy minded, remarkable, and (by Evelyn Waugh) as a "preposterous and richly comic figure", Stukeley remains a flamboyant and fascinating character in the imagination of succeeding generations. Yet whilst these portrayals may be accurate, they do not in themselves do full justice to a multifaceted man whose remarkable career included stints as mercenary, pirate, forger, colonial adventurer, political advisor, diplomat and traitor, and who rubbed shoulders with princes, kings and popes. In this new biography, Professor Tazon makes extensive use of previously neglected documents from British, Spanish and Italian archives to produce a much more rounded and complete portrait of Stukeley and the events in which he participated. He brings Stukeley forth as a real figure, urging the reader to view in parallel English, Spanish, Irish and wider European history.

Societies perceive "Reform" or "Reforms" as substantial changes and significant breaks which must be well-justified. The Enlightenment brought forth the idea that the future was uncertain and could be shaped by human beings. This gave the concept of reform a new character and new fields of application. Those who sought support for their plans and actions needed to reflect, develop new arguments, and offer new reasons to address an anonymous public. This book aims to compile these changes under the heuristic term of "languages of reform." It analyzes the structures of communication regarding reforms in the 18th century through a wide variety of topics.