In ancien regime France almost all posts of public responsibility had to be bought or inherited. Rather than tax their richer subjects directly, French kings preferred to sell them privileged public offices, which further payments allowed them to sell or bequeath at will. By the eighteenth century there were 70,000 venal offices, comprising the entire judiciary, most of the legal profession, officers in the army, and a wide range of other professions - from financiers handling the king's revenues down to auctioneers and even wigmakers. Though now yielding diminishing returns to the king, offices were more in demand than ever for the privileges and prestige, profit and power, that they conferred; and although it was widely accepted that selling public authority was undesirable, nobody imagined that those who had invested in offices could ever be bought out. The Revolution brought an unexpected opportunity to do so, but the legacy of venality has marked French institutions down to our day. William Doyle, one of the foremost historians of early modern Europe, has written the first comprehensive history of the last century of venality. He traces the evolution and dissolution of a system which was fundamental to the workings of state and society in France for over three centuries.

The German town of Emden was, in the sixteenth century, the most important haven for exiled Dutch Protestants. In this book, based on unrivalled knowledge of the contemporary archives, Andrew Pettegree explores the role of Emden as a refuge, a training centre and, above all, as the major source of Dutch Protestant propaganda. He also provides a unique and invaluable reconstruction of the output of Emden's famous printing presses. The emergence of an independent state in the Netherlands was accompanied by a transformation in the status of Protestantism from a persecuted sect to the dominant religious force in the new Dutch republic. Dr Pettegree shows how the exile churches, the nurseries of Dutch Calvinism, provided military and financial support for the armies of William of Orange and models of church organization for the new state. Emden and the Dutch Revolt is a major scholarly contribution to our understanding of the origins of the Dutch Republic and the place of Calvinism in the European Reformation.

Shakespeare's plays are stuffed with letters - 111 appear on stage in all but five of his dramas. But for modern actors, directors, and critics they are frequently an awkward embarrassment. Alan Stewart shows how and why Shakespeare put letters on stage in virtually all of his plays. By reconstructing the very different uses to which letters were put in Shakespeare's time, and recapturing what it meant to write, send, receive, read, and archive a letter, it throws new light on some of his most familiar dramas. Early modern letters were not private missives sent through an anonymous postal system, but a vital - sometimes the only - means of maintaining contact and sending news between distant locations. Penning a letter was a serious business in a period when writers made their own pen and ink; letter-writing protocols were strict; letters were dispatched by personal messengers or carriers, often received and read in public - and Shakespeare exploited all these features to dramatic effect. Surveying the vast range of letters in Shakespeare's oeuvre, the book also features sustained new readings of Hamlet, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, The Merchant of Venice and Henry IV Part One.

Selection of correspondence from the house which was once Little Malvern priory, illuminating life at the time. In 1538 John Russell, secretary to the Council of the Welsh Marches, acquired the dissolved priory of Little Malvern, where his descendants, the Beringtons, still live. This selection from the family letters in the WorcestershireRecord Office vividly illustrates the impact on Worcestershire of the Reformation and the Civil War. Among much else, it includes correspondence with Thomas Cromwell and Lord Chancellor Audley (who was John Russell's brother-in-law); Elizabethan medical prescriptions and business letters; correspondence about evading the penal laws against Catholics; a mock-heroic Latin skit on James I; a personal letter from one of the Jesuits executed at the time of theOates Plot, and an official certificate that Little Malvern had been (unsuccessfully) searched for priests. The letters themselves are accompanied by an introduction and explanatory notes. Michael Hodgetts has written extensively on Recusant History and is an acknowledged expert on English Catholic families and their houses.

This collection explores the political thinking of a fundamental period of Irish history. It moves from the turmoil of the 17th century, through the years of the Protestant ascendancy, to the revolutionary events at the end of the 18th century. Light is thrown on a huge cast of forgotten or never known figures, including royal officials, lawyers, clergymen, landowners, and popular writers.

Between 1560 and 1620, a thousand or more people left the town of Brihuega in Spain to migrate to New Spain (now Mexico), where nearly all of them settled in Puebla de los Angeles, New Spain's second most important city. A medium-sized community of about four thousand people, Brihuega had been a center of textile production since the Middle Ages, but in the latter part of the sixteenth century its industry was in decline--a circumstance that induced a significant number of its townspeople to emigrate to Puebla, where conditions for textile manufacturing seemed ideal.
The immigrants from Brihuega played a crucial role in making Puebla the leading textile producer in New Spain, and they were otherwise active in the city's commercial-industrial sector as well. Although some immigrants penetrated the higher circles of "poblano" society and politics, for the most part they remained close to their entrepreneurial and artisanal origins. Closely associated through business, kinship, marital, and "compadrazgo" ties, and in residential patterns, the Brihuega immigrants in Puebla constituted a coherent and visible community.
This book uses the experiences and activities of the immigrants as a basis for analyzing society in Brihuega and Puebla, making direct comparisons between the two cities by examining such topics as mobility and settlement; politics and public life; economic activity; religious life; social relations; and marriage, family, and kinship. In tracing the socioeconomic, cultural, and institutional patterns of a town in Spain and a city in New Spain--in all their connections, continuities, and discontinuities--the book offers a new basis for understanding the process and implications of the transference of these patterns within the early modern Hispanic world.

This book examines the Whig theory of resistance that emerged from the Revolution of 1688 in England, and presents an important challenge to the received opinion of Whig thought as confused and as inferior to the revolutionary principles set forth by John Locke. While a wealth of Whig literature is analyzed, Rudolph focuses upon the work of James Tyrrell, presenting the first full-length study of this seminal Whig theorist, and friend and colleague of John Locke. This book provides a compelling argument for the importance of Whig political thought for the history of liberalism.

Fully revised and updated, this second edition of the standard textbook on the causes of the English Civil War provides a comprehensive guide to the historiographical debates surrounding this crucial period of English history.

The events surrounding the trial of Charles I have been remarkably understudied by historians, despite a wealth of information regarding both the proceedings and personalities involved, and contemporary responses and reactions. These essays submit one of the most momentous events in English history to rigorous scholarship, contextualize it in the light of recent historiography, and with a focus on the relations between the three kingdoms of Britain.

An edition of Henry Elsyng's early seventeenth-century treatise on how to conduct the business of parliament.

This book examines how, quite by accident and under very unfortunate circumstances, Britain's colony of South Carolina afforded women an unprecedented opportunity for economic autonomy. Though the colony prospered financially, throughout the colonial period the death rate remained alarmingly high, keeping the white population small. This demographic disruption allowed white women a degree of independence unknown to their peers in most of England's other mainland colonies, for, as heirs of their male relatives, an unusually large proportion of women controlled substantial amounts of real estate. Their economic independence went unchallenged by their male peers because these women never envisioned themselves as anything more than deputies for their husbands, fathers, brothers, and friends.

As far as low country settlers were concerned, allowing women to assume the role of planter was necessary to the creation of a traditional, male-centered society in the colony. Fundamentally conservative, women in South Carolina worked to safeguard the patriarchal social order that the area's staggering mortality rate threatened to destroy. Critical to the perpetuation of English culture and patriarchal authority in South Carolina, female planters attended to the affairs of the world and helped to preserve English society in a wilderness setting.

The issues and controversies surrounding the creation of our federal republic--and the rights of the federal government--have reverberated through many watershed events in the 200+ years of American history. This book will help students to debate those issues as they played out in eight crises from 1787 to the beginning of the 21st century. Expert commentary and 54 primary documents contemporary to the time were carefully selected to represent a variety of views on each issue. Events range from the creation of the federal republic to the ongoing controversy over women's rights.

Primary documents include presidential letters and speeches, newspaper opinion pieces, first-person accounts and letters, Supreme Court decisions, congressional debates, statutes, resolutions, and political party platforms. A narrative introduction to the issue of federalism over American history will help students contextualize the events in context. A chronology and bibliography of books and Web sites will assist the student researcher.

Contagionism is an old idea, but gained new life in Restoration Britain. The Germ of an Idea considers British contagionism in its religious, social, political and professional context from the Great Plague of London to the adoption of smallpox inoculation. It shows how ideas about contagion changed medicine and the understanding of acute diseases.

This collection conceptualizes the question of rulership in past centuries, incorporating such diverse disciplines as archaeology, art history, history, literature and psychoanalysis to illustrate how kings and queens ruled in Europe from the antiquity to early modern times. It discusses forms of kingship such as client-kingship, monarchy, queen consort and regnant queenship that manifest gubernatorial power in concert with paternal succession and the divine right of the king. While the king assumes a religious dimension in his obligatory functions, justice and peace are vital elements to maintain his sovereignty. In sum, the active side of governmental power is to keep peace and order leading to prosperity for the subjects; the passive side of power is to protect the subjects from external attack and free them from fear. These concepts of power find concurrence in modern times as well as in non-European cultures. Through a truly cross-cultural, transnational, multidimensional, gender-conscious and interdisciplinary study, this collection offers a cutting edge account of how power has been exercised and demonstrated in various cultures of some bygone eras.

Please note this is a 'Palgrave to Order' title (PTO). Stock of this book requires shipment from an overseas supplier. It will be delivered to you within 12 weeks. This book details how France's most profitable plantation colony became Haiti, Latin America's first independent nation, through an uprising by slaves and the largest and wealthiest free population of people of African descent in the New World. Garrigus explains the origins of this free colored class, exposes the ways its members supported and challenged slavery, and examines how they shaped a new 'American' identity.

Religious conversion - a shift in membership from one community of faith to another - can take diverse forms in radically different circumstances. As the essays in this volume demonstrate, conversion can be protracted or sudden, voluntary or coerced, small-scale or large. It may be the result of active missionary efforts, instrumental decisions, or intellectual or spiritual attraction to a different doctrine and practices. In order to investigate these multiple meanings, and how they may differ across time and space, this collection ranges far and wide across medieval and early modern Europe and beyond. From early Christian pilgrims to fifteenth-century Ethiopia; from the Islamisation of the eastern Mediterranean to Reformation Germany, the volume highlights salient features and key concepts that define religious conversion, particular the Jewish, Muslim and Christian experiences. By probing similarities and variations, continuities and fissures, the volume also extends the range of conversion to focus on matters less commonly examined, such as competition for the meaning of sacred space, changes to bodies, patterns of gender, and the ways conversion has been understood and narrated by actors and observers. In so doing, it promotes a layered approach that deepens inquiry by identifying and suggesting constellations of elements that both compose particular instances of conversion and help make systematic comparisons possible by indicating how to ask comparable questions of often vastly different situations.

This work is a thought-provoking look at the original 13 colonies, presenting the facts and engaging the reader by using alternate history-what if key events had turned out differently?-to help develop critical thinking skills. This entry in ABC-CLIO's exciting series Turning Points-Actual and Alternate Histories covers the development of the original 13 states, from first European contact up to the Revolutionary War. Using the fascinating tool of alternate history-postulating the course of events, had one key fact been different-the book engages students' imaginations and critical thinking skills. This critical period in American history is particularly suited to the alternative history approach: The population of the colonies was small, so the import of individual actions, or of singular events, was proportionately large. If the English had lost one battle to the Swedes, the United States might have been a Swedish colony. If James, Duke of York, had died of the plague in 1654, the U.S. and French revolutions might not have happened. Detailed chronology makes the entire era of coverage-first settlement to revolution-accessible at a glance Each chapter is followed by a bibliography to point students to additional information on the specific colony

In 1682, Charles II invited his scandalous younger brother, James, Duke of York, to return from exile and take his rightful place as heir to the throne. To celebrate, the future king set sail in a fleet of eight ships destined for Edinburgh, where he would reunite with his young pregnant wife. Yet disaster struck en route, somewhere off the Norfolk coast. The royal frigate in which he sailed, the Gloucester, sank, causing some two hundred sailors and courtiers to perish. The diarist Samuel Pepys had been asked to sail with James but refused the invitation, preferring to travel in one of the other ships. Why? What did he know that others did not? Nigel Pickford's compelling account of the catastrophe draws on a richness of historical material including letters, diaries and ships' logs, revealing for the first time the full drama and tragic consequences of a shipwreck that shook Restoration Britain.

This sweeping, exhaustively researched history is the first comprehensive account of the Peace of Westphalia in English. Bringing together the latest scholarship with an engaging narrative, it retraces the historical origins of the Peace, exploring its political-intellectual underpinnings and placing it in a broad global and chronological context.

The Reign of Charles V is an important new study of one of the most important rulers in world history. As the Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain during the mid-1500s, Charles V ruled the first truly global empire and was the greatest of all the Habsburg Emperors. He reigned during one of the most important ages in the history of Europe and America and was responsible for, among other things, the conquests of Mexico and Peru and the consequent European influence on Latin America, the waning of the Renaissance, the religious transformation of Europe by the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, and the establishment of a Habsburg empire in Eastern Europe.William Maltby's engaging new study not only looks at the emperor as a person, but also examines such important critical issues as his policies and their consequences. Concise and readable, The Reign of Charles V provides an indispensable introduction to an era that changed the world.