In 1636, residents at the convent of Santa Chiara in Carpi in northern Italy were struck by an extraordinary illness that provoked bizarre behavior. Eventually numbering fourteen, the afflicted nuns were subject to screaming fits, throwing themselves on the floor, and falling abruptly into a deep sleep. When medical experts' cures proved ineffective, exorcists ministered to the women and concluded that they were possessed by demons and the victims of witchcraft. Catering to women from elite families, the nunnery suffered much turmoil for three years and, remarkably, three of the victims died from their ills. A maverick nun and a former confessor were widely suspected to be responsible, through witchcraft, for these woes. Based primarily on the exhaustive investigation by the Inquisition of Modena, The Scourge of Demons examines this fascinating case in its historical context. The travails of Santa Chiara occurred at a time when Europe witnessed peaks in both witch-hunting and in the numbers of people reputedly possessed by demons. Female religious figures appeared particularly prone to demonic attacks, and Counter-Reformation Church authorities were especially interested in imposing stricter discipline on convents. Watt carefully considers how the nuns of Santa Chiara understood and experienced alleged possession and witchcraft, concluding that Santa Chiara's diabolical troubles and their denouement -- involving the actions of nuns, confessors, inquisitorial authorities, and exorcists -- were profoundly shaped by the unique confluence of religious, cultural, judicial, and intellectual trends that flourished in the 1630s. Jeffrey R. Watt is professor of history at the University of Mississippi.

This book examines the importance of the Glorious Revolution and the passing of the Toleration Act to the development of religious and intellectual freedom in England. Most historians have considered these events to be of little significance in this connection. From Persecution to Toleration focuses on the importance of the Toleration Act for contemporaries, and also explores its wider historical context and impact. Taking its point of departure from the intolerance of the sixteenth century, the book goes on to emphasize what is here seen to be the very substantial contribution of the Toleration Act for the development of religious freedom in England. It demonstrates that his freedom was initially limited to Protestant Nonconformists, immigrant as well as English, and that it quickly came in practice to include Catholics, Jews, and anti-Trinitarians. Contributors: John Bossy, Patrick Collinson, John Dunn, Graham Gibbs, Mark Goldie, Ole Peter Grell, Robin Gwynn, Jonathan I. Israel, David S. Katz, Andrew Pettegree, Richard H. Popkin, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Nicholas Tyacke, and B. R. White.

Complete Gentlemen is the first study to look beyond the Italian Grand Tour to the wider culture of educational travel that thrived among British and Irish landowners between 1650 and 1750. Ansell reconstructs dozens of encounters with continental Europe, revealing how the varying means, ambitions, and obligations of families produced widely differing experiences of educational travel. Where historians usually isolate time abroad, he pays unprecedented attention to what families thought and did before, after, and instead of foreign travel, stages that uncover its true significance for British and Irish society. This innovative approach requires a deep source base over several generations, provided by the manuscript archives of four clusters of families from England and Ireland. Ansell uses these archives to relate travel, too often a stand-alone topic, to broader questions in social and cultural history, exploring the meanings of time abroad for social mobility, elite formation, landed identity, masculinity, and Englishness.

The revolutions in the England, North America, and France ushered in the modern political age. Cultural Revolutions analyzes the place of material culture, ritual, and everyday life during these revolutions, providing a fresh and engaging interpretation of the strategies used to transform people from monarchists into republicans.The author shows how, faced with the challenge of persuading large populations to alter their previous convictions and loyalties, revolutionaries in all three countries turned to the power of aesthetics. From the banning of dancing in Cromwell's England, to the 'homespun' clothing of Revolutionary America, to France's new calendar and naming systems, Auslander assesses how daily habits and tastes were altered in the interests of political change.

Jean Desmarets, later Sieur de Saint-Sorlin, was a late Renaissance `universal man': first Chancellor and founder-member of the Academie-francaise, last jester of the French royal court and star performer in ballets, novelist, playwright, poet, architect, inventor, and mystic. He was also the first man to publicize the notion of `a century of Louis XIV'. Hugh Gaston Hall's book examines that notion by looking afresh at Desmarets' vigorous career and relating the `century of Louis XIV' to its origins in the reign of Louis XIII. It questions historical misconceptions about Cardinal Richelieu's cultural policies and demonstrates the importance for the Court ballet of his patronage. Giovanni Bernini's illusionist sets and lighting effects for the Grand'Salle, which later became Moliere's theatre and the Opera, are discussed here in English for the first time. Desmarets' many high-level court offices, his family connections, and works - ballets, plays, poems, and religious and polemical pieces - reveal new and important links with contemporary institutions and preoccupations. In particular Dr Hall considers the plays in the light of exemplary eloquence, and considers the intentions of the Academie-francaise, and the Quarrel of the Imaginaires, in relation to royal policy and the Cartesian revolution.

Migration is the most imprecise and difficult of all aspects of pre-industrial population to measure. It was a major element in economic and social change in early modern Britain, yet, despite a wealth of detailed research in recent years, there has been no systematic survey of its importance. This book reviews a wide range of aspects of population migration, and their impacts on British society, from Tudor times to the main phase of the Industrial Revolution.

This Handbook re-examines the concept of early modern history in a European and global context. The term 'early modern' has been familiar, especially in Anglophone scholarship, for four decades and is securely established in teaching, research, and scholarly publishing. More recently, however, the unity implied in the notion has fragmented, while the usefulness and even the validity of the term, and the historical periodisation which it incorporates, have been questioned. The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern European History, 1350-1750 provides an account of the development of the subject during the past half-century, but primarily offers an integrated and comprehensive survey of present knowledge, together with some suggestions as to how the field is developing. It aims both to interrogate the notion of 'early modernity' itself and to survey early modern Europe as an established field of study. The overriding aim will be to establish that 'early modern' is not simply a chronological label but possesses a substantive integrity. Volume I examines 'Peoples and Place', assessing structural factors such as climate, printing and the revolution in information, social and economic developments, and religion, including chapters on Orthodoxy, Judaism and Islam.

Lord Derby, Lancashire's highest-ranked nobleman and its principal royalist, once offered the opinion that the English civil wars had been a 'general plague of madness'. Complex and bedevilling, the earl defied anyone to tell the complete story of 'so foolish, so wicked, so lasting a war'. Yet attempting to chronicle and to explain the events is both fascinating and hugely important. Nationally and at the county level the impact and significance of the wars can hardly be over-stated: the conflict involved our ancestors fighting one another, on and off, for a period of nine years; almost every part of Lancashire witnessed warfare of some kind at one time or another, and several towns in particular saw bloody sieges and at least one episode characterised as a massacre. Nationally the wars resulted in the execution of the king; in 1651 the Earl of Derby himself was executed in Bolton in large measure because he had taken a leading part in the so-called massacre in that town in 1644.In the early months of the civil wars many could barely distinguish what it was that divided people in 'this war without an enemy', as the royalist William Waller famously wrote; yet by the end of it parliament had abolished monarchy itself and created the only republic in over a millennium of England's history. Over the ensuing centuries this period has been described variously as a rebellion, as a series of civil wars, even as a revolution. Lancashire's role in these momentous events was quite distinctive, and relative to the size of its population particularly important. Lancashire lay right at the centre of the wars, for the conflict did not just encompass England but Ireland and Scotland too, and Lancashire's position on the coast facing Catholic, Royalist Ireland was seen as critical from the very first months.And being on the main route south from Scotland meant that the county witnessed a good deal of marching and marauding armies from the north. In this, the first full history of the Lancashire civil wars for almost a century, Stephen Bull makes extensive use of new discoveries to narrate and explain the exciting, terrible events which our ancestors witnessed in the cause either of king or parliament. From Furness to Liverpool, and from the Wyre estuary to Manchester and Warrington...civil war actions, battles, sieges and skirmishes took place in virtually every corner of Lancashire.

CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2016 Food and Health in Early Modern Europe is both a history of food practices and a history of the medical discourse about that food. It is also an exploration of the interaction between the two: the relationship between evolving foodways and shifting medical advice on what to eat in order to stay healthy. It provides the first in-depth study of printed dietary advice covering the entire early modern period, from the late-15th century to the early-19th; it is also the first to trace the history of European foodways as seen through the prism of this advice. David Gentilcore offers a doctor's-eye view of changing food and dietary fashions: from Portugal to Poland, from Scotland to Sicily, not forgetting the expanding European populations of the New World. In addition to exploring European regimens throughout the period, works of materia medica, botany, agronomy and horticulture are considered, as well as a range of other printed sources, such as travel accounts, cookery books and literary works. The book also includes 30 illustrations, maps and extensive chapter bibliographies with web links included to further aid study. Food and Health in Early Modern Europe is the essential introduction to the relationship between food, health and medicine for history students and scholars alike.

This volume presents one of the most important historical sources for medieval Islamic scholarship: The Compendium of Chronicles, written by the vizier to the Mongol Ilkhans of Iran, Rashiduddin Fazlullah. It includes a valuable survey of the Turkic and Mongolian peoples, a history of Genghis Khan's ancestors, and a detailed account of his conquests. Distinguished linguist and orientalist, Wheeler M. Thackston, provides a lucid, annotated translation that makes this key material accessible to a wide range of scholars.

This is the first study of the navy during the English Revolution. It argues that the commonwealth navy did not, as is often assumed, stand back from domestic political controversies, but was deeply influenced by the revolutionary circumstances of its origins. The new regime saw a large and politically reliable fleet as essential to its survival, and the years after 1649 witnessed a rapid build-up and a drastic remodelling of the officer corps, with political and religious radicalism becoming major criteria in the selection of officers. The book charts the navy's central role in the struggle to win foreign recognition for the new regime, and in the wars which followed: the period saw England's first major war at sea, against the Dutch. The navy's response to political change at home, and its intervention in the Restoration crisis of 1659-60 are also examined. The social history of the navy is also considered in detail. This book provides a richly detailed insight into a neglected subject, and enhances our understanding of the Cromwellian period as a whole.