Edition of records of Oxford apprentices provides valuable evidence for historians. Oxford greatly expanded and flourished under the Tudors, as the reviving University provided a growing body of consumers and trade for shopkeepers and craftsmen. They needed apprentices - and in huge numbers, as the material inthis volume demonstrates. It calendars the enrolments of over two thousand apprenticeship contracts made during this period; they are a familiar source for social and economic history and genealogy, but the Oxford material, in both quantity and detail, is quite exceptional. Moreover, sixteenth-century enrolments are much fuller than their more familiar seventeenth-century successors, containing miscellaneous information of great interest, notably lists ofworking tools, details of journeymen's wages, and stipulations about apprentices' behaviour. The data is discussed in an Introduction which re-examines the apprenticeship system on the basis of the unusually plentiful statistics, throwing new light on such matters as length of service, payment of premiums, and the rates of career failure and success. Oxford recruited apprentices from an astonishingly wide area; their places of origin are identified and mapped, and an analysis of their social and geographical origins breaks new ground in the field of migration studies. More prosaically the calendar provides the genealogist and local historian with the names, parentage, and places of origin of thousands of young men from all over England and Wales - crucial raw material for much-needed further research.on the later movements of qualified apprentices. Alan Crossley is a member of the modern history faculty, University of Oxford.

Tokugawa Ieyasu founded a dynasty of rulers, organized a system of government and set in train the re-orientation of the religion of Japan so that he would take the premier place in it. Calm, capable and entirely fearless, Ieyasu deliberately brought the opposition to a head and crushed in a decisive battle, after which he made himself Shogun, despite not being from the Minamoto clan. He organized the Japanese legal and educational systems and encouraged trade with Europe (playing off the Protestant powers of Holland and England against Catholic Spain and Portugal). This book remains one of the few volumes on Tokugawa Ieyasu which draws on more material from Japanese sources than quotations from the European documents from his era and is therefore much more accurate and thorough in its examination of the life and legacy of one of the greatest Shoguns.

Over the course of three centuries, American settlers spread throughout North America and beyond, driving out indigenous populations to establish exclusive and permanent homelands of their own. In doing so, they helped to create the richest and most powerful nation in human history, even as they caused the death and displacement of millions of people. This groundbreaking historical synthesis demonstrates that the United States is and has always been fundamentally a settler colonial society - and, indeed, that its growth as a country represents the most sweeping, violent, and significant instance of the phenomenon in history. Linking episodes too often treated in isolation - including Indian removal, the Mexican and Civil Wars, and the settlement of Alaska and Hawaii - it upends many familiar categories of US history and presents a compelling yet disturbing framework through which to understand America's rise to global dominance.

This comprehensive and beautifully illustrated collection of essays conveys a vivid picture of a fascinating and hugely significant period in history. Featuring contributions from thirty-eight international scholars, the book takes a thematic approach to a period which saw the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the explorations of Francis Drake and Walter Ralegh, the establishment of the Protestant Church, the flourishing of commercial theatre and the works of Edmund Spencer, Philip Sidney and William Shakespeare.

Encompassing social, political, cultural, religious and economic history, and crossing several disciplines, The Elizabethan World depicts a time of transformation, and a world order in transition. Topics covered include central and local government; political ideas; censorship and propaganda; parliament, the Protestant Church, the Catholic community; social hierarchies; women; the family and household; popular culture, commerce and consumption; urban and rural economies; theatre; art; architecture; intellectual developments; exploration and imperialism; Ireland, and the Elizabethan wars. The volume conveys a vivid picture of how politics, religion, popular culture, the world of work and social practices fit together in an exciting world of change, and will be invaluable reading for all students and scholars of the Elizabethan period.

When Mary Tudor became queen of England, the succession of a woman to the throne horrified many, including the Protestant reformer John Knox. His blistering condemnation of female rule, The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, was followed in print by a series of pamphlets that echoed and expanded his argument that female rule was unnatural, unlawful, and contrary to scripture. In her own variation on this "monstrous regiment," Sharon Jansen contributes to the debate about female rulers. She explores the relationships among the many women whose lives occupy a place in and perpetuate a continuing, though largely unrecognized, tradition of political rule. The "story" of early modern European political history looks very different if we focus on successive generations of powerful women and view the shifting political alliances of the period from their perspective.

Mary Stuart has intrigued people since her birth. The significance of the life of Mary, Queen of Scots, though, does not rest simply in the dramatic events of her life: rather, Mary's significance lies in her contemporaries' reaction to her. As a Catholic, a woman and a monarch in sixteenth century Europe, the debates surrounding Mary's life, reign, and imprisonment reveal a world in flux whose members attempted to solve the crises of religion, nationhood, authority, and gender that confronted them.

This case study of the causes of the Thirty Years’ War suggests an alternative framework to that of Absolutism, and views state-building as an interactive bargaining process that can engender challenges to political authority. It shows how selective court patronage changed the cultural habits of nobles in education, manners, and tastes, but failed to transform religious identities, which were intimately tied to noble interests. Instead, the confessionalization of patronage deepened divisions within the elite, providing multiple incentives for the formation of an anti-Habsburg alliance among Protestants in 1620.

This book is the first detailed examination of death in early modern Ireland. It deals with the process of dying, the conduct of funerals, the arrangement of burials, the private and public commemoration of the dead, and ideas about the afterlife. It further considers ways in which the living fashioned ceremonies of death and the reputations of the dead to support their own ends.

This book uncovers medieval and early modern examples of unions and divisions from western, central, eastern and south-eastern Europe. It provides case studies, especially from central and eastern Europe, giving students a range of accessible examples which they may be unfamiliar with. Unions and Divisions offers assessments of each union to provide an understanding for students and researchers of the political and social forces involved in the respective countries. It also investigates how the unions were reflected in contemporary literature (pamphlets, memoranda, chronicles, diaries etc.) and propaganda, in legal and historical discourses. It therefore provides the political as well as the social and cultural implications on these unions. Provides a comprehensive and engaging account with a variety of topics aimed at upper level students and researchers of personal unions, composite monarchies and multiple rule in premodern Europe uncovering how this diplomatic solution was adopted by a range of monarchies in this period.

This book examines the lives, careers, and publications of a group of Spanish Renaissance surgeons as exemplars of both the surgical renaissance occurring across Europe and of the unique context of Spain. In the sixteenth century, European surgeons forged new identities as learned experts who combined university medical degrees with manual skills and practical experience. No longer merely apprentice-trained craftsmen engaged only with healing the exterior wounds and rashes of the body, these learned surgeons actively engaged with the epistemic shifts of the sixteenth century, including new forms of knowledge construction, based in empiricism, and knowledge circulation, based in printing. These surgeons have long been overshadowed by the innovative work of anatomists and botanists but were participants in the same intellectual currents reshaping many aspects of knowledge. Active in communities across both Castile and Aragon, learned surgeons formed an intellectual community of practitioners and scholars who helped reshape surgical knowledge and practice. This book provides an overview of the Spanish learned surgeons, known as medicos y cirujanos, who were influential in universities, on battlefields, at court, and in private practice. It argues that the surgeons' larger significance rests in their collective identity as part of the broader intellectual shift to empiricism and innovation of the Renaissance. Renaissance Surgeons: Learning and Expertise in the Age of Print is essential reading for upper-level students and scholars of the history of medicine and early modern Spain.

'A groundbreaking work . . . Federici has become a crucial figure for . . . a new generation of feminists' Rachel Kushner, author of The Mars Room A cult classic since its publication in the early years of this century, Caliban and the Witch is Silvia Federici's history of the body in the transition to capitalism. Moving from the peasant revolts of the late Middle Ages through the European witch-hunts, the rise of scientific rationalism and the colonisation of the Americas, it gives a panoramic account of the often horrific violence with which the unruly human material of pre-capitalist societies was transformed into a set of predictable and controllable mechanisms. It Is a study of indigenous traditions crushed, of the enclosure of women's reproductive powers within the nuclear family, and of how our modern world was forged in blood. 'Rewarding . . . allows us to better understand the intimate relationship between modern patriarchy, the rise of the nation state and the transition from feudalism to capitalism' Guardian

Demonology - the intellectual study of demons and their powers - contributed to the prosecution of thousands of witches. But how exactly did intellectual ideas relate to prosecutions? Recent scholarship has shown that some of the demonologists' concerns remained at an abstract intellectual level, while some of the judges' concerns reflected popular culture. This book brings demonology and witch-hunting back together, while placing both topics in their specific regional cultures. The book's chapters, each written by a leading scholar, cover most regions of Europe, from Scandinavia and Britain through to Germany, France and Switzerland, and Italy and Spain. By focusing on various intellectual levels of demonology, from sophisticated demonological thought to the development of specific demonological ideas and ideas within the witch trial environment, the book offers a thorough examination of the relationship between demonology and witch-hunting. Demonology and Witch-Hunting in Early Modern Europe is essential reading for all students and researchers of the history of demonology, witch-hunting and early modern Europe.

This book examines the concept of public interest against the background of English politics from the Civil War to the coming of the Hanoverians. These years witnessed both the rise of the modern notion of the public interest as a part of ordinary political language and the growth of a social philosophy of individualism. The new ideas challenged the status quo, based on order, reason of state and national power, in the name of legitimate self-interest and respect for the rights of the private person. In presenting a complex set of ideas in their historical context, the author examines both abstract philosophies and the issues of the day as recorded in press, pulpit and law courts. A chapter devoted to economic thought includes a re-assessment of the social assumptions of mercantilism.

Reformation in Britain and Ireland is an innovative volume which studies the coming of reform in the sixteenth century more broadly than do traditional national narratives of religious change. It argues for an interactive and comparative understanding of this crucial dimension of British and Irish history. Through the examination of political choices, of ecclesiastical structures, and of individual religious attitudes, it seeks to explain the success or failure of Protestantism in these islands.

Conventional scholarship on the Mediterranean portrays the Inner Sea as a timeless entity with unchanging ecological and agrarian features. But, Faruk Tabak argues, some of the "traditional" and "olden" characteristics that we attribute to it today are actually products of relatively recent developments. Locating the shifting fortunes of Mediterranean city-states and empires in patterns of long-term economic and ecological change, this study shows how the quintessential properties of the basin -- the trinity of cereals, tree crops, and small livestock -- were reestablished as the Mediterranean's importance in global commerce, agriculture, and politics waned.

Tabak narrates this history not from the vantage point of colossal empires, but from that of the mercantile republics that played a pivotal role as empire-building city-states. His unique juxtaposition of analyses of world economic developments that flowed from the decline of these city-states and the ecological change associated with the Little Ice Age depicts large-scale, long-term social change. Integrating the story of the western and eastern Mediterranean -- from Genoa and the Habsburg empire to Venice and the Ottoman and Byzantine empires -- Tabak unveils the complex process of devolution and regeneration that brought about the eclipse of the Mediterranean.

The topic of certitude is much debated today. On one side, commentators such as Charles Krauthammer urge us to achieve "moral clarity." On the other, those like George Will contend that the greatest present threat to civilization is an excess of certitude. To address this uncomfortable debate, Susan Schreiner turns to the intellectuals of early modern Europe, a period when thought was still fluid and had not yet been reified into the form of rationality demanded by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Schreiner argues that Europe in the sixteenth century was preoccupied with concerns similar to ours; both the desire for certainty -- especially religious certainty -- and warnings against certainty permeated the earlier era. Digging beneath overt theological and philosophical problems, she tackles the underlying fears of the period as she addresses questions of salvation, authority, the rise of skepticism, the outbreak of religious violence, the discernment of spirits, and the ambiguous relationship between appearance and reality.
In her examination of the history of theological polemics and debates (as well as other genres), Schreiner sheds light on the repeated evaluation of certainty and the recurring fear of deception. Among the texts she draws on are Montaigne's Essays, the mystical writings of Teresa of Avila, the works of Reformation fathers William of Occam, Luther, Thomas Muntzer, and Thomas More; and the dramas of Shakespeare. The result is not a book about theology, but rather about the way in which the concern with certitude determined the theology, polemics and literature of an age.

Presents an exmination of printed representations of monstrous births in German-speaking Europe from the end of the fifteenth century and through the sixteenth century, beginning with a seminal series of broadsheets from the late 1490s by humanist Sebastian Brant, and including prints by Albrecht Durer and Hans Burgkmair.

Between the mid-seventeenth and mid-eighteenth century more than 15,000 Londoners suffered sudden violent deaths. In the early modern period, accidental and 'disorderly' deaths - from drowning, falls, stabbing, shooting, fires, explosions, suffocation, and animals and vehicles, among others - were a regular feature of urban life. Between the mid-seventeenth and mid-eighteenth centuries more than 15,000 Londoners suffered sudden violent deaths. While this figure includes around 3,000 who were murdered or committed suicide, the vast majority of fatalities resulted from accidents. In the early modern period, accidental and 'disorderly' deaths - from drowning, falls, stabbing, shooting, fires, explosions, suffocation, animals and vehicles, among other causes - were a regular feature ofurban life and left a significant mark in the archival records of the period. This book provides the first substantive critical study of the early modern accident, revealing and chronicling the lives - and deaths - of hundreds of otherwise unknown Londoners. Drawing on the weekly London Bills of Mortality, parish burial registers, newspapers and other related documents, it examines accidents and other forms of violent death in the city with a view tounderstanding who among its residents encountered such events, how the bureaucracy recorded and elaborated their circumstances and why they did so, and what practical responses might follow. Through a systematic review of the character of accidents, medical and social interventions, and changing attitudes toward the regulation of hazards across the metropolis, it establishes the historical significance of the accident and shows how, as the eighteenth century progressed, providential explanations gave way to a more rational viewpoint that saw certain accident events as threats to be managed rather than misfortunes to be explained. Additionally, the book explores how knowledge of such incidents was transformed to become a recurring cultural trope in oral, textual and visual narratives of metropolitan life, thereby opening a window to the way in which sudden death and violent injury was understood by early modern mentalities. CRAIG SPENCE is Senior Lecturer in History at Bishop Grosseteste University.

Men and masculinities are still inadequately incorporated into the historiography of early modern witch trials, despite the fact that 20-25% of all accused 'witches' were male. This book redresses this imbalance by making men the focus of the gender analysis and also covers the issue of regional variation in the gendering of witch persecution.

A regional study of landed society in the transition between the late medieval and early modern period. In the middle of the fifteenth century, the economy of north-east England was beset by crises: population was low, production was stagnant and many landowners faced penury. By the end of the sixteenth century, however, the precocious development of the coal industry and high levels of inflation provided opportunities for investment and profit in the Durham countryside. This book examines the development of agrarian capitalism; estate management; tenure and the land market; social mobility; the gentrification of merchant wealth and the emergence of the yeomanry during this period in the region. It looks at such questions as how the coal industry was affected by the fifteenth-century recession and the effects its rapid expansion had upon landed society; reassesses debates on the rise of the gentry and the "crisis" of the aristocracy; and considers how the wholesale economic changes of this period affected the social structure of late-medieval and early-modern England. Although this period is often seen as a transitional era, this book argues that it needs to be studied as one long agrarian cycle, showing the degree to which patterns of landholding fixed during the fifteenth-century recession affected the distribution of profits between different types of lords and tenants in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century. A.T. Brown is an AddisonWheeler Fellow at Durham University.

Volume III of The Oxford History of Historical Writing contains essays by leading scholars on the writing of history globally during the early modern era, from 1400 to 1800. The volume proceeds in geographic order from east to west, beginning in Asia and ending in the Americas. It aims at once to provide a selective but authoritative survey of the field and, where opportunity allows, to provoke cross-cultural comparisons. This is the third of five volumes in a series that explores representations of the past from the beginning of writing to the present day, and from all over the world.