The period 1618-1648 was one of the most complex in European history. Religion interacted with rebellion and dynastic rivalry in a series of conflicts in central Europe known collectively as the Thirty Years War. This book guides the reader through the period by surveying the narrative of events and establishing the essential chronological framework. In addition Stephen Lee looks at such key issues as the motives of the participants, their gains and losses, as well as at the religious, military, social and economic aspects of the War. Each section in the book incorporates the most recent research.

Wills from lower social status shed light on religious, social and cultural history. Lincolnshire has an extensive archive of sixteenth-century probate material, preserved in the registers of the consistory and archdeaconry courts of Lincoln, the peculiar court of the Dean and Chapter of Lincoln Cathedral, and thearchdeaconry court of Stow. Unlike the wills proved by the archiepiscopal probate courts of Canterbury and York, those from Lincolnshire reflect a population of lower social status. The overwhelming majority come from the ranks of husbandmen, yeomen, or tradesmen, rather than the gentry. In this respect the wills offer a valuable source for the cultural and religious preoccupations of the 'middling sort' and those lower in the social spectrum on the eve of the Reformation. Equally, the detailed bequests of property, livestock and land provide an insight into the material culture and prosperity of the testators, as well as extensive genealogical and topographical information of interest to local, regional and family historians.

Filling a major gap in historical, literary, and post-colonial scholarship, Imperialisms examines the identity statements of the world's major imperialisms in multiple theatres of competition over the course of four centuries. Filling a major gap in historical, literary, and post-colonial scholarship, Imperialisms examines early identity statements and nuances of dominance of the world's major imperialisms in various theatres of competition. Developed in collaboration with leading scholars in the field, this book balances historical essays and case studies, and encourages investigations of conversant and competing imperialisms, their practices, and rhetoric of self-justification. Europe (west and east), India, the New World, Africa, and the Far East are among the sites of imperialism featured here, which are analyzed in relation to intersecting debates on politics, religion, literature, nationalism, commerce, conversion, and race. Valuable for preliminary or advanced studies, Imperialisms provides multiple points of entry into and guidelines for a conversation both current and vigorous.

This volume reproduces key historical texts concerning `colonial knowledges'. The use of the adjective 'colonial' indicates that knowledge is shaped by power relationships, while the use of the plural form, 'knowledges' indicates the emphasis in this collection is on an interplay between different, often competing, cognitive systems. George Balandier's notion of the colonial situation is an organising principle that runs throughout the volume, and there are four sub-themes: language and texts, categorical knowledge, the circulation of knowledge and indigenous knowledge. The volume is designed to introduce students to a range of important interventions which speak to each other today, even if they were not intended to do so when first published. An introductory essay links the themes together and explains the significance of the individual articles.

Encounters with a 'multicultural' Britain in the Tudor and Stuart periods written with an eye to debates about immigration and ethnicity in today's Britain. This book recovers the encounter with a "multicultural" Britain by British travellers in the Tudor and Stuart periods. When William Camden, writing in the sixteenth century, set out to write the history of Britannia, he deliberately took to the roads to discover it first-hand, and those diverse cultures guided and informed his journeys. Here, John Cramsie offers original perspectives on Camden's multicultural Britain through the study of British travellersand their narratives. We meet characters such as the Tudor traveller John Leland, who intended to tell the peoples of England and Wales about themselves; chronicle how they came to settle the towns, villages, valleys, and mountaintops they called home; record the marks they left in the landscape; and celebrate the noble histories and cultures they created. Dozens - eventually hundreds - of Britons shared the same passion to meet their island neighbours and relate their experiences. The individuals studied in this book include actual as well as armchair travellers and those who blurred the boundaries between them. Their letters, diaries, journals, and histories range from the epic,poignant, and matter of fact to the exotic, preposterous, and hateful; the sources include actual and imaginative narratives and those which combined both elements. Travellers painted Britain with, in Leland's words, native colours that were rich, vibrant, and, above all, complex. Their remarkable journeys are the story of how Britons over two centuries met, interacted, and attempted (or not) to understand one another. Written with an eye to debates aboutimmigration and ethnicity in today's Britain, the book emphasizes the long history of making and remaking the island's cultural mosaic. The encounter with Britain's native colours has been a burden of history and opportunity formillennia, not simply for our own times. JOHN CRAMSIE is Associate Professor, Department of History, Union College, NY.

This is the story of the extraordinary life of Claver Morris and the society in which he lived. After his marriage at Chelsea in 1685, Claver Morris moved to Somerset where he established an outstanding reputation for his work as a physician. His diaries show us how he worked with apothecaries and surgeons, and travelled widely to treat all kind of patients, from the children of the poor to those of the landed gentry. The diaries also tell us about the joys and pains of Claver's personal and family life, and of his various intrigues. Claver Morris was a man of many talents: immensely enterprising, knowledgeable, sociable and loving. His house was always filled with music, guests and entertainments. Yet he was often faced with disputes and troubles partly of his own making - as when he courted a bishop's daughter, or stole some land to build his Queen Anne house. The Doctor's World provides a unique portrait of a physician living and working through the political and religious turmoils that beset the nation at the turn of the eighteenth century. Tales of medical treatments, clandestine marriages and self-serving priests are entwined with famous acts of treason and rebellion, and the pleasures and tragedies of daily life. This meticulously researched book will appeal to all readers of social, political, medical and family history.

From Elizabeth I's refoundation of the collegiate church to reforms and improvements attempted and achieved in the early years of James I's reign. The completion of Dr Knighton's edition of the first chapter minute book of Westminster Abbey records in detail Elizabeth I's refoundation of the collegiate church, including regulatio for preaching, the school and the library; the chapter's own housing is a continuing issue. Predominantly, however, the acts document the chapter's estate management: lease particulars shed light on the population of early modern Westminster and London. Favours sought by queen and courtiers are recorded, the exercise of the dean and chapter's ecclesiastical patronage is registered. At the end of the period the abbey was home to some of the most eminent churchmen and scholars of the day, Andrewes, Bancroft, Camden and Hakluyt among them. Reforms and improvements attempted and achieved in the early years of James I's reign conclude the volume. Index to both vols.CHARLES KNIGHTON gained his Ph.D. from Magdalene College, Cambridge.

This edited volume brings together a collection of provocative essays examining a number of different facets of Elizabethan foreign affairs, encompassing England and The British Isles, Europe, and the dynamic civilization of Islam. As an entirely domestic queen who never physically left her realm, Elizabeth I cast an inordinately wide shadow in the world around her. The essays is this volume collectively reveal a queen and her kingdom much more connected and integrated into a much wider world than usually discussed in conventional studies of Elizabethan foreign affairs.

This book is devoted to the inhabitants of the Spanish-Portuguese borderlands during the early modern period. It seeks to challenge a predominant historiography focused on the study of borderlands societies, relying exclusively on the antagonistic topics of subversion and the construction of boundaries. It states that by focusing just on one concept or another there is a restrictive understanding tending to condition the agency of local communities by external narratives. Thus, if traditionally border people were reduced by some scholars to actors of a struggle against a supposedly imposed border; in a more modern perspective, their behaviors have been also framed in bottom-up processes of consolidation of spaces of sovereignty in a no less limiting vision. Faced with both approaches, the objective of this work is not to deny them but, first and foremost, to situate the experiences of border populations outside of logics that I understand as originally alien to themselves, and to highlight their own subjectivity. Finally, it also demonstrates that most of the practices developed by border people were fundamentally aimed at defending their local communities. It will be useful for both audiences interested in early modern Iberia or border studies from a bottom-up perspective.

Containing an urgently needed archival database of historical evidence, this volume includes both a consolidated presentation of the documentary records of black people in Tudor and Stuart England, and an interpretive narrative that confirms and significantly extends the insights of current theoretical excursus on race in early modern England. Here for the first time Imtiaz Habib collects the scattered references to black people-whether from Africa, India or America-in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, and arranges them into a systematic, chronological descriptive index. He offers an extended historical and theoretical interpretation of the records in six chapters, which serve as an introductory guide to the index even as they articulate a specific argument about the meaning of the records. Both the archival information and interpretive scholarship provide a strong framework from which future historical debates on race in early modern England can proceed.

An account of American colonial settlement of English female felons in Virginia and Maryland and French female convicts in Louisiana.

The first volume in a pioneering account of Oliver Cromwell-providing a major new interpretation of one of the greatest figures in history "Hutton's book is intelligent, well documented, and stylish."-Keith Thomas, New York Review of Books Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658)-the only English commoner to become the overall head of state-is one of the great figures of history, but his character was very complex. He was at once courageous and devout, devious and self-serving. As a parliamentarian, he was devoted to his cause; as a soldier, he was ruthless. Cromwell's speeches and writings surpass in quantity those of any other ruler of England before Victoria and, for those seeking to understand him, he has usually been taken at his word. In this remarkable new work, Ronald Hutton untangles the facts from the fiction. Cromwell, pursuing his devotion to God and cementing his Puritan support base, quickly transformed from obscure provincial to military victor. At the end of the first English Civil War, he was poised to take power. Hutton reveals a man who was both genuine in his faith and deliberate in his dishonesty-and uncovers the inner workings of the man who has puzzled biographers for centuries.

Renaissance anatomist Gabrielle Falloppia is best known today for his account of the eponymous fallopian tubes but he made numerous other anatomical discoveries as well, was one of the most famous surgeons of his time, and is widely believed to have invented the condom. Drawing on Falloppia's Observationes anatomicae of 1561 and on dozens of handwritten and published sets of student notes, this book not only looks at Falloppia's anatomical lectures and demonstrations. It also studies Falloppia's work on surgical topics - including the French disease and cosmetic surgery - on thermal waters, and on pharmacology. Last but not least, it uses student notes and the letters of contemporary scholars to throw a new light on Falloppia's biography, on his very special relationship with the botanist Melchior Wieland, who lived in his house for several years, and on his conflicts with his fellow professors in Padua, one of whom, Bassiano Landi, was murdered just ten days after his funeral - by Falloppia's disciples, as some believed. Written by one of the leading scholars in the field of early modern medicine, this book will appeal to all those interested in the teaching and practice of anatomy, surgery, and pharmacology in the Renaissance.

The first major study of the early Reformation and the Polish monarchy for over a century, this volume asks why Crown and church in the reign of King Sigismund I (1506-1548) did not persecute Lutherans. It offers a new narrative of Luther's dramatic impact on this monarchy - which saw violent urban Reformations and the creation of Christendom's first Lutheran principality by 1525 - placing these events in their comparative European context. King Sigismund's realm appears to offer a major example of sixteenth-century religious toleration: the king tacitly allowed his Hanseatic ports to enact local Reformations, enjoyed excellent relations with his Lutheran vassal duke in Prussia, allied with pro-Luther princes across Europe, and declined to enforce his own heresy edicts. Polish church courts allowed dozens of suspected Lutherans to walk free. Examining these episodes in turn, this study does not treat toleration purely as the product of political calculation or pragmatism. Instead, through close analysis of language, it reconstructs the underlying cultural beliefs about religion and church (ecclesiology) held by the king, bishops, courtiers, literati, and clergy - asking what, at heart, did these elites understood 'Lutheranism' and 'catholicism' to be? It argues that the ruling elites of the Polish monarchy did not persecute Lutheranism because they did not perceive it as a dangerous Other - but as a variant form of catholic Christianity within an already variegated late medieval church, where social unity was much more important than doctrinal differences between Christians. Building on John Bossy and borrowing from J.G.A. Pocock, it proposes a broader hypothesis on the Reformation as a shift in the languages and concept of orthodoxy.

The fifteen-year period between 1645 and 1660 was one of the most dynamic in British history, during which the republican Commonwealth and Cromwellian Protectorate attempted to create a new type of 'Godly' state after the execution of Charles I. Drawing on the latest research and established sources, as well as the works and diaries of contemporaries such as John Evelyn, Lucy Hutchinson and Samuel Pepys, A Sword for Christ offers a new and stimulating perspective on these extraordinary years. Key personalities such as Sir Thomas Fairfax, the Marquis of Argyll, Charles II and, of course, Oliver Cromwell himself - one of the most contentious figures in history - are re-appraised and brought vividly to life. In addition to exploring the religious and political debates which shaped the era and the military culture which defined it, the book also considers how society was profoundly affected by the upheaval caused by the civil wars; the relations between what was essentially an English republic and its Irish and Scottish neighbours; and the ethos of the New Model Army and the navy.

This is a detailed and scholarly account of religious belief and conflict in the strategically important province of Inner Austria between 1580 and 1630. Dr Pörtner analyses the aims, achievements, and shortcomings of the Habsburgs' confessional crusade in Styria, showing how although the progress of Protestantization was reversed, the Counter-Reformation left an ambivalent legacy to the modern Austrian state.

This book is about the transformation of England's trade and government finances in the mid-seventeenth century, a revolution that destroyed Ireland. In 1642 a small group of merchants, the 'Adventurers for Irish land', raised an army to conquer Ireland but sent it instead to fight for parliament in England. Meeting secretly at Grocers Hall in London from 1642 to 1660, they laid the foundations of England's empire and modern fiscal state. But a dispute over their Irish land entitlements led them to reject Cromwell's Protectorate and plot to restore the monarchy. This is the first book to chart the relentless rise of the Adventurers and their profound political influence. It is essential reading for students of Britain and Ireland in the mid-seventeenth century, the origins of England's empire and the Cromwellian land settlement. -- .

Drama, History, Great Britain, Tudor Era, Elizabethan Era, Stuart Era, acting & auditioning

In this book, O'Hara presents the first general history of Britons relationship with the surrounding oceans from 1600 to the present day. This all-encompassing account covers individual seafarers, ship-borne migration, warfare and the maritime economy, as well as the British peoples maritime ideas and self perception throughout the centuries.

The first comprehensive history of seventeenth-century London, told through the lives of those who experienced it "Lively and arresting. . . . [Lincoln] is as confident in handling the royal ceremonials of political transition . . . as she is with London's thriving coffee-house culture, and its turbulent maritime community."-Ian W. Archer, Times Literary Supplement "Lincoln has a curator's gift for selecting all the right details for a thoroughly absorbing account."-Tony Barber, Financial Times, "Best Books of 2021: History" The Gunpowder Plot, the Civil Wars, Charles I's execution, the Plague, the Great Fire, the Restoration, and then the Glorious Revolution: the seventeenth century was one of the most momentous times in the history of Britain, and Londoners took center stage. In this fascinating account, Margarette Lincoln charts the impact of national events on an ever-growing citizenry with its love of pageantry, spectacle, and enterprise. Lincoln looks at how religious, political, and financial tensions were fomented by commercial ambition, expansion, and hardship. In addition to events at court and parliament, she evokes the remarkable figures of the period, including Shakespeare, Bacon, Pepys, and Newton, and draws on diaries, letters, and wills to trace the untold stories of ordinary Londoners. Through their eyes, we see how the nation emerged from a turbulent century poised to become a great maritime power with London at its heart-the greatest city of its time.

Updated to incorporate recent scholarship on the subject, this new edition of Hugh Cunningham's classic text investigates the relationship between ideas about childhood and the actual experience of being a child, and assesses how it has changed over the span of 500 years. Through his engaging narrative Hugh Cunningham tells the story of the development of ideas from the Renaissance to the present, revealing considerable differences in the way Western societies have understood and valued childhood over time. His survey of parent/child relationships uncovers evidence of parental love, care and, in the frequent cases of child death, grief throughout the period, concluding that there was as much continuity as change in the actual relations of children and adults across these five centuries. Since the book's first publication in 1995, the volume of historical research on children and childhood has escalated hugely and is testimony to the level of concern provoked by the dominance of the negative narrative that originated in the 1970s and 1980s. A new epilogue revisits the volume from today's perspective, analysing why this negative narrative established dominance in Western society and considering how it has affected historical writing about children and childhood, enabling the reader to put both this volume and recent debates into context. Supported by an updated historiographical discussion and expanded bibliography, Children and Childhood in Western Society since 1500 remains an essential resource for students of the history of childhood, the history of the family, social history and gender history.

Consisting of over 100 easy to access capsule portraits of America's Founding Fathers, "Our Lives, Our Fortunes, Our Sacred Honor" tells the stories of the mighty figures of an age gone by. Now students and interested readers can have a handy reference guide to key figures covering the lowliest private in the Continental Army to the most important leaders in Congress. Here they all are: the generals, the soldiers, the frontiersmen, the politicians, the spies, and the rabble rousers "Our Lives, Our Fortunes, Our Sacred Honor" will take readers into the halls of Congress to see how independence was declared and the Constitution crafted, into the counsels of the army where strategy was planned, on the high seas where great vessels exchanged fire, on the frontier where mercy was neither asked nor given, in the palaces of Europe with their intrigue and secret negotiations, and on the battlefield where the fate of nations and the world was decided in hundreds of actions both small and large So if you are a reader well versed in the Revolutionary era or a newcomer to the most important historical event of modern times, you cannot afford to ignore this single volume new collection.