There is both an extensive introduction with two parts and a reflection at the end, which sets out and summarises the volume in a clear and accessible way, helping students and readers understand the topic as a whole, and enabling them to draw their own conclusions. The chapters are diverse in approach and subject, and many deal with global issues through European mediation, giving readers a survey of the subject beyond the traditional western European lens. The book is truely original, with its emphasis on rules/regulation rather than circulation of knowledge and issues of secrecy, providing students and readers a fresh and cutting edge approach to the history of knowledge.

Elizabethan English culture is saturated with tales and figures from Ovid's "Metamorphoses." While most of these narratives interrogate metamorphosis and transformation, many tales--such as those of Philomela, Hecuba, or Orpheus--also highlight heightened states of emotion, especially in powerless or seemingly powerless characters. When these tales are translated and retold in the new cultural context of Renaissance England, a distinct politics of Ovidian emotion emerges. Through intertextual readings in diverse cultural contexts, "Ovid and the Politics of Emotion in Elizabethan""England" reveals the ways these representations helped redefine emotions and the political efficacy of emotional expression in sixteenth-century England.

America's colonial era began and ended dramatically, with the founding of the first enduring settlement at Jamestown on May 14, 1607 and the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776. During those 169 years, conflicts were endemic and often overlapping among the colonists, between the colonists and the original inhabitants, between the colonists and other imperial European peoples, and between the colonists and the mother country. As conflicts were endemic, so too were struggles for power. This study reveals the reasons for, stages, and results of these conflicts. The dynamic driving this history are two inseparable transformations as English subjects morphed into American citizens, and the core American cultural values morphed from communitarianism and theocracy into individualism and humanism. These developments in turn were shaped by the changing ways that the colonists governed, made money, waged war, worshipped, thought, wrote, and loved. Extraordinary individuals led that metamorphosis, explorers like John Smith and Daniel Boone, visionaries like John Winthrop and Thomas Jefferson, entrepreneurs like William Phips and John Hancock, dissidents like Rogers Williams and Anne Hutchinson, warriors like Miles Standish and Benjamin Church, free spirits like Thomas Morton and William Byrd, and creative writers like Anne Bradstreet and Robert Rogers. Then there was that quintessential man of America's Enlightenment, Benjamin Franklin. And finally, George Washington who, more than anyone, was responsible for winning American independence when and how it happened.

These studies look at Malory's Morte Darthur as both literature and history. Insights into warfare and into contemporary attitudes to violence and the depredations of war are balanced by considerations of the literary context of the Morte, both with regard to the manuscript tradition of 'grete bokes', and the first printed version. Current critical attitudes to the Morte are also examined, with the suggestion that Malory's intentions have been both imperfectly realised and understood. D. THOMAS HANKS Professor of English, Baylor University Many aspects of Malory's Morte Darthur reflect contemporary literary and social issues, and it is this topic which forms the focus for the eight essays in the volume, all by leading Malory scholars. Terence McCarthy suggests that the Morte was a book that came at the wrong time, and which we have admired for the wrong reasons. Andrew Lynch and D. Thomas Hanks Jr argue that Malory questions his culture's ideology of arms; Karen Cherewatuk and Kevin Grimm discuss the manuscript and printed contexts of the Morte. Robert Kelly examines some of the political elements of the Morte; Ann Elaine Bliss points out the role of processions in Malory's time and in the Morte; and P.J.C. Field compares the Morte's final battle to elements of the Battle of Towton (1461), finding strong similarities between the two.

This book addresses the multifaceted history of the domestic sphere in Europe from the Age of Reformation to the emergence of modern society. By focusing on daily practice, interaction and social relations, it shows continuities and social change in European history from an interior perspective. The Routledge History of the Domestic Sphere in Europe contains a variety of approaches from different regions that each pose a challenge to commonplace views such as the emergence of confessional cultures, of private life, and of separate spheres of men and women. By analyzing a plethora of manifold sources including diaries, court records, paintings and domestic advice literature, this volume provides an overview of the domestic sphere as a location of work and consumption, conflict and cooperation, emotions and intimacy, and devotion and education. The book sheds light on changing relations between spouses, parents and children, masters and servants or apprentices, and humans and animals or plants, thereby exceeding the notion of the modern nuclear family. This volume will be of great use to upper-level graduates, postgraduates and experienced scholars interested in the history of family, household, social space, gender, emotions, material culture, work and private life in early modern and nineteenth-century Europe.

Originally published in 1984, this was the first detailed study of the impact of Puritan influences on the wealthy county families of early Stuart England. It discusses one of the central issues in the history of the English Civil War: what motivated those men and women who risked all in opposition to King Charles I. The book looks at the role played by gentry families in the advancement or defence of 'true religion', and considers the reasons why powerful families which helped to govern the counties were to be found among the godly. It explores the conflict between class values and the exacting demands of an austere religious philosophy and examines the relationship between the Puritan gentry and the clerical Puritans who included authors, university dons, schoolmasters, lecturers and parish clergy.

Originally published in 1915, the essays in this book deal with 9 English writers - as diverse in outlook and temperament as Bunyan and Boswell; poets and Puritans and men who were neither. The book examines each writer in his historical and social context - facing problems in art or religion and life in general.

Originally published in 1968, the documents collected in this volume (all re-set for ease of reading), trace the history of the Puritan Revolution from its roots in the early seventeenth century to the Restoration. They show how the causes and the course of the upheaval were reflected immediately and polemically in the torrent of books, tracts and pamphlets, letters, speeches, sermons, petitions, paper constitutions and government instruments that accompanied and often precipitated events. The documents substantiate the conviction of many scholars that the English Revolution represented a shaking of society comparable to the French and Russian revolutions. The Introduction discusses the work of historians of modern-day historians of the period and contributes to the debate about the underlying causes of the crisis.

Originally published in 1972 and based on extensive research and use of source materials including manuscripts, this book examines Puritan spiritual autobiographies written before 1725 and sets them in the context of the literary tradition out of which they grew. As well as Bunyan, Baxter and Fox, this book also discusses important works which have received less attention, notably the Confessions of Richard Norwood, the Bermudan settler. The book identifies 3 strands in the tradition: the work of the 'orthodox' Puritans; the prophets of the Commonwealth, and the confessions and journals of the early Quakers. The social, religious and literary factors which contributed to their development are discussed and it is shown how the self-analysis popularized by the Puritan preachers and writers contributed to the development of the novel. The book will be of particular value to those interested in 17th Century literature or religion.

Offering a comprehensive discussion into regime change in Italy during the Early Modern period, this book will appeal to students and researchers alike interested in the dynamics between politics, military, and culture in Europe during this crucial era.

Examining the ideologies that motivated the members of the parliaments of Sweden, Poland, and Hungary in the Eighteenth Century, this book will appeal to students and researchers alike interested in the early modern institutions which have now been replaced with their more democratic counterparts.

This book showcases the wide variety of commercial cosmopolitan practices that arose from the global economic entanglements of the early modern period. Cosmopolitanism is not only a philosophical ideal: for many centuries it has also been an everyday practice across the globe. The early modern era saw hitherto unprecedented levels of economic interconnectedness. States, societies, and individuals reacted with a mixture of commercial idealism and commercial anxiety, seeking at once to exploit new opportunities for growth whilst limiting its disruptive effects. In highlighting the range of commercial cosmopolitan practices that grew out of early modern globalisation, the book demonstrates that it provided robust alternatives to the universalising western imperial model of the later period. Deploying a number of interdisciplinary methodologies, the kind of 'methodological cosmopolitanism' that Ulrich Beck has called for, chapters provide agency-centred evaluations of the risks and opportunities inherent in the ambiguous role of the cosmopolitan, who, often playing on and mobilising a number of identities, operated in between and outside of different established legal, social, and cultural systems. The book will be important reading for students and scholars working at the intersection of economic, global, and cultural history.

Early modern Protestant scholars closely engaged with Islamic thought in more ways than is usually recognized. Among Protestants, Lutheran scholars distinguished themselves as the most invested in the study of Islam and Muslim culture. Mehmet Karabela brings the neglected voices of post-Reformation theologians, primarily German Lutherans, into focus and reveals their rigorous engagement with Islamic thought. Inspired by a global history approach to religious thought, Islamic Thought Through Protestant Eyes offers new sources to broaden the conventional interpretation of the Reformation beyond a solely European Christian phenomenon. Based on previously unstudied dissertations, disputations, and academic works written in Latin in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Karabela analyzes three themes: Islam as theology and religion; Islamic philosophy and liberal arts; and Muslim sects (Sunni and Shi'a). This book provides analyses and translations of the Latin texts as well as brief biographies of the authors. These texts offer insight into the Protestant perception of Islamic thought for scholars of religious studies and Islamic studies as well as for general readers. Examining the influence of Islamic thought on the construction of the Protestant identity after the Reformation helps us to understand the role of Islam in the evolution of Christianity.

Following the Glorious Revolution the court of the exiled Stuarts was for many years based in France, until after the failure of the Jacobite rising of 1715, it was forced to move, eventually to be established in Rome. This book provides the first study of the court in transition, when exiled King James III lived in the Palazzo Ducale at Urbino.

In early modern English medicine, the balance of fluids in the body was seen as the key to health. Menstruation was widely believed to regulate the blood level in the female body and so was extensively discussed in medical texts. In this book, Sara Read examines all forms of literature, from plays and poems, to life-writing, and compares these texts with the medical theories. Many of these literary representations show how early modern English women related to their bleeding bodies, both in their menstrual cycles and at other times of transition, from menarche to menopause. For example, how would a literate woman read about her body in the books which claimed to be guides for female health? How was menstruation presented to society in staged and printed works? As part of its attempt to recover the ways in which a woman in this era might have understood this aspect of her physiology, this book examines the key moments when menstruation and related changes were at the forefront of her experience of living in a female body.

Scandal and Reputation at the Court of Catherine de Medici explores Catherine de Medici's 'flying squadron', the legendary ladies-in-waiting of the sixteenth-century French queen mother who were alleged to have been ordered to seduce politically influential men for their mistress's own Machiavellian purposes. Branded a 'cabal of cuckoldry' by a contemporary critic, these women were involved in scandals that have encouraged a perception, which continues in much academic literature, of the late Valois court as debauched and corrupt. Rather than trying to establish the guilt or innocence of the accused, Una McIlvenna here focuses on representations of the scandals in popular culture and print, and on the collective portrayal of the women in the libelous and often pornographic literature that circulated information about the court. She traces the origins of this material to the all-male intellectual elite of the parlementaires: lawyers and magistrates who expressed their disapproval of Catherine's political and religious decisions through misogynist pamphlets and verse that targeted the women of her entourage. Scandal and Reputation at the Court of Catherine de Medici reveals accusations of poisoning and incest to be literary tropes within a tradition of female defamation dating to classical times that encouraged a collective and universalizing notion of women as sexually voracious, duplicitous and, ultimately, dangerous. In its focus on manuscript and early print culture, and on the transition from a world of orality to one dominated by literacy and textuality, this study has relevance for scholars of literary history, particularly those interested in pamphlet and libel culture.

This book explores how families of the early modern age in Italy, France and England adopted a system of selective infanticide to manage food and economic resources avoiding the creation of problematic situations for the survival of the family. Providing students and researcher of early modern history with a new take on the history of the family to inform their studies. The book is based on careful transcription of a wide array of documents, including hundreds of criminal cases, thousands of instances of civil litigation and claims of property damage, baptism records, a complete set of village assembly records and attendant tax assessments. Enabling students and researchers to see how these legal and economic records can expand their knowledge of social history and the period more broadly. Death Control in the West provides students and researchers interested in the demographic mechanisms of the age and for the study of social and family relationships in early modern Europe with the tools to undertake their own research and form their own conclusions about the prolificity of infanticide in early modern Europe.

This book explores how families of the early modern age in Italy, France and England adopted a system of selective infanticide to manage food and economic resources avoiding the creation of problematic situations for the survival of the family. Providing students and researcher of early modern history with a new take on the history of the family to inform their studies. The book is based on careful transcription of a wide array of documents, including hundreds of criminal cases, thousands of instances of civil litigation and claims of property damage, baptism records, a complete set of village assembly records and attendant tax assessments. Enabling students and researchers to see how these legal and economic records can expand their knowledge of social history and the period more broadly. Death Control in the West provides students and researchers interested in the demographic mechanisms of the age and for the study of social and family relationships in early modern Europe with the tools to undertake their own research and form their own conclusions about the prolificity of infanticide in early modern Europe.

European states were overwhelmed with information around 1500. Their agents sought to organize their overflowing archives to provide trustworthy evidence and comprehensive knowledge that was useful in the everyday exercise of power. This detailed comparative study explores cases from Lisbon to Vienna to Berlin in order to understand how changing information technologies and ambitious programs of state-building challenged record-keepers to find new ways to organize and access the information in their archives. From the intriguing details of how clerks invented new ways to index and catalog the expanding world to the evolution of new perspectives on knowledge and power among philologists and historians, this book provides illuminating vignettes and revealing comparisons about a core technology of governance in early modern Europe. Enhanced by perspectives from the history of knowledge and from archival science, this wide-ranging study explores the potential and the limitations of knowledge management as media technologies evolved.

Whether one things of him as dashing cavalier or shameless horse thief, it is impossible not to regard John Hunt Morgan as a fascinating figure of the Civil War. He collected his Raiders at first from the prominent families of Kentucky, though later the exploits of the group were to attract a less elite class of recruits. Morgan was able to lead these men into the most dangerous adventures by convincing them that the honor of the South was at stake; yet he did not always succeed in appealing to that sense of honor when temptations of easy theft drew the Raiders from military objectives to wanton pillage.

In John Hunt Morgan and his Raiders, Edison H. Thomas gives us a balanced view of these controversial men and their raids. In a fast-paced narrative he follows the cavalry unit for the evening the first group set out from Lexington to join the Confederate forces until the morning of Morgan's death in Greeneville, Tennessee. Basil Duke, St. Leger Grenfell, Lightning Ellsworth, and the beautiful Martha Ready all receive their due, and the truly remarkable story of the Raiders' newspaper is told.

A special contribution is the insight this account offers into the disruption of rail communications carried out with such enthusiasm by Morgan and his men. Thomas' study of the railroad records of the period has enabled him to present this part of the Raiders' story with rare detail and understanding.

An exploration of the personal and professional networks of political power during the reign of Louis XIV, focusing on the influence of his minister Louis Phelypeaux de Pontchartrain. This book explores the processes of state-building and the nature of political power in France during the reign of Louis XIV [1642-1715] through a study of a prominent ministerial family, the Phelypeaux de Pontchartrain. During the initial development of French governmental institutions in early modern France, patron-client ties provided networks for the transmission of political power that often paralleled or underpinned formal state institutions. In theabsence of an efficient state bureaucracy, these informal patron-client ties tended to be grounded in personal connections between patrons and clients: marriage, kinship, or friendship. During the second half of the reign of LouisXIV, however, earlier state-building and centralizing initiatives began to take root. Although this study focuses primarily on one family, the Phelypeaux de Pontchartrain, it provides a broad study of institutions and political authority in the early modern French state from 1670 to 1715. Louis Phelypeaux de Pontchartrain and his son Jerome became members of the small circle of Louis XIV's most important advisors and, as royal councillors, they headed virtually every administrative division in the royal government over the course of their careers: finances, the navy, the colonies, the king's household, and the justice system. This study maps the evolution and developmentof the family's personal networks of power that included political patrons and clients in the parlements [law courts] in Paris, the royal court, among the clergy, in the outlying provinces, in the navy, and in the French colonies. The Pontchartrain family's complex political networks also show the important role of noblewomen in political networks and state-building. Marriage alliances proved to be an important factor in the family's ability to weather political crisis and scandals that beset the clan in the early seventeenth century. Sara Chapman is Assistant Professor of History at Oakland University.

This is the first comprehensive study of the Renaissance commonplace-book. Commonplace-books were the information-organizers of Early Modern Europe, notebooks of quotations methodically arranged for easy retrieval. From their first introduction to the rudiments of Latin to the specialized studies of leisure reading of their later years, the pupils of humanist schools were trained to use commonplace-books, which formed an immensely important element of Renaissance education. The common-place book mapped and resourced Renaissance culture's moral thinking, its accepted strategies of argumentation, its rhetoric, and its deployment of knowledge. In this ground-breaking study Ann Moss investigates the commonplace-book's medieval antecedents, its methodology and use as promulgated by its humanist advocates, its varieties as exemplified in its printed manifestations, and the reasons for its gradual decline in the seventeenth century. The book covers the Latin culture of Early Modern Europe and its vernacular counterparts and continuations, particularly in France. Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought is much more than an account of humanist classroom practice: it is a major work of cultural history.

London in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a surprisingly diverse place, home not just to people from throughout the British Isles but to a significant population of French and Dutch immigrants, to travelers and refugees from beyond Europe's borderlands and, from the 1650s, to a growing Jewish community. Yet although we know much about the population of the capital of early modern England, we know little about how Londoners conceived of the many peoples of their own city. Diversity and Difference in Early Modern London seeks to rectify this, addressing the question of how the inhabitants of the metropolis ordered the heterogeneity around them. Rather than relying upon literary or theatrical representations, this study emphasizes day-to-day practice, drawing upon petitions, government records, guild minute books and taxation disputes along with plays and printed texts. It shows how the people of London defined belonging and exclusion in the course of their daily actions, through such prosaic activities as the making and selling of goods, the collection of taxes and the daily give and take of guild politics. This book demonstrates that encounters with heterogeneity predate either imperial expansion or post-colonial immigration. In doing so it offers a perspective of interest both to scholars of the early modern English metropolis and to historians of race, migration, imperialism and the wider Atlantic world. An empirical examination of civic economics, taxation and occupational politics that asks broader questions about multiculturalism and Englishness, this study speaks not just to the history of immigration in London itself, but to the wider debate about evolving notions of national identity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Now in its fifth edition, The Italian City Republics illustrates how, from the eleventh century onwards, many Italian towns achieved independence as political entities, unhindered by any centralising power. Until the fourteenth century, when the regimes of individual 'tyrants' took over in most towns, these communes were the scene of a precocious, and very well-documented, experiment in republican self-government. In this new edition, Trevor Dean has expanded the book's treatment of women and gender, the early history of the communes and the lives of non-elites. Focusing on the typical medium-sized towns rather than the better-known cities, the authors draw on a rich variety of contemporary material, both documentary and literary, to portray the world of the communes, illustrating the patriotism and public spirit as well as the equally characteristic factional strife which was to tear them apart. Discussion of the artistic and social lives of the inhabitants shows how these towns were the seedbed of the cultural achievements of the early Renaissance. The Bibliography has been updated to a list of Further Reading with the latest scholarship for students to continue their studies. Both students and the general reader interested in Italian history, literature and art will find this accessible book a rewarding and fascinating read.

This edited volume examines how individuals and communities defined and negotiated the boundaries between inclusion and exclusion in England between 1550 and 1800. It aims to uncover how men, women, and children from a wide range of social and religious backgrounds experienced and enacted exclusion in their everyday lives. Negotiating Exclusion takes a fresh and challenging look at early modern England's distinctive cultures of exclusion under three broad themes: exclusion and social relations; the boundaries of community; and exclusions in ritual, law, and bureaucracy. The volume shows that exclusion was a central feature of everyday life and social relationships in this period. Its chapters also offer new insights into how the history of exclusion can be usefully investigated through different sources and innovative methodologies, and in relation to the experiences of people not traditionally defined as "marginal." The book includes a comprehensive overview of the historiography of exclusion and chapters from leading scholars. This makes it an ideal introduction to exclusion for students and researchers of early modern English and European history. Due to its strong theoretical underpinnings, it will also appeal to modern historians and sociologists interested in themes of identity, inclusion, exclusion, and community.