First published in 1992, Subject to Others considers the intersection between late seventeenth- to early nineteenth-century British female writers and the colonial debate surrounding slavery and abolition. Beginning with an overview that sets the discussion in context, Moira Ferguson then chronicles writings by Anglo-Saxon women and one African-Caribbean ex-slave woman, from between 1670 and 1834, on the abolition of the slave trade and the emancipation of slaves. Through studying the writings of around thirty women in total, Ferguson concludes that white British women, as a result of their class position, religious affiliation and evolving conceptions of sexual difference, constructed a colonial discourse about Africans in general and slaves in particular. Crucially, the feminist propensity to align with anti-slavery activism helped to secure the political self-liberation of white British women. A fascinating and detailed text, this volume will be of particular interest to undergraduate students researching colonial British female writers, early feminist discourse, and the anti-slavery debate.

‘A notorious fiend’, ‘generally odious’, ‘he seems hideous, and so he is.’

Thanks to the invidious reputation of his most famous work, The Prince, Niccolò Machiavelli exerts a unique hold over the popular imagination. But was Machiavelli as sinister as he is often thought to be? Might he not have been an infinitely more sympathetic figure, prone to political missteps, professional failures and personal dramas?

Alexander Lee reveals the man behind the myth, following him from cradle to grave, from his father’s penury and the abuse he suffered at a teacher’s hands, to his marriage and his many affairs (with both men and women), to his political triumphs and, ultimately, his fall from grace and exile. In doing so, Lee uncovers hitherto unobserved connections between Machiavelli’s life and thought. He also reveals the world through which Machiavelli moved: from the great halls of Renaissance Florence to the court of the Borgia pope, Alexander VI, from the dungeons of the Stinche prison to the Rucellai gardens, where he would begin work on some of his last great works.

As much a portrait of an age as of a uniquely engaging man, Lee’s gripping and definitive biography takes the reader into Machiavelli’s world – and his work – more completely than ever before.

In an era when ease of travel is greater than ever, it is also easy to overlook the degree to which voyages of the body - and mind - have generated an outpouring of artistry and creativity throughout the ages. Exploration of new lands and sensations is a fundamental human experience. This volume in turn provides a stimulating and adventurous exploration of the theme of travel from an art-historical perspective. Topical regions are covered ranging from the Grand Tour and colonialism to the travels of Hadrian in ancient times and Georgia O'Keeffe's journey to the Andes; from Vasari's Neoplatonic voyages to photographing nineteenth-century Japan. The scholars assembled consider both imaginary travel, as well as factual or embellished documentation of voyages. The essays are far-reaching spatially and temporally, but all relate to how art has documented the theme of travel in varying media across time and as illustrated and described by writers, artists, and illustrators. The scope of this volume is far-reaching both chronologically and conceptually, thereby appropriately documenting the universality of the theme to human experience.

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.

A different take on a popular topic, this book uncovers the exciting history of the jewels and jewellery worn and used by the later medieval and Tudor Queens of England from Margaret of Anjou to Katherine Parr. Enabling general readers to see how jewellery was used by Queens to assert their power and influence in their husband's courts. Dr Tallis is an experienced writer of non-fiction to a public audience; this book is accessibly written for an educated popular audience and undergraduate students. Explores the lives of ten queen consorts across 100 years, providing students and general readers alike with a long duree view into Queenship, women's history and material culture.

The emblem was big business in early-modern Europe, used extensively not only in printed books and broadsheets, but also to decorate pottery, metalware, furniture, glass and windows and numerous other domestic, devotional and political objects. At its most basic level simply a combination of symbolic visual image and texts, an emblem is a hybrid composed of words and picture. However, as this book demonstrates, understanding the precise and often multiple meaning, intention and message emblems conveyed can prove a remarkably slippery process. In this book, Peter Daly draws upon many years' research to reflect upon the recent upsurge in scholarly interest in, and rediscovery of, emblems following years of relative neglect. Beginning by considering some of the seldom asked, but important, questions that the study of emblems raises, including the importance of the emblem, the truth value of emblems, and the transmission of knowledge through emblems, the book then moves on to investigate more closely-focussed aspects such as the role of mnemonics, mottoes and visual rhetoric. The volume concludes with a review of some perhaps inadequately considered issues such as the role of Jesuits (who had a role in the publication of about a quarter of all known emblem books), and questions such as how these hybrid constructs were actually read and interpreted. Drawing upon a database containing records of 6,514 books of emblems and imprese, this study suggests new ways for scholars to approach important questions that have not yet been satisfactorily broached in the standard works on emblems.

In both 1715 and 1745 there was a major military challenge in Britain to the thrones of George I and George II, posed by Jacobite supporters of the exiled Stuart claimant. This book examines the responses of those loyal to the Hanoverian dynasty, whose efforts have been ignored or disparaged compared to the military perspective or that of the Jacobites. These efforts included those of the clergy who gave loyalist sermons, accompanied the volunteer forces against the Jacobites and even stood up to the Jacobite forces in person. The lords lieutenant organized militia and volunteer forces to support the status quo. Official bodies, such as the corporations, parishes, quarter sessions and sheriffs, organized events to celebrate loyalist occasions and dealt with local Jacobite sympathisers. The press, both national and regional, was uniformly loyal. Finally, both the middling and common people acted, often violently, against those thought to be hostile towards the status quo. The effectiveness of these bodies had limits, but was at times decisive, and showed that the dynasty was not without popular support in its hours of crisis. This volume is essential reading for all those interested in the Jacobite rebellions and the early English Georgian state, church and society.

English Historical Documents is the most ambitious, impressive and comprehensive collection of documents on English history ever published. An authoritative work of primary evidence, each volume presents material with exemplary scholarly accuracy. Editorial comment is directed towards making sources intelligible rather than drawing conclusions from them. Full account has been taken of modern textual criticism. A general introduction to each volume portrays the character of the period under review and critical bibliographies have been added to assist further investigation. Documents collected include treaties, personal letters, statutes, military dispatches, diaries, declarations, newspaper articles, government and cabinet proceedings, orders, acts, sermons, pamphlets, agricultural instructions, charters, grants, guild regulations and voting records. All volumes contain extra apparatus including genealogical tables, lists of officials, chronologies, diagrams, graphs and maps.

This title, first published in 1979, was ground-breaking in its exploration of the understudied area of the Tudor law of treason. Bellamy first examines the scope of that law, noting the inheritance from the Middle Ages, the effectiveness of the new statutes and interpretation of the law by the judiciary. Mining the archives for official, legal and literary accounts, the following parts consider how the government came to hear of traitors, the use of evidence and witnesses in trials and finally the fate of the traitor at the gallows and beyond. This is a full, useful and interesting title, which will be of great value to students researching Tudor and late medieval statute law, the Tudor concept of treason and the mores of Tudor society.

By the latter half of the seventeenth century, the practice of drawing up a will had become commonplace, and people were increasingly encouraged to set down their final wishes in a 'last will and testament'. Although intended to clarify ownership, these documents often provoked conflict amongst those who had survived the testator. As John Addy shows in this study, first published in 1992, where there was a will, there were relatives. Drawing on a large corpus of contemporary evidence, this survey analyses numerous cases of the family disputes that arose from wills, to form a picture of the attitudes and priorities possessed by those who contested them. This was one of the first studies to use contested-will material, and remains of great value to students of early modern history, sociology and genealogy, as well as general readers with an interest in local history.

This study, first published in 1989, examines the social relationships and moral standards within the diocese of Chester throughout the seventeenth century. Using Church Court records as his main body of evidence, John Addy examines over 10 000 cases of moral offences, including fornication, brawling in church, drunkenness, adultery and concubinage, to form a picture of the moral conduct of the Stuart laity and clergy. One of the main methods by which the Church attempted to enforce strict moral standards, the records arising from the ecclesiastical courts reveal that those codes of conduct once applied to a medieval Catholic society were increasingly being shunned by a society with expanding capitalist attitudes. An important contribution to the historiography of early modern English society, this title will be of great value to undergraduate and postgraduate students with an interest in seventeenth-century attitudes towards morality and conduct.

Divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived.For over four centuries, popular imagination has been gripped by the story of King Henry VIII and his six wives - and by the tangled web of passion and intrigue that lies behind it. Henry's desperate hope for a son, a male heir for the throne of England, drove him until his death.This attractive guide looks at the King, each of his wives and the background of religious change that surrounds their stories. From Henry's first marriage to his brother's widow Catherine of Aragon until the end of his life with Catherine Parr and three heirs, this guide tells these stories with fascinating facts, artworks, illustrations and colour photographs.Perfect for students of history and anyone with an interest in one of England's most famous monarchs and his six wives. Look out for more Pitkin Guides on the very best of British history, heritage and travel.

This book presents the first study of music in convent life in a single Hispanic city, Barcelona, during the early modern era. Exploring how convents were involved in the musical networks operating in sixteenth-century Barcelona, it challenges the invisibility of women in music history and reveals the intrinsic role played by nuns and lay women in the city's urban musical culture. Drawing on a wide range of archival sources, this innovative study offers a cross-disciplinary approach that not only reveals details of the rich musical life in Barcelona's nunneries, but shows how they took part in wider national and transnational networks of musical distribution, including religious, commercial, and social dimensions of music. The connections of Barcelona convents to networks for the dissemination of music in and outside the city provide a rich example of the close relationship between musical networks, urban society, and popular culture. Addressing how music was understood as a marker of identity, prestige, and social status and, above all, as a conduit between earth and heaven, this book provides new insights into how women shaped musical traditions in the urban context. It is essential reading for scholars of early modern history, musicology, history of religion, and gender studies, as well as all those with an interest in urban history and the city of Barcelona. The book is supported by additional digital appendices, which include: Records of inquiries into the lineage of Santa Maria de Jonqueres nuns Development of the collections of choir books belonging to the convents of Santa Maria de Jonqueres and Sant Antoni i Santa Clara.

This title, first published in 1989, was one of the first to directly address the legal dimension of bastard feudalism. John Bellamy explores the role and vulnerability of local officials and juries, the nature of the endemic land wars and the interference in the justice system by those at the top of the social chain. What emerges is a focus on the role of land in disputes, the importance of royal favour and political advantage and the attempt to suppress disruption. This is an interesting title, which will be of particular value to students researching the nature of late medieval and early Tudor feudalism, royal patronage and legal procedure.

Of interest to interdisciplinary historians as well as those in various other fields, this book presents the first publication of 14 poems ranging from 12 to 3,000 lines. The poems are printed in the chronological order of their composition, from Elizabethan to Augustan times, but nine of them are verse translations of works from earlier periods in the development of alchemy. Each has a textual and historical introduction and explanatory note by the Editor. Renaissance alchemy is acknowledged as an important element in the histories of early modern science and medicine. This book emphasises these poems' expression of and shaping influence on religious, social and political values and institutions of their time too and is a useful reference work with much to offer for cultural studies and literary studies as well as science and history.

Authority, Gender, and Midwifery in Early Modern Italy: Contested Deliveries explores attempts by church, state, and medical authorities to regulate and professionalize the practice of midwifery in Italy from the late sixteenth to the late eighteenth century. Medical writers in this period devoted countless pages to investigating the secrets of women's sexuality and the processes of generation. By the eighteenth century, male practitioners in Britain and France were even successfully advancing careers as male midwives. Yet, female midwives continued to manage the vast majority of all early modern births. An examination of developments in Italy, where male practitioners never made successful inroads into childbirth, brings into focus the complex social, religious, and political contexts that shaped the management of reproduction in early modern Europe. Authority, Gender, and Midwifery in Early Modern Italy argues that new institutional spaces to care for pregnant women and educate midwives in Italy during the eighteenth century were not strictly medical developments but rather socio-political responses both to long standing concerns about honor, shame, and illegitimacy, and contemporary unease about population growth and productivity. In so doing, this book complicates our understanding of such sites, situating them within a longer genealogy of institutional spaces in Italy aimed at regulating sexual morality and protecting female honor. It will be of interest to scholars of the history of medicine, religious history, social history, and Early Modern Italy.

Women come to the fore in witchcraft trials as accused persons or as witnesses, and this book is a study of women's voices in these trials in eight countries around the North Sea: Spanish Netherlands, Northern Germany, Denmark, Scotland, England, Norway, Sweden, and Finland. From each country, three trials are chosen for close reading of courtroom discourse and the narratological approach enables various individuals to speak. Throughout the study, a choir of 24 voices of accused women are heard which reveal valuable insight into the field of mentalities and display both the individual experience of witchcraft accusation and the development of the trial. Particular attention is drawn to the accused women's confessions, which are interpreted as enforced narratives. The analyses of individual trials are also contextualized nationally and internationally by a frame of historical elements, and a systematic comparison between the countries shows strong similarities regarding the impact of specific ideas about witchcraft, use of pressure and torture, the turning point of the trial, and the verdict and sentence. This volume is an essential resource for all students and scholars interested in the history of witchcraft, witchcraft trials, transnationality, cultural exchanges, and gender in early modern Northern Europe.

In the sixteenth century, the Ottoman court in Constantinople emerged as the axial centre of early modern diplomacy in Eurasia. Diplomatic Cultures at the Ottoman Court, c.1500-1630 takes a unique approach to diplomatic relations by focusing on how diplomacy was conducted and diplomatic cultures forged at a single court: the Sublime Porte. It unites studies from the perspectives of European and non-European diplomats with analyses from the perspective of Ottoman officials involved in diplomatic practices. It focuses on a formative period for diplomatic procedure and Ottoman imperial culture by examining the introduction of resident embassies on the one hand, and on the other, changes in Ottoman policy and protocol that resulted from the territorial expansion and cultural transformations of the empire in the sixteenth century. The chapters in this volume approach the practices and processes of diplomacy at the Ottoman court with special attention to ceremonial protocol, diplomatic sociability, gift-giving, cultural exchange, information gathering, and the role of para-diplomatic actors.

Written by leading scholars, this collection provides a comprehensive and authoritative overview of modern empires. Spanning the era of modern imperial history from the early sixteenth century to the present, it challenges both the rather insular focuses on specific experiences, and gives due attention to imperial formations outside the West including the Russian, Japanese, Mughal, Ottoman and Chinese. The companion is divided into three broad sections. Part I - Times - surveys the three main eras of modern imperialism. The first was that dominated by the settlement impulse, with migrants - many voluntarily and many more by force - making new lives in the colonies. This impulse gave way, most especially in the nineteenth century, to a period of busy and rapid expansion which was less likely to promote new settlement, and in which colonists more frequently saw their sojourn in colonial lands as temporary and related to the business mostly of governance and trade. Lastly, in the twentieth century in particular, empires began to fail and to fall. Part II - Spaces - studies the principal imperial formations of the modern world. Each chapter charts the experience of a specific empire while at the same time placing it within the complex patterns of wider imperial constellations. The individual chapters thus survey the broad dynamics of change within the empires themselves and their relationships with other imperial formations, and reflect critically on the ways in which these topics have been approached in the literature. In Part III - Themes - scholars think critically about some of the key features of imperial expansion and decline. These chapters are brief and many are provocative. They reflect the current state of the field, and suggest new lines of inquiry which may follow from more comparative perspectives on empire. The broad range of themes captures the vitality and diversity of contemporary scholarship on questions of empire and colonialism, encompassing political, economic and cultural processes central to the formation and maintenance of empires as well as institutions, ideologies and social categories that shaped the lives both of those implementing and those experiencing the force of empire. In these pages the reader will find the slave and the criminal, the merchant and the maid, the scientist and the artist alongside the structures which sustained their lives and their livelihoods. Overall, the companion emphasises the diversity of imperial experience and process. Comprehensive in its scope, it draws attention to the particularities of individual empires, rather than over-generalising as if all empires, at all times, and in all places, behaved in a similar manner. It is this contingent and historical specificity that enables us to explore in expansive ways precisely what constituted the modern empire.

Think of maritime slavery, and the notorious Middle Passage - the unprecedented, forced migration of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic - readily comes to mind. This so-called 'middle leg' - from Africa to the Americas - of a supposed trading triangle linking Europe, Africa, and the Americas naturally captures attention for its scale and horror. After all, the Middle Passage was the largest forced, transoceanic migration in world history, now thought to have involved about 12.5 million African captives shipped in about 44,000 voyages that sailed between 1514 and 1866. No other coerced migration matches it for sheer size or gruesomeness. Maritime slavery is not, however, just about the movement of people as commodities, but rather, the involvement of all sorts of people, including slaves, in the transportation of those human commodities. Maritime slavery is thus not only about objects being moved but also about subjects doing the moving. Some slaves were actors, not simply the acted-upon. They were pilots, sailors, canoemen, divers, linguists, porters, stewards, cooks, and cabin boys, not forgetting all the ancillary workers in ports such as stevedores, warehousemen, labourers, washerwomen, tavern workers, and prostitutes. Maritime Slavery reflects this current interest in maritime spaces, and covers all the major Oceans and Seas. This book was originally published as a special issue of Slavery and Abolition.

In a Reformation kingdom ill-used to queens, Elizabeth I needed a very particular image to hold her divided country together. The 'Cult of Gloriana' would elevate the queen to the status of a virgin goddess, aided by authors, musicians, and artists such as Spenser, Shakespeare, Hilliard, Tallis and Byrd. Her image was widely owned and distributed, thanks to the expansion of printing, and the English came to surpass their European counterparts in miniature painting, allowing courtiers to carry a likeness of their sovereign close to their hearts. Sumptuously illustrated, Gloriana: Elizabeth I and the Art of Queenship tells the story of Elizabethan art as a powerful device for royal magnificence and propaganda, illuminating several key artworks of Elizabeth's reign to create a portrait of the Tudor monarch as she has never been seen before.

After 500 years Henry VIII still retains a public fascination unmatched by any monarch before or since. Whilst his popular image is firmly associated with his appetites - sexual and gastronomic - scholars have long recognized that his reign also ushered in profound changes to English society and culture, the legacy of which endure to this day. To help take stock of such a multifaceted and contested history, this volume presents a collection of 17 essays that showcase the very latest thinking and research on Henry and his court. Divided into seven parts, the book highlights how the political, religious and cultural aspects of Henry's reign came together to create a one of the most significant and transformative periods of English history. The volume is genuinely interdisciplinary, drawing on literature, art history, architecture and drama to enrich our knowledge. The first part is a powerful and personal account by Professor George W. Bernard of his experience of writing about Henry and his reign. The next parts - Material Culture and Images - reflect a historical concern with non-documentary evidence, exploring how objects, collections, paintings and buildings can provide unrivalled insight into the world of the Tudor court. The parts on Court Culture and Performance explore the literary and theatrical world and the performative aspects of court life, looking at how the Tudor court attempted to present itself to the world, as well as how it was represented by others. The part on Reactions focuses upon the political and religious currents stirred up by Henry's policies, and how they in turn came to influence his actions. Through this wide-ranging, yet thematically coherent approach, a fascinating window is opened into the world of Henry VIII and his court. In particular, building on research undertaken over the last ten years, a number of contributors focus on topics that have been neglected by traditional historical writing, for example gender, graffiti and clothing. With contributions from many of the leading scholars of Tudor England, the collection offers not only a snapshot of the latest historical thinking, but also provides a starting point for future research into the world of this colourful, but often misrepresented monarch.

The "(re)turn to history" in Romantic Studies in the 1980s marked the beginning of a critical orthodoxy that continues to condition, if not define, our sense of the Romantic period twenty-five years on. Romantic New Historicism's revisionary engagements have played a central role in the realignment of the field and in the expansion of the Romantic canon. In this major new collection of eleven essays, critics reflect on New Historicism's inheritance, its achievements and its limitations. Integrating a self-reflexive engagement with New Historicism's "history" and detailed attention to a range of Romantic lives and literary texts, the collection offers a close-up view of Romanticism's hybrid present, and a dynamic vision of its future.

This book traces the emergence and early development of segregationist practices and policies in Spanish and Portuguese America - showing that the practice of resettling diverse indigenous groups in segregated "Indian towns" (or aldeamentos in the case of Brazil) influenced the material reorganization of colonial space, shaped processes of racialization, and contributed to the politicization of reproductive sex. The book advances this argument through close readings of published and archival sources from the 16th and early-17th centuries, and is informed by two main conceptual concerns. First, it considers how segregation was envisioned, codified, and enforced in a historical context of consolidating racial differences and changing demographics associated with the racial mixture. Second, it theorizes the interrelations between notions of race and reproductive sexuality. It shows that segregationist efforts were justified by paternalistic discourses that aimed to conserve and foster indigenous population growth, and it contends that this illustrates how racially-qualified life was politicized in early modernity. It further demonstrates that women's reproductive bodies were instrumentalized as a means to foster racially-qualified life, and it argues that processes of racialization are critically tied to the differential ways in which women's reproductive capacities have been historically regulated. Race, Sex, and Segregation in Colonial Latin America is essential for students, researchers and scholars alike interested in Latin American history, social history and gender studies.