In the early modern period, images of revolts and violence became increasingly important tools to legitimize or contest political structures. This volume offers the first in-depth analysis of how early modern people produced and consumed violent imagery, and assesses its role in memory practices, political mobilization, and the negotiation of cruelty and justice. Critically evaluating the traditional focus on Western European imagery, the case studies in this book draw on evidence from Russia, China, Hungary, Portugal, Germany, North America, and other regions. The contributors highlight the distinctions among visual cultures of violence, as well as their entanglements in networks of intensive transregional communication, early globalization, and European colonization. Contributors: Monika Barget, David de Boer, Nora G. Etenyi, Fabian Fechner, Joana Fraga, Malte Griesse, Alain Hugon, Gleb Kazakov, Nancy Kollmann, Ya-Chen Ma, Galina Tirnanic, and Ramon Voges.

The sixteenth-century encounter between Mesoamericans and Europeans resulted in a tremendous loss of life in indigenous communities and significantly impacted their health and healing strategies. Contributors to this special issue of Ethnohistory address how indigenous people experienced bodily health in the wake of this encounter. By exploring archival indigenous and Spanish-language documents, contributors address how bodily health was experienced in the wake of the European encounter and uncover transformations of health discourses and experiences of illness. They investigate eclectic healing practices and medical chants; changing notions of the causes of illnesses; and the language of cleansing ceremonies, bone-setting, midwifery, and maternal medicine. Contributors. Sabina Cruz de la Cruz, Rebecca Dufendach, Servando Hinojosa, Timothy W. Knowlton, Gabrielle Vail, Edber Dzidz Yam

Privacy is often considered a modern phenomenon. Early Modern Privacy: Sources and Approaches challenges this view. This collection examines instances, experiences, and spaces of early modern privacy, and opens new avenues to understanding the structures and dynamics that shape early modern societies. Scholars of architectural history, art history, church history, economic history, gender history, history of law, history of literature, history of medicine, history of science, and social history detail how privacy and the private manifest within a wide array of sources, discourses, practices, and spatial programmes. In doing so, they tackle the methodological challenges of early modern privacy, in all its rich, historical specificity. Contributors: Ivana Bicak, Mette Birkedal Bruun, Maarten Delbeke, Willem Frijhoff, Michael Green, Mia Korpiola, Mathieu Laflamme, Natacha Klein Kafer, Hang Lin, Walter S. Melion, Helene Merlin-Kajman, Lars Cyril Norgaard, Anne Regent-Susini, Marian Rothstein, Thomas Max Safley, Valeria Viola, Lee Palmer Wandel, and Heide Wunder.

Why devote a Companion to the "mirrors for princes", whose very existence is debated? These texts offer key insights into political thoughts of the past. Their ambiguous, problematic status further enhances their interest. And although recent research has fundamentally challenged established views of these texts, until now there has been no critical introduction to the genre. This volume therefore fills this important gap, while promoting a global historical perspective of different "mirrors for princes" traditions from antiquity to humanism, via Byzantium, Persia, Islam, and the medieval West. This Companion also proposes new avenues of reflection on the anchoring of these texts in their historical realities. Contributors are Makram Abbes, Denise Aigle, Olivier Biaggini, Hugo Bizzarri, Charles F. Briggs, Sylvene Edouard, Jean-Philippe Genet, John R. Lenz, Louise Marlow, Cary J. Nederman, Corinne Peneau, Stephane Pequignot, Noelle-Laetitia Perret, Gunter Prinzing, Volker Reinhardt, Hans-Joachim Schmidt, Tom Stevenson, Karl Ubl, and Steven J. Williams.

In Between Tradition and Innovation, Ad Meskens traces the profound influence of a group of Flemish Jesuits on the course of mathematics in the seventeenth century. Using manuscript evidence, this book argues that one of the Flemish mathematics school's professors, Gregorio a San Vicente (1584-1667), had developed a logically sound integration method more than a decade before the Italian mathematician Bonaventura Cavalieri. Although San Vincente's superiors refused to grant him permission to publish his results, his methods went on to influence numerous other mathematicians through his students, many of whom became famous mathematicians in their own right. By carefully tracing their careers and outlining their biographies, Meskens convincingly shows that they made a number of ground-breaking contributions to fields ranging from mathematics and mechanics to optics and architecture.

The vanquished Taino Indians, the Spanish conquistadors, rebellious slaves, common folk, foreign invaders, bloody dictators, gallant heroes, charismatic politicians, and committed rebels - all have left their distinct imprint on Dominican society and left behind printed records. Nevertheless, the five-hundred-year history of the people of the Dominican Republic has yet to be told through its documents. Although there has been a considerable production of documentary compilations in the Dominican Republic - particularly during the Trujillo era - few of these are known outside the country, and none has ever been translated into English. The Dominican People: A Documentary History bridges this gap by providing an annotated collection of documents related to the history of the Dominican Republic and its people. The compilation features annotated documents on some of the transcendental events that have taken place on the island since pre-Columbian times: the extermination of the Taino Indians, sugar and African slavery, the establishment of French Saint Dominique, independence from Haiti and from Spain, caudillo politics, U.S. interventionism, the Trujillo dictatorship, and contemporary politics.

An engrossing biography that attempts to fathom the motivations of an infamous sixteenth-century Spanish general. Ferdinand Alvarez de Toledo, the third duke of Alba (1507-82), is known to history as "the butcher of Flanders." The general who carried out Philip ll's repressive policies in the Netherlands, he was responsible for the massacre of thousands of men, women, and children, considering it better to lay waste an entire country than leave it in the hands of heretics. Alba came to represent for contemporaries as well as for future generations the unacceptable face of Spanish imperialism. In this intriguing re-evaluation, Henry Kamen narrates the duke's personal history, looking beyond the conventional image to reveal motives and to explain rather than simply to condemn. Kamen examines the early years of Alba's life, his travels over the whole of Europe, and the complex military and political career that made him Spain's leading general of the imperial age. Drawing on the duke's rich and expressive surviving correspondence, Kamen explores Alba's beliefs and considers his infamous actions within the contexts of his time and of the monarchs--Emperor Charles V and King Philip II of Spain--whom he served.

The Lost History of Cosmopolitanism challenges our most basic assumptions about the history of an ideal at the heart of modernity. Beginning in antiquity and continuing through to today, Leigh T.I. Penman examines how European thinkers have understood words like 'kosmopolites', 'cosmopolite', 'cosmopolitan' and its cognates. The debates over their meanings show that there has never been a single, stable cosmopolitan concept, but rather a range of concepts-sacred and secular, inclusive and exclusive-all described with the cosmopolitan vocabulary. While most scholarly attention in the history of cosmopolitanism has focussed on Greek and Roman antiquity or the Enlightenments of the 18th century, this book shows that the crucial period in the evolution of modern cosmopolitanism was early modernity. Between 1500 and 1800 philosophers, theologians, cartographers, jurists, politicians, alchemists and heretics all used this vocabulary, shedding ancient associations, and adding new ones at will. The chaos of discourses prompted thinkers to reflect on the nature of the cosmopolitan ideal, and to conceive of an abstract 'cosmopolitanism' for the first time. This meticulously researched book provides the first intellectual history of an overlooked period in the evolution of a core ideal. As such, The Lost History of Cosmopolitanism is an essential work for anyone seeking a contextualised understanding of cosmopolitanism today.

Norms beyond Empire seeks to rethink the relationship between law and empire by emphasizing the role of local normative production. While European imperialism is often viewed as being able to shape colonial law and government to its image, this volume argues that early modern empires could never monolithically control how these processes unfolded. Examining the Iberian empires in Asia, it seeks to look at norms as a means of escaping the often too narrow concept of law and look beyond empire to highlight the ways in which law-making and local normativities frequently acted beyond colonial rule. The ten chapters explore normative production from this perspective by focusing on case studies from China, India, Japan, and the Philippines. Contributors are: Manuel Bastias Saavedra, Marya Svetlana T. Camacho, Luisa Stella de Oliveira Coutinho Silva, Romulo da Silva Ehalt, Patricia Souza de Faria, Fupeng Li, Miguel Rodrigues Lourenco, Abisai Perez Zamarripa, Marina Torres Trimallez, and Angela Barreto Xavier.