The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the establishment of the new Safavid regime in Iran. Along with reuniting the Persian lands under one rule, the Safavids initiated the radical transformation of the religious landscape by introducing Imami Shi'ism as the official state faith and in this as in other ways, laying the foundations of Iran's modern identity. In this book, leading scholars of Iranian history, culture and politics examine the meaning of the idea of Iran in the Safavid period by examining contemporary experiences of both insiders and outsiders, asking how modern scholarship defines the distinctive features of the age. While sometimes viewed as a period of decline from the high points of classical Persian literature and the visual arts of preceding centuries, the chapters of this book demonstrate that the Safavid era was nevertheless a period of great literary and artistic activity in the realms of both secular and theological endeavour. With the establishment of comparable polities across western, southern and central Asia at broadly the same time, the book explores some of the literary and political interactions with Iran's Ottoman, Mughal and Uzbek neighbours. As the volume and frequency of European merchants and diplomats visiting Safavid Persia increased, especially in the seventeenth century, and as more Iranians recorded their own travel experiences to surrounding Muslim lands, the Safavid period is the first in which we can document and explore the contours of Iran's place in an expanding world, and gain insights into how Iranians saw themselves and others saw them.

The interplay between nature, science, and art in antiquity and the early modern period differs significantly from late modern expectations. In this book scholars from ancient studies as well as early modern studies, art history, literary criticism, philosophy, and the history of science, explore that interplay in several influential ancient texts and their reception in the Renaissance. The Natural History of Pliny, De Architectura of Vitruvius, De Rerum Natura of Lucretius, Automata of Hero, and Timaios of Plato among other texts reveal how fields of inquiry now considered distinct were originally understood as closely interrelated. In our choice of texts, we focus on materialistic theories of nature, knowledge, and art that remain underappreciated in ancient and early modern studies even today.

During the early modern period the public postal systems became central pillars of the emerging public sphere. Despite the importance of the post in the transformation of communication, commerce and culture, little has been known about the functioning of the post or how it affected the lives of its users and their societies. In Postal culture in Europe, 1500-1800, Jay Caplan provides the first historical and cultural analysis of the practical conditions of letter-exchange at the dawn of the modern age. Caplan opens his analysis by exploring the economic, political, social and existential interests that were invested in the postal service, and traces the history of the three main European postal systems of the era, the Thurn and Taxis, the French Royal Post and the British Post Office. He then explores how the post worked, from the folding and sealing of letters to their collection, sorting, and transportation. Beyond providing service to the general public, these systems also furnished early modern states with substantial revenue and effective surveillance tools in the form of the Black Cabinets or Black Chambers. Caplan explains how postal services highlighted the tension between state power and the emerging concept of the free individual, with rights to private communication outside the public sphere. Postal systems therefore affected how letter writers and readers conceived and expressed themselves as individuals, which the author demonstrates through an examination of the correspondence of Voltaire and Rousseau, not merely as texts but as communicative acts. Ultimately, Jay Caplan provides readers with both a comprehensive overview of the changes wrought by the newly-public postal system - from the sounds that one heard to the perception of time and distance - and a thought provoking account of the expectations and desires that have led to our culture of instant communication.

The sixteenth-century glazing from Herkenrode Abbey in Belgium constitutes the most significant body of Flemish stained glass in the world. In the early nineteenth century, an English aristocrat took advantage of the secularization of the monasteries on the Continent to purchase the abbey church's glazing; glass from the abbess's private chapel was acquired by another English aristocrat. This account of the glazing, the result of a unique and fruitful collaboration between the Corpus Vitrearum in Great Britain and Belgium, has sections on the three locations in England where the glass is now located - Lichfield, Shrewsbury, and Ashtead - prefaced by a historical introduction on Herkenrode Abbey. It benefits from extensive research into artistic practice in the Low Countries (for art-historical context), draws on the rich documentation in the Lichfield Cathedral archives (for the glass's reception in England), and presents the insights gained during recent conservation of the glass at Lichfield Cathedral (for the glazing's execution and condition).

This book uses the experience of three generations of the Earle family to throw light on the social and economic history of Liverpool during its rise to prominence as a great port, from 1688 to 1840. The focus is on six members of this successful family, John who came to Liverpool as apprentice to a merchant in 1688, his three sons, Ralph, Thomas and William, who all became merchants specializing in different branches of the trade of the port, and William's two sons, another Thomas and another William, who consolidated the fortunes of the family and began the process of converting their wealth into gentility. The approach is descriptive rather than theoretical, and the aim throughout has been to make the book entertaining as well as informative. Where sources permit, the book describes the businesses run by these men, often in considerable detail. Trading in slaves was an important part of the business of three of them, but they and other members of the family also engaged in a variety of other trades, such as the import-export business with Leghorn (Livorno) in Italy, fishing in Newfoundland and the Shetland Islands, the wine and fruit trades of Spain, Portugal and the Azores, the import of raw cotton for the industries of the Industrial Revolution and the Russia trade. Other family interests included privateering, art collection and the trade in art, a sugar plantation in Guyana, and the emigrant trade. While the book is mainly a work of economic history, there is also much on the merchants' wives and families and on the social history of both Liverpool and Livorno.

The Kunstkammer was a programmatic display of art and oddities amassed by wealthy Europeans during the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. These nascent museums reflected the ambitions of such thinkers as Descartes, Locke, and Kepler to unite the forces of nature with art and technology. Bredekamp advances a radical view that the baroque Kunstkammer is also the nucleus of modern cyberspace.

The long eighteenth century was a period of major transformation for Europe and India as imperialism heralded a new global order. Eschewing the reductive perspectives of nation-state histories and postcolonial 'east vs west' oppositions, contributors to India and Europe in the global eighteenth century put forward a more nuanced and interdisciplinary analysis. Using eastern as well as western sources, authors present fresh insights into European and Indian relations and highlight: how anxieties over war and piracy shaped commercial activity; how French, British and Persian histories of India reveal the different geo-political issues at stake; the material legacy of India in European cultural life; how novels parodied popular views of the Orient and provided counter-narratives to images of India as the site of corruption; how social transformations, traditionally characterised as 'Mughal decline', in effect forged new global connections that informed political culture into the nineteenth century.

The Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) lies at the intersection of early modern and modern times. Frequently portrayed as the concluding chapter of the Reformation, it also points to the future by precipitating fundamental changes in the military, legal, political, religious, economic, and cultural arenas that came to mark a new, the modern era. Prompted by the 400th anniversary of the outbreak of the war, the contributors reconsider the event itself and contextualize it within the broader history of the Reformation, military conflicts, peace initiatives, and negotiations of war.

This collection of essays presents new insights into what shaped and constituted the Renaissance and early modern views of fate and fortune. It argues that these ideas were emblematic of a more fundamental argument about the self, society, and the universe and shows that their influence was more widespread, both geographically and thematically, than hitherto assumed.

In The Emergence of Pastoral Authority in the French Reformed Church, c.1555-c.1572, Gianmarco Braghi offers a broad overview of the issues and ambiguities connected to the implementation of the authority of the first generation of Geneva-trained French Reformed pastors and of their implications for the character and identity of the early French Reformed movement at large, using them as a prism for historical analysis of the transition from loose evangelicalism to a nascent synodal-consistorial network of Reformed congregations scattered across the kingdom of France.

Over the past few decades, a growing number of studies have highlighted the importance of the 'School of Salamanca' for the emergence of colonial normative regimes and the formation of a language of normativity on a global scale. According to this influential account, American and Asian actors usually appear as passive recipients of normative knowledge produced in Europe. This book proposes a different perspective and shows, through a knowledge historical approach and several case studies, that the School of Salamanca has to be considered both an epistemic community and a community of practice that cannot be fixed to any individual place. Instead, the School of Salamanca encompassed a variety of different sites and actors throughout the world and thus represents a case of global knowledge production. Contributors are: Adriana Alvarez, Virginia Aspe, Marya Camacho, Natalie Cobo, Thomas Duve, Jose Luis Egio, Dolors Folch, Enrique Gonzalez Gonzalez, Lidia Lanza, Esteban Llamosas, Osvaldo R. Moutin, and Marco Toste.