The book provides an overview and analysis of the witch trials in the Scottish Borders in the 17th century. The 17th century was a time of upheaval in Scottish and British history, with a civil war, the abolition of the monarchy, the plague and the reformation all influencing the social context at the time. This book explores the social, political, geographical, religious and legal structures that led to the increased amount of witch trials and executions in the Scottish Borders. As well as looking at specific trials the book also explores the role of women, both as accuser and as accused.

CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2017 The first social and cultural history of vagrancy between 1650 and 1750, this book combines sources from across England and the Atlantic world to describe the shifting and desperate experiences of the very poorest and most marginalized of people in early modernity; the outcasts, the wandering destitute, the disabled veteran, the aged labourer, the solitary pregnant woman on the road and those referred to as vagabonds and beggars are all explored in this comprehensive account of the subject. Using a rich array of archival and literary sources, Vagrancy in English Culture and Society, 1650-1750 offers a history not only of the experiences of vagrants themselves, but also of how the settled 'better sort' perceived vagrancy, how it was culturally represented in both popular and elite literature as a shadowy underworld of dissembling rogues, gypsies, and pedlars, and how these representations powerfully affected the lives of vagrants themselves. Hitchcock's is an important study for all scholars and students interested in the social and cultural history of early modern England.

What did Paul mean when he wrote that the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom? Through close analysis of the sixteenth-century reception of Paul's discourses of folly, this book examines the role of the New Testament in the development of what Erasmus and John Calvin refer to as the "Christian philosophy." Erasmus and Calvin on the Foolishness of God reveals the importance of Pauline rhetoric in the development of humanist critiques of scholasticism while charting the formation of a specifically affective approach to religious epistemology and theological method. As the first book-length examination of Calvin's indebtedness to Erasmus, which also considers the participation of Bullinger, Pellikan, and Melanchthon in an Erasmian exegetical milieu, it is a case study in the complicated cross-confessional exchange of ideas in the sixteenth century. Kirk Essary examines assumptions about the very nature of theology in the sixteenth century, how it was understood by leading humanist reformers, and how ideas about philosophy and rhetoric were received, appropriated, and shared in a complex intellectual and religious context.

The seventeenth-century Nahua, or Aztec, historian Chimalpahin made an extraordinary contribution to the historiography of preconquest and early colonial Mexico, but his work has been little known or studied owing to the inaccessibility of its Nahuatl-language prose. This groundbreaking edition of the Codex Chimalpahin, the most comprehensive history of native Mexico by a known Indian, makes an English-language transcription and translation available for the first time.

The Codex Chimalpahin, which consists of more than one thousand pages of Nahuatl and Spanish texts, is a life history of the only Nahua about whom we have much knowledge. It also affords a firsthand indigenous perspective on the Nahua past, present, and future in a changing colonial milieu. Moreover, Chimalpahin's sources, a rich variety of ancient and contemporary records, give voice to a culture long thought to be silent and vanquished.

Volume Two of the Codex Chimalpahin represents heretofore unknown manuscripts by Chimalpahin. Predominantly annals and dynastic records, it furnishes detailed histories of the formation and development of Nahua societies and polities in central Mexico over an extensive period. Included are the Exercicio quotidiano of Sahagun, for which Chimalpahin was the copyist, some unsigned Nahuatl materials, and a letter by Juan de San Antonio of Texcoco as well as a store of information about Nahua women, religion, ritual, concepts of conquest, and relations with Europeans.

This volume is the second to be published, under the editorship of Susan Schroeder, as a set that will culminate in Volume 6, containing a comprehensive study of Chimalpahin's life and writings and a bibliography for theentire Codex Chimalpahin.

Imperial frontiers are a fascinating stage for studying the interactions of people, institutions, and their environments. In one of the first books to explore the Inka frontier through archaeology, Sonia Alconini examines part of present-day Bolivia that was once a territory at the edge of the Inka empire. Along this frontier, one of the New World's most powerful polities came into repeated conflict with tropical lowland groups that it could never subject to its rule. Using extensive field research, Alconini explores the multifaceted socioeconomic processes that transpired in the frontier region. Her unprecedented study shows how the Inka empire exercised control over vast expanses of land and peoples in a territory located hundreds of miles away from the capital city of Cusco, and how people on the frontier navigated the cultural and environmental divide that separated the Andes and the Amazon.