Calvinism in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth 1548-1648 offers an in-depth history of the Reformed Churches in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in their first hundred years. Kazimierz Bem analyses church polity, liturgy, the practices of Calvinist church discipline and piety, and the reasons for conversion to and from Calvinism in all strata of the society. Drawing on extensive research in primary sources, Bem challenges the dominant narrative of Protestant decline after 1570 and argues for a continued flourishing of Calvinism in the Commonwealth until the 1630s.

Inquisitions of heresy have long fascinated both specialists and non-specialists. A Companion to Heresy Inquisitions presents a synthesis of the immense amount of scholarship generated about these institutions in recent years. The volume offers an overview of many of the most significant areas of heresy inquisitions, both medieval and early modern. The essays in this collection are intended to introduce the reader to disagreements and advances in the field, as well as providing a navigational aid to the wide variety of recent discoveries and controversies in studies of heresy inquisitions. Contributors: Christine Ames, Feberico Barbierato, Elena Bonora, Lucia Helena Costigan, Michael Frassetto, Henry Ansgar Kelly, Helen Rawlings, Lucy Sackville, Werner Thomas, and Robin Vose

In Parish Clergy Wives in Elizabethan England, Anne Thompson shifts the emphasis from the institution of clerical marriage to the people and personalities involved. Women who have hitherto been defined by their supposed obscurity and unsuitability are shown to have anticipated and exhibited the character, virtues, and duties associated with the archetypal clergy wife of later centuries. Through adept use of an extensive and eclectic range of archival material, this book offers insights into the perception and lived experience of ministers' wives. In challenging accepted views on the social status of clergy wives and their role and reception within the community, new light is thrown on a neglected but crucial aspect of religious, social, and women's history.

This is a work of fundamental importance for our understanding of the intellectual and cultural history of early modern Europe. Stuart Clark offers a new interpretation of the witchcraft beliefs of European intellectuals based on their publications in the field of demonology, and shows how these beliefs fitted rationally with many other views current in Europe between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. Professor Clark is the first to explore the appeal of demonology to early modern intellectuals by looking at the books they published on the subject during this period. After examining the linguistic foundations of their writings, the author shows how the writers' ideas about witchcraft (and about magic) complemented their other intellectual commitments-in particular, their conceptions of nature, history, religion, and politics. The result is much more than a history of demonology. It is a survey of wider intellectual and ideological purposes, and underlines just how far the nature of rationality is dependent on its historical context.

Very little attention in the existing literature focuses specifically on England's road network and systems of communications in the early modern period. Although authors frequently mention improved travel and transportation as central to the processes of economic, political and cultural development that characterised the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, few provide substantial evidence regarding the precise nature of communications that existed in that period. It is not known, for example, precisely how fast (on average) an official letter could be carried from London to Edinburgh or from London to Calais, and how much it would cost. Authors often condemn the quality and state of repair of England's roads yet argue that better levels of 'contact' were a vital means of 'managing' the emerging nation state. Such contradictions and paradoxes are addressed in this book which explores in detail developments in road travel and communication in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The author's research, carried out during the past twenty or more years, is brought together and related to the wider context of political, economic and cultural changes that occurred in the early modern period. Evidence is introduced to reinforce the notion that easier, swifter and more efficient communications were gradually developed in the Tudor and Stuart period, and that roads (though far from ideal) were, on the whole, quite serviceable and certainly well used. The book is a wide-ranging study of all aspects of travel and communication and thereby fills a gap in the scholarly literature. Moreover, it places on record the advances made in recent years as a result of research on these twin themes.

The work of David Bien, one of America's foremost historians of eighteenth-century France, transformed our understanding of the ancien regime and the origins of the French Revolution. The editors bring together for the first time his most important articles, other previously unpublished essays and an interview transcript. Bien's empirically-grounded approach made him a central figure in the 'revisionist' debates on the origins of the French Revolution. His re-reading of the Calas affair as an anomaly in a growing trend of tolerance (rather than a sign of widespread bigotry among an entire class of magistrates) opened up significant new insights into the history of religious persecution, long influenced by Voltaire. Bien's ground-breaking research on the army and the sale of offices revealed the surprising extent of social mobility at the time and challenged the prevailing orthodoxy that it was frustration of the bourgeoisie which contributed to the outbreak of the Revolution. With a preface by Keith Baker and an introduction by Michael Christofferson, Interpreting the 'ancien regime'underlines the seminal importance of David Bien's work for contemporary debates about the social and political history of late-eighteenth-century France. It will be an indispensible resource for historians and historiographers alike.

The House of Lords presented the stage on which some of the critical confrontations in English and British constitutional and political history were played out in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Published for the History of Parliament Trust. Condemned as 'useless and dangerous', the House of Lords was abolished in the revolution of 1649, shortly after the execution of King Charles I. Reinstated, along with the monarchy, at the Restoration of 1660, the House of Lords vigorously renewed its involvement in the political life of the nation. This highly illustrated book presents the first results from the research undertaken by the History of Parliament Trust on the peers and bishops between the Restoration and the accession of George I. It shows them as politicians at Westminster; as members of an elite intensely conscious of their honour and status; as a class apart, always devising new schemes - successful and unsuccessful - to increase their wealth and 'interest'; and as local grandees, to whom local society looked for leadership and protection. From the proud duke of Somerset to the beggarly Lord Mohun, from the devious earl of Oxford to the disgruntled Lord Lucas, the material here presents initial insights into the nature of the Restoration House of Lords and the men who formed it, showing them in their best moments, when they vigorously defended the law and the constitution, and in their worst, as they obsessively concerned themselves with honour and precedence and indefatigably pursued private interests. RUTH PALEY is editor, and BEVERLY ADAMS, ROBIN EAGLES and CHARLES LITTLETON are senior research fellows, for the House of Lords, 1660-1832 section of The History of Parliament. PAUL SEAWARD is director of The History of Parliament.

In The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius Loyola: Contexts, Sources, Reception, Terence O'Reilly examines the historical, theological and literary contexts in which the Exercises took shape. The collected essays have as their common theme the early history of the Spiritual Exercises, and the interior life of Ignatius Loyola to which they give expression. The traditional interpretation of the Exercises was shaped by writings composed in the late sixteenth century, reflecting the preoccupations of the Counter-Reformation world in which they were composed. The Exercises, however, belong, in their origins, to an earlier period, before the Council of Trent, and the full recognition of this fact, and of its implications, has confronted modern scholars with fresh questions about the sources, evolution, and reception of the work.

Disputed Messiahs: Jewish and Christian Messianism in the Ashkenazic World during the Reformation is the first comprehensive study that situates Jewish messianism in its broader cultural, social, and religious contexts within the surrounding Christian society. By doing so, Rebekka Vo?f shows how the expressions of Jewish and Christian end-time expectation informed one another. Although the two groups disputed the different messiahs they awaited, they shared principal hopes and fears relating to the end of days. Drawing on a great variety of both Jewish and Christian sources in Hebrew, Yiddish, German, and Latin, the book examines how Jewish and Christian messianic ideology and politics were deeply linked. It explores how Jews and Christians each reacted to the other's messianic claims, apocalyptic beliefs, and eschatological interpretations, and how they adapted their own views of the last days accordingly. This comparative study of the messianic expectations of Jews and Christians in the Ashkenazic world during the Reformation and their entanglements contributes a new facet to our understanding of cultural transfer between Jews and Christians in the early modern period. Disputed Messiahs includes four main parts. The first part characterizes the specific context of Jewish messianism in Germany and defines the Christian perception of Jewish messianic hope. The next two parts deal with case studies of Jewish messianic expectation in Germany, Italy and Poland. While the second part focuses on the messianic phenomenon of the prophet Asher Lemlein, part 3 is divided into five chapters, each devoted to a case of interconnected Jewish-Christian apocalyptic belief and activity. Each case study is a representative example used to demonstrate the interplay of Jewish and Christian eschatological expectations. The final part presents Vo?f's general conclusions, carving out the remarkable paradox of a relationship between Jewish and Christian messianism that is controversial, albeit fertile. Scholars and students of history, culture, and religion are the intended audience for this book.

This volume investigates the various ways in which writers comment on, present, and defend their own works, and at the same time themselves, across early modern Europe. A multiplicity of self-commenting modes, ranging from annotations to explicatory prose to prefaces to separate critical texts and exemplifying a variety of literary genres, are subjected to analysis. Self-commentaries are more than just an external apparatus: they direct and control reception of the primary text, thus affecting notions of authorship and readership. With the writer understood as a potentially very influential and often tendentious interpreter of their own work, the essays in this collection offer new perspectives on pre-modern and modern forms of critical self-consciousness, self-representation, and self-validation. Contributors are Harriet Archer, Gilles Bertheau, Carlo Caruso, Jeroen De Keyser, Russell Ganim, Joseph Harris, Ian Johnson, Richard Maber, Martin McLaughlin, John O'Brien, Magdalena Ozarska, Federica Pich, Brian Richardson, Els Stronks, and Colin Thompson.

During the year between July 1588, when the Spanish Armada set sail from Spain and July 1589, when the survivors of the English counterpart of this fleet, the little-known English Armada, reached port in England, two of history's worst naval catastrophes took place. A great deal of attention has been dedicated to the former and precious little to the latter. This book presents a full-scale account of an event which has been neglected for more than four centuries. It reconstructs the military operations day by day for the first time, taking apart the established notion that, with the defeat of the Spanish Armada, England achieved maritime supremacy and the decay of Spain began. This book clearly and in a rigorously documented fashion shows how the defeat of the English Armada counterbalanced that of the Spanish, frustrating England's intention of seizing Philip II's American empire and changing the tide of the war.

Robin Raybould's Hieroglyph, Emblem and Renaissance Pictography is the first English translation of Ludwig Volkmann's Bilderschriften der Renaissance, the classic text which promoted the symbol as a defining cultural and literary characteristic of early modern Europe. Volkmann enumerates and describes many of the works which illustrated the contemporary obsession with hieroglyph, emblem and device, particularly those from France and Germany, thus complementing Karl Giehlow's earlier Hieroglyphenkunde on the subject. Volkmann's book highlights both Renaissance theories of the image as language and the symbol as an aid to an understanding of the meaning of life and the nature of God. Raybould's translation has been described as elegant, admirable and impeccable and includes an introduction, extensive notes and several additional essays on topics relevant to the field.