Women, fashion, consumption, luxury, and education are the main subjects of our researchers. The contributors of this volume accompanied women and objects in their travels across Modern Europe and offered thorough and diverse analyses connecting the circulation of people with the circulation of ideas. Making use of archive materials, visual sources and museum collections, the authors point out the richness of the region and the role of women in promoting new ideas of modernity. This will help the public to better know and understand the importance of women's sociability in building new nations and constructing new identities in South-Eastern Europe and beyond.

The English Bible in the Early Modern World addresses the most significant book available in the English language in the centuries after the Reformation, and investigates its impact on popular religion and reading practices, and on theology, religious controversy and intellectual history between 1530 and 1700. Individual chapters discuss the responses of both clergy and laity to the sacred text, with particular emphasis on the range of settings in which the Bible was encountered and the variety of responses prompted by engagement with the Scriptures. Particular attention is given to debates around the text and interpretation of the Bible, to an emerging Protestant understanding of Scripture and to challenges it faced over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Based on consilia and decisiones, Wouter Druwe studies the multinormative framework on loans and credit in the Golden Ages of Antwerp and Amsterdam (c. 1500-1680). He analyzes the use of a wide variety of legal financial techniques in the Low Countries, such as money lending and the taking of interest, the constitution of annuities, cession and delegation, bearer bonds, bills of exchange, partnerships, and representation in financial affairs, as well as the consequences of monetary fluctuations. Special attention is paid to how the transregional European system of learned Roman and canon law (ius commune) was applied in daily 'learned legal practice'. The study also deals with the prohibition against usury and with the impact of moral theology on legal debates.

In With Eyes and Ears Open: The Role of Visitors in the Society of Jesus, twelve historians examine important visitations in the history of the Society. After a thorough investigation of the nature and role of the "visitor" in Jesuit rules and regulations, ten visitations of missions and provinces-from Peru in the sixteenth century, to Ireland in the seventeenth, to the Zambesi mission and Australia in the twentieth-are considered. Visitors, appointed by the superior general in Rome, surveyed the situation for fidelity to the Jesuit way of life, resolved any problems, and recommended future paths, often to the disapproval of Jesuit hosts. One contribution concerns the canonical visitation of the non-Jesuit Francis Saldanha da Gama in 1758, which resulted in the expulsion of the Jesuits from Portugal in 1759.

An amazing woman from Bourne, Collyweston and Maxey who had a profound impact on history but has been virtually forgotten in our Lincolnshire locality. Read tales of her survival from the traumatic birth of her son (Henry VII) when aged only thirteen, her ever-changing fortunes in the Wars of the Roses, being condemned as a traitor by Richard III and her eventual triumph, which saw her become the matriarch of the Tudor dynasty. As the only blood link from the Normans to our present Royal Family (documented here), her legacy through her symbols and academia is still far-reaching today.

Space, Place, and Motion: Locating Confraternities in the Late Medieval and Early Modern City offers the first sustained comparative examination of the relationship between confraternal life and the spaces of the late medieval and early modern city. By considering cities large (Rome) and small (Aalst) in regions as disparate as Ireland and Mexico, the essays collected here seek to uncover the commonalities and differences in confraternal practice as they played out on the urban stage. From the candlelit oratory to the bustling piazza, from the hospital ward to the festal table, from the processional route to the execution grounds, late medieval and early modern cities, this interdisciplinary book contends, were made up of fluid and contested 'confraternal spaces.' Contributors are: Kira Maye Albinsky, Meryl Bailey, Cormac Begadon, Caroline Blondeau-Morizot, Danielle Carrabino, Andrew Chen, Ellen Decraene, Laura Dierksmeier, Ellen Alexandra Dooley, Douglas N. Dow, Anu Mand, Rebekah Perry, Pamela A.V. Stewart, Arie van Steensel, and Barbara Wisch.

In Before Enlightenment: Play and Illusion in Renaissance Humanism, Timothy Kircher argues for new ways of appreciating Renaissance humanist philosophy. Literary qualities - tone, voice, persona, style, imagery - composed a core of their philosophizing, so that play and illusion, as well as rational certainty, formed pre-Enlightenment ideas about knowledge, ethics, and metaphysics. Before Enlightenment takes issue with the long-standing view of humanism's philosophical mediocrity. It shows new features of Renaissance culture that help explain the origins not only of Enlightenment rationalists, but also of early modern novelists and essayists. If humanist writings promoted objective knowledge based on reason's supremacy over emotion, they also showed awareness of one's place and play in the world. The animal rationale is also the homo ludens.

Peasants, Lords and State: Comparing Peasant Conditions in Scandinavia and the Eastern Alpine Region, 1000-1750 challenges the once widespread view, rooted in the historical thinking of the nineteenth century, that Scandinavian and especially Norwegian peasants enjoyed a particular "peasant freedom" compared to their Continental counterparts. Markers of this supposed freedom were believed to be peasants' widespread ownership of land, extensive control over land and resources, and comprehensive judicial influence through the institution of the thing. The existence of slaves and unfree people was furthermore considered a marginal phenomenon. The contributors compare Scandinavia with the eastern Alpine region, two regions comprising fertile plains as well as rugged mountainous areas. This offers an opportunity to analyse the effect of topographical factors without neglecting the influence of manorial and territorial power structures over the long time-span of c.1000 to 1750. With contributions by Markus Cerman, Tore Iversen, Michael Mitterauer, John Ragnar Myking, Josef Riedmann, Werner Roesener, Helge Salvesen, and Stefan Sonderegger.

In 1588, the Spanish Jesuit Pedro de Ribadeneyra published a history of the English Reformation, which he continued to revise until his death in 1611. Spencer J. Weinreich's translation is the first English edition of the History, one fully alive to its metamorphoses over two decades. Weinreich's introduction explores the text's many dimensions-propaganda for the Spanish Armada, anti-Protestant polemic, Jesuit hagiography, consolation amid tribulation-and assesses Ribadeneyra as a historian. The extensive annotations anchor Ribadeneyra's narrative in the historical record and reconstruct his sources, methods, and revisions. The History, long derided as mere propaganda, emerges as remarkable evidence of the centrality of historiography to the intellectual, theological, and political battles of early modern Europe.

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.