The work of women philosophers in the early modern period has traditionally been overlooked, yet their writing on topics such as reality, time, mind and matter holds valuable lessons for our understanding of metaphysics and its history. This volume of new essays explores the work of nine key female figures: Bathsua Makin, Anna Maria van Schurman, Elisabeth of Bohemia, Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, Damaris Cudworth Masham, Mary Astell, Catharine Trotter Cockburn, and Emilie Du Chatelet. Investigating issues from eternity to free will and from body to natural laws, the essays uncover long-neglected perspectives and demonstrate their importance for philosophical debates, both then and now. Combining careful philosophical analysis with discussion of the intellectual and historical context of each thinker, they will set the agenda for future enquiry and will appeal to scholars and students of the history of metaphysics, science, religion and feminism.

Prior histories of the first Spanish mariners to circumnavigate the globe in the sixteenth century have focused on Ferdinand Magellan and the other illustrious leaders of these daring expeditions. Harry Kelsey's masterfully researched study is the first to concentrate on the hitherto anonymous sailors, slaves, adventurers, and soldiers who manned the ships. The author contends that these initial transglobal voyages occurred by chance, beginning with the launch of Magellan's armada in 1519, when the crews dispatched by the king of Spain to claim the Spice Islands in the western Pacific were forced to seek a longer way home, resulting in bitter confrontations with rival Portuguese. Kelsey's enthralling history, based on more than thirty years of research in European and American archives, offers fascinating stories of treachery, greed, murder, desertion, sickness, and starvation but also of courage, dogged persistence, leadership, and loyalty.

Witchcraft holds a continued fascination for readers around the world, and the Scottish witch hunts have recently received renewed media attention, especially with the BBC 2 show Lucy Worsley Investigates, bringing attention to Edinburgh's witches. Expert Mary Craig explores the unusual story of Agnes Finnie, a middle class shopkeeper who lived in the tenements of Edinburgh. After arrest, most witches were tried within a matter of days but not Agnes. Her unusual case took months with weeks of deliberation of the jury. Mary explains why and gives her expert insight into the political and religious tensions that led to her burning. The book will interest a variety of readers, academics and non-academics alike - those interested in witchcraft, British and Scottish history, religious studies and women's studies. Mary Craig works as a historian with museums, archives and schools and hosts regular, well-attended events on the subject of witchcraft in the Scottish Borders. We expect strong media coverage. The Witches of Scotland campaign has recently gained traction and the attention of first minister Nicola Sturgeon, calling for a pardon and apology to those accused during the witch hunts.

In 1666 Valentine Greatrakes achieved brief but widespread fame as a miracle healer. Dubbed the 'Stroker', he is widely believed to have touched and cured thousands of men, women, and children suffering from a large range of acute diseases and chronic conditions. His actions attracted the attention of the King, Charles II, as well as other eminent figures at court and in the various institutions of government and learning, including the newly founded Royal Society. However, there was little consensus as to the nature and origin of his gift and, following a brief period of intense lobbying on his behalf, he retired to Ireland and relative obscurity. Most histories of this period rarely grant the strange events surrounding the appearance of Greatrakes much more than an occasional footnote. Here, however, for the first time the compelling story of Greatrakes the man, and his place in the history of seventeenth-century Britain, is told in full for the first time. Based on extensive research in Irish and English archives, it reveals a fascinating account of one man's engagement with, and response to, some of the most important events of the period, including the Irish Rebellion of 1641, the English civil wars, the Cromwellian Conquest of Ireland, and the Restoration of 1660. In the process, it shows how Greatrakes' claims to heal the bodies of the sick and maimed were in large part a response to broader divisions within the fractured body politic of Britain - an approach that was enthusiastically received by many prominent figures in church and state who were eager to seek reconciliation and rapprochement in the early years of the Restoration.

This study of clothing during British colonial America examines items worn by the well-to-do as well as the working poor, the enslaved, and Native Americans, reconstructing their wardrobes across social, economic, racial, and geographic boundaries. Clothing through American History: The British Colonial Era presents, in six chapters, a description of all aspects of dress in British colonial America, including the social and historical background of British America, and covering men's, women's, and children's garments. The book shows how dress reflected and evolved with life in British colonial America as primitive settlements gave way to the growth of towns, cities, and manufacturing of the pre-Industrial Revolution. Readers will discover that just as in the present day, what people wore in colonial times represented an immediate, visual form of communication that often conveyed information about the real or intended social, economic, legal, ethnic, and religious status of the wearer. The authors have gleaned invaluable information from a wide breadth of primary source materials for all of the colonies: court documents and colonial legislation; diaries, personal journals, and business ledgers; wills and probate inventories; newspaper advertisements; paintings, prints, and drawings; and surviving authentic clothing worn in the colonies.

Some of the poorest regions of historic Britain had some of its most vibrant festivities. Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, the peoples of northern England, Lowland Scotland, and Wales used extensive celebrations at events such as marriage, along with reciprocal exchange of gifts, to emote a sense of belonging to their locality. Bride Ales and Penny Weddings looks at regionally distinctive practices of giving and receiving wedding gifts, in order to understand social networks and community attitudes. Examining a wide variety of sources over four centuries, the volume examines contributory weddings, where guests paid for their own entertainment and gave money to the couple, to suggest a new view of the societies of 'middle Britain', and re-interpret social and cultural change across Britain. These regions were not old fashioned, as is commonly assumed, but differently fashioned, possessing social priorities that set them apart both from the south of England and from 'the Celtic fringe'. This volume is about informal communities of people whose aim was maintaining and enhancing social cohesion through sociability and reciprocity. Communities relied on negotiation, compromise, and agreement, to create and re-create consensus around more-or-less shared values, expressed in traditions of hospitality and generosity. Ranging across issues of trust and neighbourliness, recreation and leisure, eating and drinking, order and authority, personal lives and public attitudes, R. A. Houston explores many areas of interest not only to social historians, but also literary scholars of the British Isles.

Diplomacy in Renaissance Rome is an investigation of Renaissance diplomacy in practice. Presenting the first book-length study of this subject for sixty years, Catherine Fletcher substantially enhances our understanding of the envoy's role during this pivotal period for the development of diplomacy. Uniting rich but hitherto unexploited archival sources with recent insights from social and cultural history, Fletcher argues for the centrality of the papal court - and the city of Rome - in the formation of the modern European diplomatic system. The book addresses topics such as the political context from the return of the popes to Rome, the 1454 Peace of Lodi and after 1494 the Italian Wars; the assimilation of ambassadors into the ceremonial world; the prescriptive literature; trends in the personnel of diplomacy; an exploration of travel and communication practices; the city of Rome as a space for diplomacy; and the world of gift-giving.

This is a major study of Charles I's relationship with the English aristocracy. Rejecting the traditional emphasis on the 'Crisis of the Aristocracy', Professor Richard Cust highlights instead the effectiveness of the King and the Earl of Arundel's policies to promote and strengthen the nobility. He reveals how the peers reasserted themselves as the natural leaders of the political nation during the Great Council of Peers in 1640 and the Long Parliament. He also demonstrates how Charles deliberately set out to cultivate his aristocracy as the main bulwark of royal authority, enabling him to go to war against the Scots in 1639 and then build the royalist party which provided the means to fight parliament in 1642. The analysis is framed throughout within a broader study of aristocratic honour and the efforts of the heralds to stabilise the social order.

Consumers in eighteenth-century England were firmly embedded in an expanding world of goods, one that incorporated a range of novel foods (tobacco, chocolate, coffee, and tea) and new supplies of more established commodities, including sugar, spices, and dried fruits. Much has been written about the attraction of these goods, which went from being novelties or expensive luxuries in the mid-seventeenth century to central elements of the British diet a century or so later. They have been linked to the rise of Britain as a commercial and imperial power, whilst their consumption is seen as transforming many aspects of British society and culture, from mealtimes to gender identity. Despite this huge significance to ideas of consumer change, we know remarkably little about the everyday processes through which groceries were sold, bought, and consumed. In tracing the lines of supply that carried groceries from merchants to consumers, Sugar and Spice reveals how changes in retailing and shopping were central to the broader transformation of consumption and consumer practices, but also questions established ideas about the motivations underpinning consumer choices. It demonstrates the dynamic nature of eighteenth-century retailing; the importance of advertisements in promoting sales and shaping consumer perceptions, and the role of groceries in making shopping an everyday activity. At the same time, it shows how both retailers and their customers were influenced by the practicalities and pleasures of consumption. They were active agents in consumer change, shaping their own practices rather than caught up in a single socially-inclusive cultural project such as politeness or respectability.

It is an often ignored but fundamental fact that in the Ottoman world as in most empires, there were 'first-class' and 'second class' subjects. Among the townspeople, peasants and nomads subject to the sultans, who might be Muslims or non-Muslims, adult Muslim males were first-class subjects and all others, including Muslim boys and women, were of the second class. As for the female members of the elite, while less privileged than the males, in some respects their life chances might be better than those of ordinary women. Even so, they shared the risks of pregnancy, childbirth and epidemic diseases with townswomen of the subject class and to a certain extent, with village women as well. Women also made up a sizeable share of the enslaved, belonging to the sultans, to elite figures but often to members of the subject population as well. Thus, the study of Ottoman women is indispensable for understanding Ottoman society in general. In this book, the experiences of women from a diverse range of class, religious, ethnic, and geographic backgrounds are woven into the social history of the Ottoman Empire, from the early-modern period to its dissolution in 1922. Its thematic chapters first introduce readers to the key sources for information about women's lives in the Ottoman Empire (qadi registers, petitions, fetvas, travelogues authored by women). The first section of the book then recounts urban, non-elite women's experiences at the courts, family life, and as slaves. Paying attention to the geographic diversity of the Ottoman Empire, this section also considers the social history of women in the Arab provinces of Baghdad, Cairo and Aleppo. The second section charts the social history of elite women, including that of women in the Palace system, writers and musicians and the history of women's education. The final section narrates the history of women at the end of the empire, during the Great War and Civil War. The first introductory social history of women in the Ottoman Empire, Women in the Ottoman Empire will be essential reading for scholars and students of Ottoman history and the history of women in the Middle East.

Shakespeare, Court Dramatist centres around the contention that the courts of both Elizabeth I and James I loomed much larger in Shakespeare's creative life than is usually appreciated. Richard Dutton argues that many, perhaps most, of Shakespeare's plays have survived in versions adapted for court presentation, where length was no object (and indeed encouraged) and rhetorical virtuosity was appreciated. The first half of the study examines the court's patronage of the theatre during Shakespeare's lifetime and the crucial role of its Masters of the Revels, who supervised all performances there (as well as censoring plays for public performance). Dutton examines the emergence of the Lord Chamberlain's Men and the King's Men, to whom Shakespeare was attached as their 'ordinary poet', and reviews what is known about the revision of plays in the early modern period. The second half of the study focuses in detail on six of Shakespeare's plays which exist in shorter, less polished texts as well as longer, more familiar ones: Henry VI Part II and III, Romeo and Juliet, Henry V, Hamlet, and The Merry Wives of Windsor. Shakespeare, Court Dramatist argues that they are not cut down from those familiar versions, but poorly-reported originals which Shakespeare revised for court performance into what we know best today. More localised revisions in such plays as Titus Andronicus, Richard II, and Henry IV Part II can also best be explained in this context. The court, Richard Dutton argues, is what made Shakespeare Shakespeare.

Beginning around 1559 and continuing through 1642, writers in England, Scotland, and France found themselves pre-occupied with an unusual sort of crime, a crime without a name which today we call 'terrorism'. These crimes were especially dangerous because they were aimed at violating not just the law but the fabric of law itself; and yet they were also, from an opposite point of view, especially hopeful, for they seemed to have the power of unmaking a systematic injustice and restoring a nation to its 'ancient liberty'. The Bible and the annals of classical history were full of examples: Ehud assassinating King Eglon of Moab; Samson bringing down the temple in Gaza; Catiline arousing a conspiracy of terror in republican Rome; Marcus Brutus leading a conspiracy against the life of Julius Caesar. More recent history provided examples too: legends about Mehmed II and his concubine Irene; the assassination in Florence of Duke Alessandro de 'Medici, by his cousin Lorenzino. Terrorism Before the Letter recounts how these stories came together in the imaginations of writers to provide a system of 'enabling fictions', in other words a 'mythography', that made it possible for people of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to think (with and about) terrorism, to engage in it or react against it, to compose stories and devise theories in response to it, even before the word and the concept were born. Terrorist violence could be condoned or condemned, glorified or demonised. But it was a legacy of political history and for a while an especially menacing form of aggression, breaking out in assassinations, abductions, riots, and massacres, and becoming a spectacle of horror and hope on the French and British stage, as well as the main theme of numerous narratives and lyrical poems. This study brings to life the controversies over 'terrorism before the letter' in the early modern period, and it explicates the discourse that arose around it from a rhetorical as well as a structural point of view. Kenneth Burke's 'pentad of motives' helps organise the material, and show how complex the concept of terrorist action could be. Terrorism is usually thought to be a modern phenomenon. But it is actually a foundational figure of the European imagination, at once a reality and a myth, and it has had an impact on political life since the beginnings of Europe itself. Terrorism is a violence that communicates, and the dynamics of communication itself reveal it special powers and inevitable failures.

Paul von Hintze war als Staatssekretar des Auswartigen Amts in den dramatischen Monaten von Juli bis Oktober 1918 die Schlusselfigur der deutschen Aussenpolitik mit Einfluss auch auf die innenpolitische Entwicklung. Mit seinem Wirken sind das fieberhafte Bemuhen um die Liquidation des Weltkriegs und folgenreiche Weichenstellungen in Osteuropa sowie fur die Verfassung des Kaiserreichs verbunden. Diese Politik im Angesicht der Niederlage kann durch die Kenntnis der Karriere Hintzes besser verstanden werden. Die politische Laufbahn Hintzes im ausgehenden Kaiserreich wird in einer langeren biographischen Einleitung nachgezeichnet und im Editionsteil auf breiter, z.T. bisher nicht zuganglicher Quellenbasis dokumentiert. Dabei bietet sich uber den personalhistorischen Bezug hinaus ein tiefer Einblick in die Diplomatie- und Mentalitatsgeschichte Deutschlands und der Staatenwelt zwischen Beharrung, Revolution, Krieg und Frieden."

The place of religion in the Enlightenment has been keenly debated for many years. Research has tended, however, to examine the interplay of religion and knowledge in Western countries, often ignoring the East. In Enlightenment and religion in the Orthodox World leading historians address this imbalance by exploring the intellectual and cultural challenges and changes that took place in Orthodox communities during the eighteenth century. The two main centres of Orthodoxy, the Greek-speaking world and the Russian Empire, are the focus of early chapters, with specialists analysing the integration of modern cosmology into Greek education, and the Greek alternative 'enlightenment', the spiritual Philokalia. Russian experts also explore the battle between the spiritual and the rational in the works of Voulgaris and Levshin. Smaller communities of Eastern Europe were faced with their own particular difficulties, analysed by contributors in the second part of the book. Governed by modernising princes who embraced Enlightenment ideals, Romanian society was fearful of the threat to its traditional beliefs, whilst Bulgarians were grappling in different ways with a new secular ideology. The particular case of the politically-divided Serbian world highlights how Dositej Obradovic's complex humanist views have been used for varying ideological purposes ever since. The final chapter examines the encroachment of the secular on the traditional in art, and the author reveals how Western styles and models of representation were infiltrating Orthodox art and artefacts. Through these innovative case studies this book deepens our understanding of how Christian and secular systems of knowledge interact in the Enlightenment, and provides a rich insight into the challenges faced by leaders and communities in eighteenth-century Orthodox Europe.

The Bohemian preacher and religious reformer Jan Hus has been celebrated as a de facto saint since being burned at the stake as a heretic in 1415. Patron Saint and Prophet analyzes Hus's commemoration from the time of his death until the middle of the following century, tracing the ways in which both his supporters and his most outspoken opponents sought to determine whether he would be remembered as a heretic or saint. Phillip Haberkern examines how specific historical conflicts and exigencies affected the evolution of Hus's memoryawithin the militant Hussite movement that flourished until the mid-1430s, within the Czech Utraquist church that succeeded it, and among sixteenth-century Lutherans who viewed Hus as a forerunner and even prophet of their reform. Using close readings of written sources such as sermons and church histories, visual media including manuscript illuminations and monumental art, and oral forms of discourse such as vernacular songs and liturgical prayers, this book offers a fascinating account of how changes in media technology complemented the shifting theology of the cult of saints in order to shape early modern commemorative practices. By focusing on the ways in which the invocation of Hus catalyzed religious dissent within two distinct historical contexts, Haberkern compares the role of memory in late medieval Bohemia with the emergence of history as a constitutive religious discourse in the early modern German land. In this way, he also provides a detailed analysis of the ways in which Bohemian and German religious reformers justified their dissent from the Roman Church by invoking the past.