Dewey Wallace tells the story of several prominent English Calvinist actors and thinkers in the first generations after the beginning of the Restoration. He seeks to overturn conventional cliches about Calvinism: that it was anti-mystical, that it allowed no scope for the ''ancient theology'' that characterized much of Renaissance learning, that its piety was harshly predestinarian, that it was uninterested in natural theology, and that it had been purged from the established church by the end of the seventeenth century.
In the midst of conflicts between Church and Dissent and the intellectual challenges of the dawning age of Enlightenment, Calvinist individuals and groups dealt with deism, anti-Trinitarianism, and scoffing atheism--usually understood as godlessness--by choosing different emphases in their defense and promotion of Calvinist piety and theology. Wallace shows that in each case, there was not only persistence in an earlier Calvinist trajectory, but also a transformation of the Calvinist heritage into a new mode of thinking and acting. The different paths taken illustrate the rich variety of English Calvinism in the period.
This study presents description and analysis of the mystical Calvinism of Peter Sterry, the hermeticist Calvinism of Theophilus Gale, the evangelical Calvinism of Joseph Alleine and the circle that promoted his legacy, the natural theology of the moderate Calvinist Presbyterians Richard Baxter, William Bates, and John Howe, and the Church of England Calvinism of John Edwards. Shapers of English Calvinism, 1660-1714 illuminates the religious and intellectual history of the era between the Reformation and modernity, offering fascinating insight into the development of Calvinism and also into English Puritanism as it transitioned into Dissent."

Following the execution of the king in 1649, the new Commonwealth and then Oliver Cromwell set out to drive forward a puritan reformation of manners. They wanted to reform the church and its services, enforce the Sabbath, suppress Christmas, and spread the gospel. They sought to impose a stern moral discipline to regulate and reform sexual behaviour, drinking practices, language, dress, and leisure activities ranging from music and plays to football.
England's Culture Wars explores how far this agenda could be enforced, especially in urban communities which offered the greatest potential to build a godly civic commonwealth. How far were local magistrates and ministers willing to cooperate, and what coercive powers did the regime possess to silence or remove dissidents? How far did the reformers themselves wish to go, and how did they reconcile godly reformation with the demands of decency and civility? Music and dancing lived on, in genteel contexts, early opera replaced the plays now forbidden, and puritans themselves were often fond of hunting and hawking. Bernard Capp explores the propaganda wars waged in press and pulpit, how energetically reformation was pursued, and how much or little was achieved. Many recent historians have dismissed interregnum reformation as a failure. He demonstrates that while the reforming drive varied enormously from place to place, its impact could be powerful. The book is therefore structured in three parts: setting out the reform agenda and challenges, surveying general issues and patterns, and finally offering a number of representative case-studies. It draws on a wide range of sources, including local and central government records, judicial records, pamphlets, sermons, newspapers, diaries, letters, and memoirs; and demonstrates how court records by themselves give us only a very limited picture of what was happening on the ground.

This volume sets out to explore the world of domestic devotions and is premised on the assumption that the home was a central space of religious practice and experience throughout the early modern world. The contributions to this book, which deal with themes dating from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, tell of the intimate relationship between humans and the sacred within the walls of the home. The volume demonstrates that the home cannot be studied in isolation: the sixteen essays, that encompass religious history, the histories of art and architecture, material culture, literary history, and social and cultural history, instead point individually and collectively to the porosity of the home and its connectedness with other institutions and broader communities. Contributors: Dotan Arad, Kathleen Ashley, Martin Christ, Hildegard Diemberger, Marco Faini, Suzanna Ivanic, Debra Kaplan, Marion H. Katz, Soyeon Kim, Hester Lees-Jeffries, Borja Franco Llopis, Alessia Meneghin, Francisco J. Moreno Diaz del Campo, Cristina Osswald, Kathleen M. Ryor, Igor Sosa Mayor, Hanneke van Asperen, Torsten Wollina, and Jungyoon Yang.

In Conflict and Soldiers' Literature in Early Modern Europe, Paul Scannell analyses the late 16th-century and early 17th-century literature of warfare through the published works of English, Welsh and Scottish soldiers. The book explores the dramatic increase in printed material on many aspects of warfare; the diversity of authors, the adaptation of existing writing traditions and the growing public interest in military affairs. There is an extensive discussion on the categorisation of soldiers, which argues that soldiers' works are under-used evidence of the developing professionalism among military leaders at various levels. Through analysis of autobiographical material, the thought process behind an individual's engagement with an army is investigated, shedding light on the relevance of significant personal factors such as religious belief and the concept of loyalty. The narratives of soldiers reveal the finer details of their experience, an enquiry that greatly assists in understanding the formidable difficulties that were faced by individuals charged with both administering an army and confronting an enemy. This book provides a reassessment of early modern warfare by viewing it from the perspective of those who experienced it directly. Paul Scannell highlights how various types of soldier viewed their commitment to war, while also considering the impact of published early modern material on domestic military capability - the 'art of war'.

Spoken Word and Social Practice: Orality in Europe (1400-1700) addresses historians and literary scholars. It aims to recapture oral culture in a variety of literary and non-literary sources, tracking the echo of women's voices, on trial, or bantering and gossiping in literary works, and recapturing those of princes and magistrates, townsmen, villagers, mariners, bandits, and songsmiths. Almost all medieval and early modern writing was marked by the oral. Spoken words and turns of phrase are bedded in writings, and the mental habits of a speaking world shaped texts. Writing also shaped speech; the oral and the written zones had a porous, busy boundary. Cross-border traffic is central to this study, as is the power, range, utility, and suppleness of speech. Contributors are Matthias Bahr, Richard Blakemore, Michael Braddick, Rosanna Cantavella, Thomas V. Cohen, Gillian Colclough, Jan Dumolyn, Susana Gala Pellicer, Jelle Haemers, Marcus Harmes, Elizabeth Horodowich, Carolina Losada, Virginia Reinburg, Anne Regent-Susini, Joseph T. Snow, Sonia Suman, Lesley K. Twomey and Liv Helene Willumsen.

The Crimean Khanate was often treated as a semi-nomadic, watered-down version of the Golden Horde, or yet another vassal state of the Ottoman Empire. This book revises these views by exploring the Khanate's political and legal systems, which combined well organized and well developed institutions, which were rooted in different traditions (Golden Horde, Islamic and Ottoman). Drawing on a wide range of sources, including the Crimean court registers from the reign of Murad Giray (1678-1683), the book examines the role of the khan, members of his council and other officials in the Crimean political and judicial systems as well as the practice of the Crimean sharia court during the reign of Murad Giray.

This book is a collection of essays on Ottoman history, focusing on how sultans of the Ottoman Empire were viewed by the public.

Historical research in previous decades has done a great deal to explore the social and political context of early modern natural and moral inquiries. Particularly since the publication of Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer's Leviathan and the Air-Pump (1985) several studies have attributed epistemological stances and debates to clashes of political and theological ideologies. The present volume suggests that with an awareness of this context, it is now worth turning back to questions of the epistemic content itself. The contributors to the present collection were invited to explore how certain non-epistemic values had been turned into epistemic ones, how they had an effect on epistemic content, and eventually how they became ideologies of knowledge playing various roles in inquiry and application throughout early modern Europe.

In the first book to investigate in detail the origins of antislavery thought and rhetoric within the Society of Friends, Brycchan Carey shows how the Quakers turned against slavery in the first half of the eighteenth century and became the first organization to take a stand against the slave trade. Through meticulous examination of the earliest writings of the Friends, including journals and letters, Carey reveals the society's gradual transition from expressing doubt about slavery to adamant opposition. He shows that while progression toward this stance was ongoing, it was slow and uneven and that it was vigorous internal debate and discussion that ultimately led to a call for abolition. His book will be a major contribution to the history of the rhetoric of antislavery and the development of antislavery thought as explicated in early Quaker writing.

Anthropomorphism - the projection of the human form onto the every aspect of the world - closely relates to early modern notions of analogy and microcosm. What had been construed in Antiquity as a ready metaphor for the order of creation was reworked into a complex system relating the human body to the body of the world. Numerous books and images - cosmological diagrams, illustrated treatises of botany and zoology, maps, alphabets, collections of ornaments, architectural essays - are entirely constructed on the anthropomorphic analogy. Exploring the complexities inherent in such work, the interdisciplinary essays in this volume address how the anthropomorphic model is fraught with contradictions and tensions, between magical and rational, speculative and practical thought. Contributors include Pamela Brekka, Anne-Laure van Bruaene, Ralph Dekoninck, Agnes Guiderdoni, Christopher P. Heuer, Sarah Kyle, Walter S. Melion, Christina Normore, Elizabeth Petcu, Bertrand Prevost, Bret Rothstein, Paul Smith, Miya Tokumitsu, Michel Weemans, and Elke Werner.

This history of the American Revolution in Georgia offers a thorough examination of how landownership issues complicated and challenged colonists' loyalties. Despite underdevelopment and isolation, eighteenth-century Georgia was an alluring place, for it held out to settlers of all social classes the prospect of affordable land -- and the status that went with ownership.

Then came the Revolution and its many threats to the orderly systems by which property was acquired and protected. As rebel and royal leaders vied for the support of Georgia's citizens, says Leslie Hall, allegiance became a prime commodity, with property and the preservation of owners' rights the requisite currency for securing it.

As Hall shows, however, the war's progress in Georgia was indeterminate; in fact, Georgia was the only colony in which British civil government was reestablished during the war. In the face of continued uncertainties -- plundering, confiscation, and evacuation -- many landowners' desires for a strong, consistent civil authority ultimately transcended whatever political leanings they might have had. The historical irony here, Hall's study shows, is that the most successful regime of Georgia's Revolutionary period was arguably that of royalist governor James Wright.

Land and Allegiance in Revolutionary Georgia is a revealing study of the self-interest and practical motivations in competition with a period's idealism and rhetoric.

During the Renaissance there was no centralized Inquisition in northern Italy until Pope Paul III founded the Roman Inquisition in 1542, but there was a dense network of autonomous papal inquisitors. Based on extensive archival research, this study investigates the life of the Dominican friars from whom these inquisitors were mostly drawn. It focuses on a selection of hitherto almost unknown but representative inquisitors to cast new light on their formation, appointment and careers, as well as their principal pursuits - the prosecution of heretics, especially Waldensians and Judaizers, and, most of all, the hunting of witches, for it was at its most intense in northern Italy during the Renaissance, over a century before reaching its peak in Northern Europe.

According to the accepted legal theory, the American colonists claimed the English common law as their birthright, brought with them its general principles and adopted so much of it as was applicable to their condition. Although this theory is universally adopted by the courts, a close study of the subject reveals among the early colonists a far different attitude toward the common law from that which is usually attributed to them. In none of the colonies, perhaps, was this more marked than in early Massachusetts. Here the binding force of English law was denied, and a legal system largely different came into use. It is the purpose of this work to trace the development of that system during the period of the first charter.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Religion offers new insight into the religious dimension of Bruegel's art. With a number of highly original and thorough case studies, the volume illuminates Bruegel's inventive and multifaceted engagement with the contemporary religious concepts and practices of his day and age. Religion remains a vital question in the life and career of Bruegel, because it was so long believed to be more or less absent from his work. As a pioneer of the new genres of landscape and peasant scenes, Bruegel was heralded as a ground-breaking "secular" painter. This volume highlights the most recent scholarship on the artist, offering a much more nuanced portrait of Bruegel's engagement with the dynamic religious landscape of the mid-sixteenth century. Contributors are: Jessica Buskirk, Ralph Dekoninck, Bertram Kaschek, Walter S. Melion, Jurgen Muller, Anna Pawlak, Gerd Schwerhoff, Larry Silver, and Michel Weemans.

Patrons of the Old Faith is the first full-length study on the Catholic nobility in the Dutch Republic. Based on a detailed prosopographical analysis and through the examination of their marriage strategies, interaction with Protestants, religiosity and contributions to the Holland Mission, Jaap Geraerts shows how the behaviour of the Catholic nobility was highly distinctive and differed from their co-religionists and Protestant peers as it was influenced by a specific set of noble and Catholic values. Due to the synthesis of their noble and confessional identities, the Dutch Catholic nobility in Utrecht and Guelders acted as patrons of their faith and were instrumental for the survival of Catholicism in the Dutch Republic.

Eight years before the Boston Tea Party and ten years before Lexington and Concord, the first shots in the American Revolution were fired in Mercersburg, Pennsylvania, in 1765. Known as the Smith Rebellion, this crucial turning point in American history set the stage for modern American politics.

In this history, author Karen Ramsburg tells the enlightening story of this uprising on the Pennsylvania frontier and definitively shows how it laid the groundwork for the political maneuverings of today. Ramsburg dips back into history and reveals how a simple act of self-defense became the spark that created our nation and developed the first battle in a long, continuous class war still ongoing today.

Fearful that illegal trade goods, such as tomahawks, scalping knives, and gun powder, were being transported to Fort Pitt to rearm the Indians and renew Pontiac's War against the frontiersmen, Justice William Smith and his cousin James Smith, a.k.a. Black Boy Jimmy, believed they had a right to stop it. The ensuing rebellion led to a definition of government as a contract between all men to reject some of their natural rights in favor of a framework that would secure each man's rights to life, liberty, and property.

Caught in the grip of savage religious war, fear of sorcery and the devil, and a deepening crisis of epistemological uncertainty, the intellectual climate of late Renaissance France (c. 1550-1610) was one of the most haunted in European history. Although existing studies of this climate have been attentive to the extensive body of writing on witchcraft and demons, they have had little to say of its ghosts. Combining techniques of literary criticism, intellectual history, and the history of the book, this study examines a large and hitherto unexplored corpus of ghost stories in late Renaissance French writing. These are shown to have arisen in a range of contexts far broader than was previously thought: whether in Protestant polemic against the doctrine of purgatory, humanist discussions of friendship, the growing ethnographic consciousness of New World ghost beliefs, or courtroom wrangles over haunted property. Chesters describes how, over the course of this period, we also begin to see emerge characteristics recognisable from modern ghost tales: the setting of the 'haunted house', the eroticised ghost, or the embodied revenant. Taking in prominent literary figures including Rabelais, Ronsard, Montaigne, d'Aubigne, as well as forgotten demonological tracts and sensationalist pamphlets, Ghost Stories in Late Renaissance France sheds new light on the beliefs, fears, and desires of a period on the threshold of modernity. It will be of interest to any scholar or student working in the field of early modern European history, literature or thought.

The French kingdom dissolved into civil wars, known as the "wars of religion," for a generation from 1562 to 1598. This book examines the reactions of France's governing groups to that experience. Their major political endeavour was securing peace. They attempted to achieve it through a religious pluralism not envisaged in any other state on this scale in this period. Its achievement would only be fulfilled, however, alongside a reform of the kingdom's institutions and society. Peace and reform went hand in hand --a moral agenda for restoration.
France's notables drew on reservoirs of classical and Christian moral philosophy and wisdom to find practical answers to the difficult problems of governance that confronted them. The resulting public introspection and vocal debates are difficult to match anywhere else in Europe at this time. They were an essential part of the profound sense of crisis that France's governing elites experienced during the later sixteenth century.
Drawing extensively on manuscript and printed sources not hitherto examined, this book analyses for the first time the debates at the Estates General of Blois (1576-7) and the Assembly of Notables at Saint-Germain-en-Laye of 1583-4. It shows the French polity in a fresh light, presenting major issues of political thought in their public and practical context. And it re-examines the crucial and little-understood reign of Henri III, the last Valois king, suggesting how Bourbon France could have emerged very differently from the civil wars of the late sixteenth century.

Since the dawn of history people have used charms and spells to try to control their environment, and forms of divination to try to foresee the otherwise unpredictable chances of life. Many of these techniques were called "superstitious" by educated elites.
For centuries religious believers used "superstition" as a term of abuse to denounce another religion that they thought inferior, or to criticize their fellow-believers for practising their faith "wrongly." From the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, scholars argued over what 'superstition' was, how to identify it, and how to persuade people to avoid it. Learned believers in demons and witchcraft, in their treatises and sermons, tried to make 'rational' sense of popular superstitions by blaming them on the deceptive tricks of seductive demons.
Every major movement in Christian thought, from rival schools of medieval theology through to the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment, added new twists to the debates over superstition. Protestants saw Catholics as superstitious, and vice versa. Enlightened philosophers mocked traditional cults as superstitions. Eventually, the learned lost their worry about popular belief, and turned instead to chronicling and preserving 'superstitious' customs as folklore and ethnic heritage.
Enchanted Europe offers the first comprehensive, integrated account of western Europe's long, complex dialogue with its own folklore and popular beliefs. Drawing on many little-known and rarely used texts, Euan Cameron constructs a compelling narrative of the rise, diversification, and decline of popular 'superstition' in the European mind.