Paul Cavill offers a major reinterpretation of early Tudor constitutional history. In the grand "Whig" tradition, the parliaments of Henry VII were a disappointing retreat from the onward march towards parliamentary democracy. The king was at best indifferent and at worst hostile to parliament; its meetings were cowed and quiescent, subservient to the royal will. Yet little research has tested these assumptions.
Drawing on extensive archival research, Cavill challenges existing accounts and revises our understanding of the period. Neither to the king nor to his subjects did parliament appear to be a waning institution, fading before the waxing power of the crown. For a ruler in Henry's vulnerable position, parliament helped to restore royal authority by securing the good governance that legitimated his regime. For his subjects, parliament served as a medium through which to communicate with the government and to shape--and, on occasion, criticize--its policies. Because of the demands parliament made, its impact was felt throughout the kingdom, among ordinary people as well as among the elite. Cooperation between subjects and the crown, rather than conflict, characterized these parliaments.
While for many scholars parliament did not truly come of age until the 1530s, when-freed from its medieval shackles-the modern institution came to embody the sovereign nation state, in this study Henry's reign emerges as a constitutionally innovative period. Ideas of parliamentary sovereignty were already beginning to be articulated. It was here that the foundations of the "Tudor revolution in government" were being laid.

Early Modern Universities: Networks of Higher Education publishes twenty essays on early modern institutional academic networks and the history of the book. The case studies examine universities, schools, and academies across a wide geographical range throughout Europe, and in Central America. The volume suggests pathways for future research into institutional hierarchies, cultural ties, and how networks of policy makers were embedded in complex scholarly and scientific developments. Topics include institutions and political entanglements; locality and mobility, especially the movement of scholars and scholarship between institutions; communication, collaboration, and the circulation of academic knowledge. The essays use studies of print and book cultures to provide insights into cooperative interregional markets, travel and trade. Contributors: Laurence Brockliss, Liam Chambers, Liam Chambers, Peter Davidson, Mordechai Feingold, Alette Fleischer, Willem Frijhoff, Anja- Silvia Goeing, Martina Hacke, Michael Hunter, Urs B. Leu, David A. Lines, Ian Maclean, Thomas O'Connor, Glyn Parry, Yari Perez Marin, Elizabeth Sandis, Andreas Sohn, Jane Stevenson, Iolanda Ventura, and Benjamin Wardhaugh.

In World Trade Systems of the East and West, Geoffrey C. Gunn profiles Nagasaki's historic role in mediating the Japanese bullion trade, especially silver exchanged against Chinese and Vietnamese silk. Founded in 1571 as the terminal port of the Portuguese Macau ships, Nagasaki served as Japan's window to the world over long time and with the East-West trade carried on by the Dutch and, with even more vigor, by the Chinese junk trade. While the final expulsion of the Portuguese in 1646 characteristically defines the "closed" period of early modern Japanese history, the real trade seclusion policy, this work argues, only came into place one century later when the Shogunate firmly grasped the true impact of the bullion trade upon the national economy.

Baker and Milsom's Sources of English Legal History is the definitive source book on the development of English private law. This new edition has been comprehensively revised and udpated to incorporate new sources discovered since the original publication in 1986, and to reflect developments in recent scholarship.
All the sources included are translated into modern English, offering an accessible inroad to the leading primary materials for students of the history of the common law.
The sources themselves - revealing the operation of courts across a wide range of personal and economic disputes - offer a rich resource for historians researching the development of the English government, society, and economy. Their significance in shaping the common law spans beyond England, and ensures the collection is an essential reference point for all those interested in the history of the common law in any jurisdiction.

Peter Anstey presents a thorough and innovative study of John Locke's views on the method and content of natural philosophy. Focusing on Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding, but also drawing extensively from his other writings and manuscript remains, Anstey argues that Locke was an advocate of the Experimental Philosophy: the new approach to natural philosophy championed by Robert Boyle and the early Royal Society who were opposed to speculative philosophy.
On the question of method, Anstey shows how Locke's pessimism about the prospects for a demonstrative science of nature led him, in the Essay, to promote Francis Bacon's method of natural history, and to downplay the value of hypotheses and analogical reasoning in science. But, according to Anstey, Locke never abandoned the ideal of a demonstrative natural philosophy, for he believed that if we could discover the primary qualities of the tiny corpuscles that constitute material bodies, we could then establish a kind of corpuscular metric that would allow us a genuine science of nature. It was only after the publication of the Essay, however, that Locke came to realize that Newton's Principia provided a model for the role of demonstrative reasoning in science based on principles established upon observation, and this led him to make significant revisions to his views in the 1690s.
On the content of Locke's natural philosophy, it is argued that even though Locke adhered to the Experimental Philosophy, he was not averse to speculation about the corpuscular nature of matter. Anstey takes us into new terrain and new interpretations of Locke's thought in his explorations of his mercurialist transmutational chymistry, his theory of generation by seminal principles, and his conventionalism about species.

Using "El lazarillo de ciegos caminantes" (the "Guide for Blind Rovers" by Alonso Carrio de Lavandera, the best known work of the era) as a jumping off point for a sprawling discussion of 18th-century Spanish America, Ruth Hill argues for a richer, more nuanced understanding of the relationship between Spain and its western colonies. Armed with primary sources including literature, maps, census data, letters, and diaries, Hill reveals a rich world of intrigue and artifice, where identity is surprisingly fluid and always in question. More importantly, Hill crafts a complex argument for reassessing our understanding of race and class distinctions at the time, with enormous implications for how we view conceptions of race and class today.

Parents of Poor Children is the first sustained study of the mothers and fathers of poor children in the England of the early modern and early industrial period. Although we know a good deal about the family life of monarchs in this period, much less is known about what life was like for poor single mothers, or for ordinary people who were trying to bring up their children. What were poor mothers and fathers trying to achieve, and what support did they have from their society, especially from the welfare system?
Patricia Crawford attempts to answer these important questions, in order to illuminate the experience of parenting at this time from the perspective of the poor, a group who have naturally left little in the way of literary testimony. In doing this, she draws upon a wide range of archival material, including quarter session records, petitions for assistance, applications for places in the London Foundling Hospital, and evidence from criminal trials in London's Old Bailey.
England in this period had a developing system of welfare, unique in Europe, by which parish rates were collected and administered to those deemed worthy of relief. The "civic fathers" who administered this welfare drew upon a code of fatherhood framed in the Elizabethan period, by which a patriarch took responsibility for maintaining and exercising authority over wives and children. But, as Patricia Crawford shows, this code of family conduct was the product of a material world completely alien to that which the poor inhabited. Parents of the poor were different from those of middling and elite status. Poverty, not property, dictated their relationships with their children. Poor families were frequently broken by death. Fathers were frequently absent, and mothers had to rear their children with whatever forms of relief they could find.

In ten chapters, partly case-studies, this monograph analyzes the (new) ways in which cultural manifestations were used to create the necessary preconditions for (religious) policy and power in the Rome of Urban VIII (1623-1644). It was the intensified interaction between culture and power-politics that created what we now call 'the Baroque'. Based on a rich variety of, hitherto largely unexplored, primary sources, the book addresses the basic issues of papal power in the post-Tridentine period. It does not study actual papal politics, but rather the cultural forms that were essential to the representation and legitimatization of the papacy's power, both secular and religious and that (co-)determined the effectiviness of papal policy. Precisely during Urban's long pontificate, the manifold, always imaginative and often unexpected uses of power representation became, in the end, not so much a series of cultural forms as, in a sense, the structure of early modern (Roman) society.

Nation and Nurture in Seventeenth-Century English Literature connects changing seventeenth-century English views of maternal nurture to the rise of the modern nation, especially between 1603 and 1675. Maternal nurture gains new prominence in the early modern cultural imagination at the precise moment when England undergoes a major paradigm shift - from the traditional, dynastic body politic, organized by organic bonds, to the post-dynastic, modern nation, comprised of symbolic and affective relations. The book also demonstrates that shifting early modern perspectives on Judeo-Christian relations deeply inform the period's interlocking reassessments of maternal nurture and the nation, especially in the case of Milton. The book's five chapters analyze a wide range of reformed and traditional texts, including A pitiless Mother, William Gouge's Of Domesticall Duties, Shakespeare's Macbeth, Charles I's Eikon Basilike, and Milton's Paradise Lost, and Samson Agonistes. Equal attention is paid to such early modern visual images as The power of women (a late sixteenth-century Dutch engraving), William Marshall's engraved frontispiece to Richard Braithwaite's The English Gentleman and Gentlewoman (1641), and Peter Paul Rubens's painting of Pero and Cimon or Roman Charity (1630). The book argues that competing early modern figurations of the nurturing mother mediate in politically implicated ways between customary biblical models of English kingship and innovative Hebraic/Puritan paradigms of Englishness.

The fifteenth century was a critical juncture for the College of Cardinals. They were accused of prolonging the exile in Avignon and causing the schism. At the councils at the beginning of the period their very existence was questioned. They rebuilt their relationship with the popes by playing a fundamental part in reclaiming Rome when the papacy returned to its city in 1420. Because their careers were usually much longer than that of an individual pope, the cardinals combined to form a much more effective force for restoring Rome. In this book, shifting focus from the popes to the cardinals sheds new light on a relatively unknown period for Renaissance art history and the history of Rome. Dr. Carol M. Richardson has been awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize (2008) in the field of History of Arts.

Naples was one of the largest cities in early modern Europe, and for about two centuries the largest city in the global empire ruled by the kings of Spain. Its crowded and noisy streets, the height of its buildings, the number and wealth of its churches and palaces, the celebrated natural beauty of its location, the many antiquities scattered in its environs, the fiery volcano looming over it, the drama of its people's devotions, the size and liveliness - to put it mildly - of its plebs, all made Naples renowned and at times notorious across Europe. The new essays in this volume aim to introduce this important, fascinating, and bewildering city to readers unfamiliar with its history. Contributors are: Tommaso Astarita, John Marino, Giovanni Muto, Vladimiro Valerio, Gaetano Sabatini, Aurelio Musi, Giulio Sodano, Carlos Jose Hernando Sanchez, Elisa Novi Chavarria, Gabriel Guarino, Giovanni Romeo, Peter Mazur, Angelantonio Spagnoletti, J. Nicholas Napoli, Gaetana Cantone, Anthony DelDonna, Sean Cocco, Melissa Calaresu, Nancy Canepa, David Gentilcore, Diana Carrio-Invernizzi, and Anna Maria Rao. The publisher, editor, and contributors mourn the passing of Gaetana Cantone, who died in April 2013.

This work offers a series of linked studies of European print culture in the sixteenth century, focusing particularly on France and the regional, provincial experience of print. France, in the sixteenth century, was one of the great centres of the European publishing industry. But in the second half of the century the established dominance of Paris and Lyon was increasingly challenged by other new printing centres, stimulated in part by the religious and political crisis of the French Wars of Religion. Drawing on the data collected by the St Andrews French book project, the author reconstructs the enigmatic history of a number of previously unstudied printers. The focus throughout is on popular print, and the growth of mass market for news, entertainment and religious instruction. Customers interested in this title may also be interested in French Vernacular Books, edited by Andrew Pettegree, Malcolm Walsby and Alexander Wilkinson.

Color has recently become the focus of scholarly discussion in many fields, but the categories of art, craft, science and technology, unreflectively defined according to modern disciplines, have not been helpful in understanding color in the early modern period. 'Color worlds', consisting of practices, concepts and objects, form the central category of analysis in this volume. The essays examine a rich variety of 'color worlds', and their constituent engagements with materials, productions and the ordering and conceptualization of color. Many color worlds appear to have intersected and cross-fertilized at the beginning of the seventeenth century; the essays focus especially on the creation of color languages and boundary objects to communicate across color worlds, or indeed when and why this failed to happen. Contributors include: Tawrin Baker, Barbara H. Berrie, Fokko Jan Dijksterhuis, Karin Leonhard, Andrew Morrall, Doris Oltrogge, Valentina Pugliano, Anna Marie Roos, Romana Sammern (Filzmoser) and Simon Werrett.

In The Jesuit Order as a Synagogue of Jews the author explains how Christians with Jewish family backgrounds went within less than forty years from having a leading role in the foundation of the Society of Jesus to being prohibited from membership in it. The author works at the intersection to two important historical topics, each of which attracts considerable scholarly attention but that have never received sustained and careful attention together, namely, the early modern histories of the Jesuit order and of Iberian "purity of blood" concerns. An analysis of the pro- and anti-converso texts in this book (both in terms of what they are claiming and what their limits are) advance our understanding of early modern, institutional Catholicism at the intersection of early modern religious reform and the new racism developing in Spain and spreading outwards.

This is the first comprehensive study of Gangraena, an intemperate anti-sectarian polemic written by a London Presbyterian Thomas Edwards and published in three parts in 1646. These books, which bitterly opposed any moves to religious toleration, were the most notorious and widely debated texts in a Revolution in which print was crucial to political moblization. They have been equally important to later scholars who have continued the lively debate over the value of Gangraena as a source for the ideas and movements its author condemned. This study includes a thorough assessment of the usefulness of Edwards's work as a historical source, but goes beyond this to provide a wide-ranging discussion of the importance of Gangraena in its own right as a lively work of propaganda, crucial to Presbyterian campaigning in the mid-1640s. Contemporary and later readings of this complex text are traced through a variety of methods, literary and historical, with discussions of printed responses, annotations and citation. Hughes's work thus provides a vivid and convincing picture of revolutionary London and a reappraisal of the nature of 1640s Presbyterianism, too often dismissed as conservative. Drawing on the newer histories of the book and of reading, Hughes explores the influence of Edwards's distasteful but compelling book.

This book examines the important themes of sexuality, gender, love, and marriage in stage, literary, and film treatments of Shakespeare's plays. The theme of sexuality is often integral to Shakespeare's works and therefore merits a thorough exploration. Sexuality in the Age of Shakespeare begins with descriptions of sexuality in ancient Greece and Rome, medieval England, and early-modern Europe and England, then segues into examinations of the role of sexuality in Shakespeare's plays and poetry, and also in film and stage productions of his plays. The author employs various theoretical approaches to establish detailed interpretations of Shakespeare's plays and provides excerpts from several early-modern marriage manuals to illustrate the typical gender roles of the time. The book concludes with bibliographies that students of Shakespeare will find invaluable for further study. Includes excerpts of four English early-modern marriage manuals A bibliography contains sources regarding Greek, Roman, medieval, and early-modern European sexuality as well as Shakespearean criticism A glossary clarifies unfamiliar terms