This book offers a comparison of lay and inquisitorial witchcraft prosecutions. In most of the early modern period, witchcraft jurisdiction in Italy rested with the Roman Inquisition, whereas in Denmark only the secular courts raised trials. Kallestrup explores the narratives of witchcraft as they were laid forward by people involved in the trials.

This is a book of biographies of 23 European women who were among the earliest arrivals in Colonial America. They came to found their homes in a wilderness or to carry out the work of their religious denomination. Most never got to return to visit their childhood homes or relatives, performing hard work daily the rest of their lives. Eliza Lucas Pinckney and others came looking for financial gain; some such as Ann Lee came to escape religious persecution; a few such as Margaret Brent came looking for adventure. Also profiled in this book are Priscilla Mullins Alden, Alice Carpenter S. Bradford, Margaret Tyndal Winthrop, Anne Marbury Hutchinson, Mary Barrett Dyer, Lady Deborah Dunch Moody, Penelope Van Princis Stout, Lady Frances Culpeper Berkeley, Margaret Hardenbroeck Philipse, Elizabeth Haddon Estaugh, Henrietta Deering Johnston, Susanna Wright, Sister Marie Madeleine Hachard, Elizabeth Timothy, Elizabeth Murray Smith, Margarethe Bechtel Jungmann, Mary Barnard Williams, Mary White Rowlandson, Jane Randolph Jefferson, and Anne Dudley Bradstreet.

In any society, a foreigner learning the language must also learn what passes for good manners. The same is true for the historian trying to understand the social rules of a period and why these change. This book explores the nature and development of early modern conceptions of good manners, and examines some of the particular forms of everyday behaviour which these conceptions implied. `Courtesy' and `Civility' were among the values central to Tudor and Stuart assumptions and fears about the social and political order.

Two societies, two conceptions of justice, collaborated and collided when French forces stormed Cartagena of the Indies in May 1697. For their commander, the baron de Pointis, a naval captain in the mould of Drake, this bloody if strategically pointless success fulfilled a long-postponed design "that might be both honourable and advantageous", with ships lent and soldiers (but not seamen) paid by the King, who in return would take the Crown's usual one-fifth interest in such "preis de vaisseaux", the remaining costs falling on private subscribers, in this case no less than 666 of them, headed by courtiers, financiers, naval contractors and officers of both pen and sword.' According to Pointis, peace rumours restricted the flow of advances and the expedition, nearly 4,000 strong when it sailed out of Brest, was weaker than he had planned, especially if it should prove difficult to use the ships' crews ashore.

Cadwallader Colden was a Scottish emigre to the American colonies in the 18th century. Trained as a physician, he settled in Philadelphia in 1710 to establish a medical practice. In 1718, he was offered a minor administrative position in the Province of New York, and thereafter he rose through a number of appointed offices, culminating in that of lieutenant governor of the colony in the era leading up to the American Revolution. As a public figure, he cast his role as a loyal servant of the Crown and adamantly tried to maintain the royal prerogative in the face of increasing divisiveness and personal unpopularity. This legacy may have largely overshadowed his more substantial and enduring contributions in a range of intellectual and scientific fields, including botanical investigation and classification; medical writings; scientific treatises; philosophy; literature; and, to a lesser extent, his writings on such topics as education, ethics, and historiography.

Colden maintained an extensive correspondence with some of the leading men of the times, including noted physicians, philosophers, and scientists, both in the American colonies and in Europe. As such, he did much to initiate and sustain that trans-Atlantic community that served to enhance the values and achievements of the Enlightenment in the American colonies of the 18th century. Colden was the first in the colonies to introduce Linnaean classification, the first to publish a work on Newtonian science in America, and the first to write in English about the several tribes that were to play a crucial role in the British-French imperial conflict, particularly in New York. Hoermann hopes to correct a distortion in the record of Colden's achievements that may have been the result of his loyalist sympathies.

This collection investigates Queen Elizabeth I as an accomplished writer in her own right as well as the subject of authors who celebrated her. With innovative essays from Brenda M. Hosington, Carole Levin, and other established and emerging experts, it reappraises Elizabeth's translations, letters, poems and prayers through a diverse range of approaches to textuality, from linguistic and philological to literary and cultural-historical. The book also considers Elizabeth as "authored," studying how she is reflected in the writing of her contemporaries and reconstructing a wider web of relations between the public and private use of language in early modern culture. Contributions from Carlo M. Bajetta, Guillaume Coatelen and Giovanni Iamartino bring the Queen's presence in early modern Italian literary culture to the fore. Together, these essays illuminate the Queen in writing, from the multifaceted linguistic and rhetorical strategies that she employed, to the texts inspired by her power and charisma.

In the late seventeenth century, Spain dominated the Caribbean and Central and South America, establishing colonies, mining gold and silver, and gathering riches from Asia for transportation back to Europe. Seeking to disrupt Spain s nearly unchecked empire-building and siphon off some of their wealth, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British adventurers both legitimate and illegitimate led numerous expeditions into the Caribbean and the Pacific. Many voyagers wrote accounts of their exploits, captivating readers with their tales of exotic places, shocking hardships and cruelties, and daring engagements with national enemies. Widely distributed and read, buccaneering and privateering narratives contributed significantly to England s imaginative, literary rendering of the Americas in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and they provided a venue for public dialogue about sea rovers and their position within empire. This book takes as its subject the literary and rhetorical construction of voyagers and their histories, and by extension, the representation of English imperialism in popular sea-voyage narratives of the period."

This is the first full scholarly study of state formation and the exercise of state power in Scotland. It sets the Scottish state in a British and European context, revealing that Scotland -- like larger and better-known states -- developed a more integrated governmental system in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This study provides an invaluable new contribution to the history of Scotland.

"A brilliant . . . analysis of the fragile hegemony and identities of colonial Virginia's elite men. . . . "On the Sources of Patriarchal Rage" compellingly illuminates the ragged edge where masculinity and colonial identity meet. . . . the book] will undoubtedly send Jefferson scholars scurrying back to their notes. . . . Most significant, by being among the first to tackle the subject of masculinity in early America, Lockridge forces colonial scholars to reexamine the lives of men they thought they already knew too well."
--"William and Mary Quarterly"

Two of the greatest of Virginia gentlemen, William Byrd II and Thomas Jefferson, each kept a commonplace book--in effect, a journal where men were to collect wisdom in the form of anecdotes and quotations from their readings with a sense of detachment and scholarship. Writing in these books, each assembled a prolonged series of observations laden with fear and hatred of women. Combining ignorance with myth and misogyny, Byrd's and Jefferson's books reveal their deep ambivalence about women, telling of women's lascivious nature and The Female Creed and invoking the fallible, repulsive, and implicitly corruptible female body as a central metaphor for all tales of social and political corruption.

Were these private outbursts meaningless and isolated incidents, attributable primarily to individual pathology, or are they written revelations of the forces working on these men to maintain patriarchal control? Their hatred for women draws upon a kind of misogynistic reserve found in the continental and English intellectual traditions, but it also twists and recontextualizes less misogynistic excerpts to intensified effect. From this interplay of intellectual traditions and the circumstances of each man's life and later behavior arises the possibility one or more specific politics of misogyny is at work here.

Kenneth Lockridge's work, replete with excerpts from the books themselves, leads us through these texts, exploring the structures, contexts, and significance of these writings in the wider historical context of gender and power. His book convincingly illustrates the ferocity of early American patriarchal rage; its various meanings, however suggestively explored here, must remain contestable.

"The Face of Queenship" investigates the aesthetic, political, and gender-related meanings in representations of Elizabeth I by her contemporaries. By attending to eyewitness reports, poetry, portraiture, and discourses on beauty and cosmetics, this book shows how the portrayals of the queen's face register her contemporaries' hopes, fears, hatreds, mockeries, rivalries, and awe. In its application of theories of the meaning of the face and its exploration of the early modern representation and interpretation of faces, this study argues that the face was seen as a rhetorical tool and that Elizabeth was a master of using her face to persuade, threaten, or comfort her subjects.

In The Government of Scotland 1560-1625 Goodare shows how Scotland was governed during the transition from Europe's decentralized medieval realms to modern sovereign states. The expanding institutions of government - crown, parliament, privy council, local courts - are detailed, but the book is structured around an analysis of governmental processes. A new framework is offered for understanding the concept of 'centre and localities': centralization happened in the localities.
Various interest groups participated in government and influenced its decisions. The nobility, in particular, exercised influence at every level. There was also English influence, both before and after the union of crowns in 1603. It is argued that the crown's continuing involvement after 1603 shows the common idea of 'absentee monarchy' to be misconceived. Goodare also pays particular attention to the harsh impact of government in the Highlands - where the chiefs were not full members of 'Scottish' political society - and on the common people - who were also excluded from normal political participation.

In this work, Buschmann incorporates neglected Spanish visions into the European perceptions of the emerging Pacific world. The book argues that Spanish diplomats and intellectuals attempted to create an intellectual link between the Americas and the Pacific Ocean.

The idea of progress stood at the very center of the intellectual world of eighteenth-century Britain, closely linked to every major facet of the British Enlightenment as well as to the economic revolutions of the period. David Spadafora here provides the most extensive discussion ever written of this prevailing sense of historical optimism, challenging long-held views on the extent of its popularity and its supposed importation from France. Spadafora demonstrates persuasively that British contributions to the idea of progress were wide-ranging and fully elaborated while owing little to the French. Drawing on hundreds of eighteenth-century books and pamphlets, Spadafora traces the development of historical progress across the century. In the process, he distinguishes among the intellectual and social sources of the idea's growth and argues that its popularity soared after mid-century. He identifies and examines in depth each of the most widespread varieties of the concept of progress, including those found in thinking about the arts and sciences, religion and the millennium, the human mind and education, and languages. Spadafora cites and evaluates men of letters, theologians and historians, and scientists and politicians. In his discussion of the belief in general progress, he explores the differences between English writers such as Priestley, Price, and Edmund Law and the somewhat less optimistic Scottish thinkers such as Hume, Smith, and Robertson. He concludes by tracing the profound impact of the eighteenth-century idea of progress on the first half of the nineteenth century in Britain and its implications for modernity. "A solid and sophisticated contribution to intellectual history written in a clear, authoritative, and attractive style. This is an important book." -Bernard Semmel, author of John Stuart Mill and the Pursuit of Virtue

As one of the main European economic, political, and religious centers throughout the late medieval and Renaissance period, Milan is the focus of this long overdue study of one of the crown jewels of the Spanish Empire. Reworking the traditional narrative that depicts Spanish rule as the primary factor in seventeenth-century Italy's decline into decadence, author Stefano D'Amico shows that in reality the Spanish monarchy provided new opportunities for wealth and prosperity to Milan and its elites. The city took advantage of its strategic and financial role within the Spanish empire and used its extended network to maintain a leading role in European economics and politics.

In this illuminating study of a vital but long overlooked aspect of Chinese religious life, Jimmy Yu reveals that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, self-inflicted violence was an essential and sanctioned part of Chinese culture. He examines a wide range of practices, including blood writing, filial body-slicing, chastity mutilations and suicides, ritual exposure, and self-immolation, arguing that each practice was public, scripted, and a signal of certain cultural expectations. Yu shows how individuals engaged in acts of self-inflicted violence to exercise power and to affect society, by articulating moral values, reinstituting order, forging new social relations, and protecting against the threat of moral ambiguity. Self-inflicted violence was intelligible both to the person doing the act and to those who viewed and interpreted it, regardless of the various religions of the period: Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism, and other religions. Self-inflicted violence as a category reveals scholarly biases that tend to marginalize or exaggerate certain phenomena in Chinese culture. Yu offers a groundbreaking contribution to scholarship on bodily practices in late imperial China, challenging preconceived ideas about analytic categories of religion, culture, and ritual in the study of Chinese religions.

The reformation was not a western European event, but historians have neglected the study of Protestantism in central and eastern Europe. This book aims to rectify this situation. It examines one of Europe's largest Protestant communities in Hungary and Transylvania. It highlights the place of the Hungarian Reformed church in the international Calvinist world, and reveals the impact of Calvinism on Hungarian politics and society.

In the sixteenth century, the famous kabbalist Isaac Luria transmitted a secret trove of highly complex mystical practices to a select groups of students. These meditations were designed to capitalize on sleep and death states in order to effectively split one's soul into multiple parts, and which, when properly performed, permitted the adept to free oneself from the cycle of rebirth. Through an in-depth analysis of these contemplative practices within the broader context of Lurianic literature, Zvi Ish-Shalom guides us on a penetrating scholarly journey into a realm of mystical teachings and practices never before available in English, illuminating a radically monistic vision of reality at the heart of Kabbalistic metaphysics and practice.

Madame de Sevigne made a significant contribution to the understanding of seventeenth-century France through her voluminous correspondence. The most famous epistoliere of the Splendid Century, the Marquise recorded important political events, religious controversies, wars and disasters, medical practices and the social and cultural life of the court of Louis XIV. She was a keen observer and brilliant writer; her literary style has been admired for over three hundred years.