This book presents and explores a challenging new approach in book history. It offers a coherent volume of thirteen chapters in the field of early modern book history covering a wide range of topics and it is written by renowned scholars in the field. The rationale and content of this volume will revitalize the theoretical and methodological debate in book history. The book will be of interest to scholars and students in the field of early modern book history as well as in a range of other disciplines. It offers book historians an innovative methodological approach on the life cycle of books in and outside Europe. It is also highly relevant for social-economic and cultural historians because of the focus on the commercial, legal, spatial, material and social aspects of book culture. Scholars that are interested in the history of science, ideas and news will find several chapters dedicated to the production, circulation and consumption of knowledge and news media.

This collection of essays is the first full account of the largest estate in early modern England, against which the fortunes of all other estates may be judged. Previous accounts have tended to regard the Crown lands as a resource to be plundered by successive monarchs in times of need: much of the monastic land confiscated by Henry VIII had been sold by the time of his death, and the estates had mostly been liquidated to meet the demands of expenditure by 1640. It is not denied in these essays that the estates suffered from the attrition of periodic sale, but the estates are also seen as a continuing enterprise of complexity and sophistication. Each essay is concerned with the dialogue between the Exchequer and its local administrators and tenants. The success and failure of initiatives launched by the Exchequer is illustrated by examples drawn from many communities throughout England.

The seventy years of late Stuart and early Hanoverian Britain following 1680 were a crucial period in British politics and society, seeing the growth both of political parties and of stability. This collection of original essays provides a coherent account of Britain in the 'First Age of Party'.

Patriarch Nikon, the most energetic, creative, influential, and obstinate of Russia's early religious leaders, dominates this book. As Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, Nikon's most important initiative was to bring Russian religious rituals into line with Greek Orthodox tradition, from which Russia's practices had diverted. Kiev's Monastery of the Caves served as a medium for his transmission of Greek notions. Nikon and Tsar Alexis I (r. 1645-1676) envisioned Russia's transformed into a new Holy Land. Eventually, Nikon became a challenger for Imperial authority. While his reforms endure, failed policies and poor political judgment were decisive in his fall and in the Patriarchate's reduction in status. Ultimately, the reforms of Peter the Great (r. 1682-1725) led to its replacement by a new, government-controlled body, the Holy Synod, which nevertheless carried out a continuity of Nikon's policies. This exceptional volume contextualizes Nikon's Patriarchate as part of the broader continuities in Russian History and serves as a bridge to the present, where Russia is forging new relationships between Church and power.

Bringing together twelve studies, this book provides an overview of the key issues of on-going interest in the study of Scottish witchcraft. The authors tackle various aspects of the question of witches; considering how people came to be considered 'witches', with new insights into the centrality of neighbourhood quarrels and misfortune; and delving into folk belief and various acts of witchcraft. It also examines the practice of witch-hunting, the 'urban geography' of witch-hunting, Scotland's international witch-hunting connections and brings fresh insights to the much-studied North Berwick witchcraft panic. Reconstructions of the brutal and ceremonial punishments inflicted on 'witches' offers a gruesome but compelling reminder of the importance of the subject.

Jonathan Bryan (1708-88) rose from the obscurity of the southern frontier to become one of colonial Georgia's richest, most powerful men. Along the way he made such influential friends as George Whitefield and James Oglethorpe. Bryan's contemporaries, in terms of their large holdings of land and slaves, were markedly traditional and conservative. As Alan Gallay shows, Bryan was different. Paternalistic and relatively open minded, Bryan contemplated religious, social, political, and economic ideas that other planters refused to consider. Of equal importance, he explored the geographic areas that lay beyond the reach and understanding of his contemporaries. Through the career of a remarkable individual--which spanned the founding of Georgia, the Revolution, and the birth of the new republic--Gallay chronicles the rise of the plantation slavery system in the colonial South.

This volume brings together some of the latest research on the cultural, intellectual, and commercial interactions during the Renaissance between Western Europe and the Middle East, with particular reference to the Ottoman Empire. Recent scholarship has brought to the fore the economic, political, cultural, and personal interactions between Western European Christian states and the Eastern Mediterranean Islamic states, and has therefore highlighted the incongruity of conceiving of an iron curtain bisecting the mentalities of the various socio-political and religious communities located in the same Euro-Mediterranean space. Instead, the emphasis here is on interpreting the Mediterranean as a world traversed by trade routes and associated cultural and intellectual networks through which ideas, people and goods regularly travelled. The fourteen articles in this volume contribute to an exciting cross-cultural and inter-disciplinary scholarly dialogue that explores elements of continuity and exchange between the two areas and positions the Ottoman Empire as an integral element of the geo-political and cultural continuum within which the Renaissance evolved. The aim of this volume is to refine current understandings of the diverse artistic, intellectual and political interactions in the early modern Mediterranean world and, in doing so, to contribute further to the discussion of the scope and nature of the Renaissance. The articles, from major scholars of the field, include discussions of commercial contacts; the exchange of technological, cartographical, philosophical, and scientific knowledge; the role of Venice in transmitting the culture of the Islamic East Mediterranean to Western Europe; the use of Middle Eastern objects in the Western European Renaissance; shared sources of inspiration in Italian and Ottoman architecture; musical exchanges; and the use of East Mediterranean sources in Western scholarship and European sources in Ottoman scholarship.

John Fisher, 1469-1535 was a figure of European stature during the Tudor age. His many roles included those of bishop, humanist, theologian, cardinal, and ultimately martyr. This study places him in the context of sixteenth-century Christendom, focusing not just on his resistance to Henry VIII, but also on his active engagement with the renaissance and reformation.

An "invisible giant," the seventeeth-century French army was the largest and hungriest institution of the Bourbon monarchy; yet it has received incomplete treatment and is poorly understood. Combining social and cultural emphases with more traditional institutional and operational concerns, this book examines the army in depth, studying recruitment, composition, discipline, motivation, selection of officers, leadership, administration, logistics, weaponry, tactics, field warfare, and siegecraft. The portrait that emerges differs from what current scholarship might have predicted. Instead of claiming that a "military revolution" transformed warfare, Lynn stresses evolutionary change. Questioning widely-held assumptions about state formation and coercion, he argues that this standing army was primarily devoted to border defense, and only rarely to internal repression.

In the 17th century, the elite household (kapi) became the focal point of Ottoman elite politics and socialization. It was a cultural melting pot, bringing together individuals of varied backgrounds through empire-wide patronage networks. This book investigates the layers of kapi power, through the example of Seyhulislam Feyzullah Efendielite.

It is now well-known that there was a separate age of youth in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century society (and before) but in much of the writing on this subject, youth has emerged as a passive construct of the adult society, lacking formative experiences. Paul Griffiths seeks to redress this imbalance by presenting a more `positive' image of young people, showing that they had a creative presence, an identity, and a historical significance which has never been fully explored. The author looks beyond the prescriptive codes of moralists and governors to survey the attitudes and activities of young people, examining their reaction to authority and to society's concept of the `ideal place' for them in the social order. He sheds new light on issues as diverse as juvenile delinquency, masculinity, the celebration of Shrovetide, sexual behaviour and courtship, clothing, catechizing, office-holding, vocabularies of insult, prostitution, and church seating plans. His research reveals much about the nature of youth culture, religious commitment, and master/servant relations, and leads to the identification of a separate milieu of `masterless' young people. Contemporary moralists called youth `the choosing time', a time of great risks and great potential; and the best time to incalculate political conformity and sound religion. Yet the concept of choice was double-edged, it recognized that young people had other options besides these expectations. This ambiguity is a central theme of theis book which demonstrates that although there was a critical politics of age during this period, young people had their own initiatives and strategies and grew up in all sorts of ways.

Utilizing contemporary accounts of India, China, Siam and the Levant, this study provides rich detail about these exotic lands and explores the priorities that shaped and motivated these bold envoys and chroniclers. Ames and Love offer a fascinating look at the symbiotic nature of cross-cultural interaction between France and the major trading regions of the Indian Ocean basin during the 17th century. During this period of intense French interest in the rich trade and cultures of the region, Louis XIV and his minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert in particular were concerned with encouraging French travelers, both clerical and lay, to explore and document these lands. Among the accounts included here are those of Francois Bernier, Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, and Francois Pyrard. Because these accounts reflect as much about the structures and priorities of France as they do about the cultures they describe, Ames and Love hope their analysis bridges the gap between studies on early modern France and those on the major Asiatic countries of the same period. Their findings challenge the current thinking in the study of early modern France by demonstrating that overseas expansion to Asia was of considerable importance and interest to all segments of French society. Specialists in traditional "internal" French history will find much in this study of European expansion to complement and supplement their research.

How Europeans, Africans, and Indians created the early southern landscape Britain's colonial empire in southeastern North America relied on the cultivation and maintenance of economic and political ties with the numerous powerful Indian confederacies of the region. Those ties in turn relied on British traders adapting to Indian ideas of landscape and power. In An Empire of Small Places, Robert Paulett examines this interaction over the course of the eighteenth century, drawing attention to the ways that conceptions of space competed, overlapped, and changed. He encourages us to understand the early American South as a landscape made by interactions among American Indians, European Americans, and enslaved African American laborers. / Focusing especially on the Anglo-Creek-Chickasaw route that ran from the coast through Augusta to present-day Mississippi and Tennessee, Paulett finds that the deerskin trade produced a sense of spatial and human relationships that did not easily fit into Britain's imperial ideas and thus forced the British to consciously articulate what made for a proper realm. He develops this argument in chapters about five specific kinds of places: the imagined spaces of British maps and the lived spaces of the Savannah River, the town of Augusta, traders' paths, and trading houses. In each case, the trade's practical demands privileged Indian, African, and non-elite European attitudes toward place. After the Revolution, the new United States created a different model for the Southeast that sought to establish a new system of Indian-white relationships oriented around individual neighborhoods.

Winner of the Sixteenth Century Society's Roland H. Bainton Prize for History or Theology
Paul C. H. Lim offers an insightful examination of the polemical debates about the doctrine of the Trinity in seventeenth-century England, showing that the philosophical and theological re-configuration of this doctrine had a significant impact on the politics of religion in the early modern period.
Lim's analysis of these heated polemics shows how Trinitarian God-talk became untenable in many ecclesiastical and philosophical circles, leading to the emergence of Unitarianism. He demonstrates that those who continued to uphold Trinitarian doctrine articulated their piety and theological perspectives in an increasingly secularized culture of discourse. Drawing on both unexplored manuscripts and well-known treatises of Continental and English provenance, he uncovers the complex layers of the polemic: from biblical exegesis to reception history of patristic authorities, from popular religious radicalism during the Civil War to Puritan spirituality, from Continental Socinians to English anti-Trinitarians who claimed an independent theological identity, from the notion of the Platonic captivity of primitive Christianity to that of Plato as "Moses Atticus."
Among this book's surprising findings are that Anti-Trinitarian sentiment arose in a Puritan ambience in which biblical literalism overrode rationalistic presuppositions, and that theology and philosophy were more closely connected during this period than previously thought. Mystery Unveiled fills a significant lacuna in early modern English intellectual history.

Robert Harley (1661-1724) dominated English politics in the late seventeenth century and throughout the reign of Queen Anne, and his long parliamentary career spanned years during which British political institutions underwent crucial changes. As predecessor of Sir Robert Walpole, he was in effect a prime minister before the office was created, and he administered the country at a time of major conflict within Europe. However, Harley's style of politics was characterized by secrecy and mistrust, and this tended to overshadow serious assessment of his influence and achievements. This book by Brian W. Hill is the first biography of this significant figure. A pioneer of parliamentary government after the revolution of 1688, Harley became leader of the opposition and Speaker of the House of Commons, and he went on to hold the most important positions of state. Although he moved from one intrigue to another, he was able to stay in power until he was dismissed from office in 1714 by Queen Anne over the South Seas Company affair. His achievements during this period were significant: he turned the early Tories into an effective opposition to help forge a two-party parliamentary system; he persuaded William III to accept limitation of the Crown's powers by the Act of Settlement; and, through the Treaty of Utrecht, he helped to secure peace in Europe for half a century. Hill sets Harley's career firmly within the political and social context of contemporary religion, regionalism, dynastic conflict, and factionalism. His much-needed study is an important contribution to our understanding of a major figure in a complex and exciting period of British history.

This essay collection is a retrospective analysis of the Washington administration's importance to the understanding of the modern presidency. Contemporary presidential scholarship gives little attention to the enormous impact that Washington's actions had on establishing the presidency. Most contemporary literature starts with 1933 and, although FDR's impact on the development of the modern institution of the presidency is undeniable, Washington's actions in office also established standards for practices that continue to this day.

This analysis of the Washington presidency begins with an examination of Washington's leadership and its relevance to the modern presidency. The second group of essays looks at different aspects of presidential powers and the precedents established by the Washington administration. The third section examines Washington's press coverage, looking at the origins of Washington's image and the various myths in the press as well as the president's difficult relations with his contemporary press. A thoughtful and important corrective that will be of interest to scholars, students, and researchers involved with the American presidency and its history.

This book (hardcover) is part of the TREDITION CLASSICS. It contains classical literature works from over two thousand years. Most of these titles have been out of print and off the bookstore shelves for decades. The book series is intended to preserve the cultural legacy and to promote the timeless works of classical literature. Readers of a TREDITION CLASSICS book support the mission to save many of the amazing works of world literature from oblivion. With this series, tredition intends to make thousands of international literature classics available in printed format again - worldwide.