Scholarly interest in Europe's nobilities has gathered pace over the past two decades, as the elites who exercised political and social dominance over an extended period have begun to receive adequate scholarly attention. This has been particularly evident for the early modern period of European history, when the importance and power of individual aristocrats and of the nobility as a whole were at their apogee. This collection of authoritative essays, leading national specialists examine the nobility of a particular country or region, on a systematic basis: they analyse the structure of the particular elite, and survey its political and economic activities, as well as the social and ideological basis of its own position and power.

In The Reformation of Feeling, Susan Karant-Nunn looks beyond and beneath the formal doctrinal and moral demands of the Reformation in Germany to examine the emotional tenor of the programs that the emerging creeds-revised Catholicism, Lutheranism, and Calvinism/Reformed theology-developed for their members. As revealed by the surviving sermons from this period, preaching clergy of each faith both explicitly and implicitly provided their listeners with distinct models of a mood to be cultivated. To encourage their parishioners to make an emotional investment in their faith, all three drew upon rhetorical elements that were already present in late medieval Catholicism and elevated them into confessional touchstones.
Looking at archival materials containing direct references to feeling, Karant-Nunn focuses on treatments of death and sermons on the Passion. She amplifies these sources with considerations of the decorative, liturgical, musical, and disciplinary changes that ecclesiastical leaders introduced during the period from the late fifteenth to the end of the seventeenth century. Within individual sermons, Karant-Nunn also examines topical elements-including Jews at the crucifixion, the Virgin Mary's voluminous weeping below the Cross, and struggles against competing denominations-that were intended to arouse particular kinds of sentiment. Finally, she discusses surviving testimony from the laity in order to assess at least some Christians' reception of these lessons on proper devotional feeling.
This book is exceptional in its presentation of a cultural rather than theological or behavioral study of the broader movement to remake Christianity. As Karant-Nunn conclusively demonstrates, in the eyes of the Reformation's formative personalities strict adherence to doctrine and upright demeanor did not constitute an adequate piety. The truly devout had to engage their hearts in their faith.

Christopher Storrs presents a fresh new appraisal of the reasons for the survival of Spain and its European and overseas empire under the last Spanish Habsburg, Carlos II (1665-1700). Hitherto it has been largely assumed that in the "Age of Louis XIV" Spain collapsed as a military, naval and imperial power, and only retained its empire because states which had hitherto opposed Spanish hegemony came to Carlos's aid.
However, this view seriously underestimates the efforts of Carlos II and his ministers to raise men to fight in Spain's various armies--above all in Flanders, Lombardy, and Catalonia--and to ensure that Spain continued to have galleons in the Atlantic and galleys in the Mediterranean. These commitments were expensive, so that the fiscal pressures on Carlos' subjects to fund the empire continued to be considerable. Not surprisingly, these demands added to the political tensions in a reign in which the succession problem already generated difficulties. They also put pressure on an administrative structure which revealed some weaknesses but which also proved its worth in time of need. The burden of empire was still largely carried in Spain by Castile (assisted by the silver of the Indies), but Spain's ability to hang onto empire was also helped by a greater integration of centre and periphery, and by the contribution of the non-Castilian territories, notably Aragon in Spain and Naples in Spanish Italy.
This book radically revises our understanding of the last decades of Habsburg Spain. As Storrs demonstrates, it was a state and society more clearly committed to the retention of empire - and more successful in achieving this--than historians have hitherto acknowledged.

This A-to-Z encyclopedia provides students and nonspecialists with concise, accurate, and engaging definitions and descriptions of important people and terms relating to Early Tudor England. Covering the period from 1485 to 1558, the reigns of Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Mary I, the book contains nearly 400 cross-referenced entries. Entries feature key events, movements, groups, treaties, publications, important people, and more. Along with well-known figures of the day, this book includes significant but less familiar individuals, for whom detailed information is elusive. The encyclopedia includes lists of additional readings, maps, genealogical charts, an extensive bibliography, a subject index, a list of Tudor-themed historical novels, a guide to related entries, and an annotated listing of Tudor Web sites. Illustrated by over 40 drawings and photographs, the encyclopedia also offers numerous useful appendices, including listings of European monarchs, holders of English titles of nobility, holders of major offices of state, sessions and speakers of Parliament, governors of Ireland, major battles and rebellions, 16th-century popes, and bishops of the Early Tudor Church.

This book uses amputation and prostheses to tell a new story about medicine and embodied knowledge-making in early modern Europe. It draws on the writings of craft surgeons and learned physicians to follow the heated debates that arose from changing practices of removing limbs, uncovering tense moments in which decisions to operate were made. Importantly, it teases out surgeons' ideas about the body embedded in their technical instructions. This unique study also explores the material culture of mechanical hands that amputees commissioned locksmiths, clockmakers, and other artisans to create, revealing their roles in developing a new prosthetic technology. Over two centuries of surgical and artisanal interventions emerged a growing perception, fundamental to biomedicine today, that humans could alter the body - that it was malleable. -- .

This core textbook gathers an international team of historians to present a comprehensive account of the central themes in the histories of Britain, British America, and the British Caribbean seen in Atlantic perspective. This collection of individual essays provides an accessible overview of essential themes, such as the state, empire, migration, the economy, religion, race, class, gender, politics, and slavery. This new and revised edition brings this text up to date with recent work in the field of Atlantic history and extends its scope to cover themes not treated in the first edition, notably the history of science and global history. Placing the British Atlantic world in imperial and global contexts, this book offers an indispensable survey of one of the liveliest fields of current historical enquiry. This text is a primary resource for both undergraduate and postgraduate students of History, particularly those taking modules on Early Modern British History, Colonial American History, Early American History, Caribbean History, Atlantic History and World History. Together, the essays also provide a useful starting point for researchers in British, American, imperial and Atlantic history.

The first book to examine Queen Elizabeth I as a "learned prince," "Learned Queen" reveals a rather startling phenomenon: Elizabeth's educated status was crucial to England's burgeoning role as an international power. Examining Elizabeth's own demonstrations of erudition alongside literary works of such political luminaries as Sir Philip Sidney and Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, this book reveals how poetry, foreign relations, and intellectual culture are far more integrated than we have hitherto imagined. From these connections emerges a methodology that places Elizabethan political culture and poetry fully on the transnational stage.

This is the first scholarly study of the political and economic relationship between Louis XIV and the parlements of France, the Parlement of Paris and all the provincial tribunals. The author explains how the king managed to impose strict political discipline for which this reign, and only this reign, is known. Hurt shows that the king built upon that discipline to extract large sums of money from the judges in the parlements, thus damaging their economic interests. When the king died in 1715, the regent, Philippe d'Orleans, after a brief attempt to befriend the parlements through compromise, resorted to the authoritarian methods of Louis XIV and perpetuated the Sun King's political and economic legacy. This study calls into question current revisionist understanding of Louis XIV and insists that absolute government had a harsh reality at its core. Based upon extensive archival research, this remarkable book will be of interest to all students of the history of early modern France and the monarchies of Europe. -- .

Recent debate over the English Reformation has turned around how Catholic the nation was before the Reformation. Most scholars now believe that there was little popular support for the change in religion imposed by Henry VIII. And yet, by the end of Elizabeth's reign England was clearly Protestant. It had abandoned much of its late Medieval culture and replaced it with a new formulation. The book explores how the English, over three generations, adapted to the religious changes and, in the process, radically reconstructed their culture.

Using personal histories, the author explores how individuals and the institutions in which they lived and worked, such as families, universities, towns, guilds, and Inns of Court, refashioned themselves in the face of the rapid social, ideological, political and economic changes brought about by the Reformation. Tracing these responses across three generations, the author emphasizes the way generational interaction and self interest interrelated to adapt to new circumstances, creating, by the late sixteenth century, a multi-theological culture that exalted nationalism and valued the individual conscience.

The first expansive study of how when the Popish Plot of 1678 came to light, fears of an Irish Catholic rebellion amongst Ireland's uneasy Protestant elite, who dominated over the Catholic majority population, were manipulated in England in an attempt to block the Catholic Duke of York from succeeding to the throne.

The political, social, and economic problems of southern Africa cannot be resolved until nations of this critical region effect educational reform. But this process requires more than change in the educational system; it involves the thrust for social transformation in national institutions. This unique study addresses key issues relative to both educational reform and social change in southern Africa. Topics discussed include the need for educational reform; approaches to educational reform; and the results of such reform on the individual and society. A bibliography and an index complete the text.

The School of Salamanca in the Affairs of the Indies explores the significance of Salamancans, such as Vitoria and Soto, and related thinkers, such as Las Casas and Sepulveda, in the formation of the early modern political order. It also analyses early modern understandings of political order, with a focus both on the decline of the medieval universal world through the independence and secularization of political community and the establishment of continuous and imbalanced relations between various European and non-European political communities. Through its investigation, this book highlights how Salamancans and related thinkers clearly distinguished their understandings of political order from medieval thought, and did so in a different way to contemporary and later thinkers, such as Machiavelli, Luther, Bodin, and Grotius, particularly with regards to the Indies, "barbarian" worlds. It also reveals the strong contribution of the School of Salamanca in early modern political thought, both internally and externally. Salamancans imposed moral restrictions against "interior barbarism," that is, power beyond law, and included "exterior barbarism," that is, "barbarian" societies, in the common political order. Situating the School of Salamanca in the mainstream history of European political thought, The School of Salamanca in the Affairs of the Indies is ideal for academics and postgraduate students of intellectual history and of Spanish colonial expansion.

This is a fresh look at the impact of the English Reformation at parish level. It provides a perceptive exploration of the role of the Catholic priesthood in the church and in the life of the community. Using a wide range of contemporary sources, Dr Marshall demonstrates how the practical consequences of the Reformation undermined the fragile modus vivendi that had sustained the late medieval system.

For German townsmen, life during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was characterized by a culture of arms, with urban citizenry representing the armed power of the state. This book investigates how men were socialized to the martial ethic from all sides, and how masculine identity was confirmed with blades and guns.

This book provides a uniquely detailed case study of the origins of millenarianism within the vast opera of one of its earliest and most influential Calvinist exponents: the Herborn encyclopedist Johann Heinrich Alsted (1588-1638). The young Alsted, it emerges, looked forward not to the millennium of Apocalypse 20 but to a brief, final period of enhanced illumination described in a poorly understood central European tradition of astrological, alchemical, spiritualist, and generally occult' prophetic speculation. It was the disasters following the Bohemian Revolt of 1618 which forced Alsted to recast these expectations as the more exclusively scriptural expectation of a literal millennium; and the material for this revision was found in a protracted dispute over the millennium between senior theologians in Herborn and Heidelberg and a little-known work on the conversion of the Jews by one of the figures most probably behind the composition of the Rosicrucian manifestos. Based on study of the full range of Alsted's works, his diverse sources, and widely dispersed manuscript material, the result is the first English book on 17th-century continental millenarianism and the first monograph in any language exclusively devoted to the origins of the doctrine within mainstream Protestantism.

This edited collection explores the axis where monstrosity and borderlands meet to reflect the tensions, apprehensions, and excitement over the radical changes of the early modern era. The book investigates the monstrous as it acts in liminal spaces in the Renaissance and the era of Enlightenment. Zones of interaction include chronological change - from the early New World encounters through the seventeenth century - and cultural and scientific changes, in the margins between national boundaries, and also cultural and intellectual boundaries.

"Looking East" explores early modern English attitudes toward the Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth century. To a nation just arriving on the international scene, the Ottoman Empire was at once the great enemy and scourge of Christendom, and at the same time the fabulously wealthy and magnificent court from which the sultan ruled over three continents with his great and powerful army. By taking the imaginative, literary and poetic writing about the Ottoman Turks and putting it alongside contemporary historical documents, the book shows that fascination with the Ottoman Empire shaped how the English thought about and represented their own place within the world as a nation with increasing imperial ambitions of its own.

What kind of political representation existed in the Ancien Regime? Which social sectors were given a voice, and how were they represented in the institutions? These are some of the issues addressed by the authors of this book from different institutional angles (monarchies and republics; parliaments and municipalities), from various European territories and finally from a connected and comparative perspective. The aim is twofold: analyse the different mechanisms of political representation before Liberalism, their strengths and limitations; value the processes of oligarchisation and the possible mismatch between a libertarian model and a reality which was far from its idealised image.

The current debate about the best methods of European organization - central or regional - is influenced by an awareness of regional identity, which offers an alternative to the rigidities of organization by nation-state. Yet where does the sense of regionalism come from? What are the distinctive factors that transform a geographical area into a particular 'region'? Tom Scott addresses these questions in this study of one apparently 'natural' region - the Upper Rhine - between 1450 and 1600. This region has been divided between three countries and so historically marginalized, yet Dr Scott is able to trace the existence of a sense of historical regional identity cutting across national frontiers, founded on common economic interests. But that identity was always contingent and precarious, neither 'natural' nor immutable.

This comprehensive study traces the history of over forty royal free towns from the sixteenth century to 1848 in the territories of what today are Hungary, Slovakia, and Romania. Szelenyi argues that these towns have been a neglected feature of national meta-narratives in Eastern Europe because their dwellers were often German speakers. He calls for a serious reevaluation of urban development in Eastern Europe and for a new meta-narrative that focuses on the region through the lenses of the numerous ethnic diasporas.

Art history has enriched the study of material culture as a scholarly field. This interdisciplinary volume enhances this literature through the contributors' engagement with gender as the conceptual locus of analysis in terms of femininity, masculinity, and the spaces in between. Collectively, these essays by art historians and museum professionals argue for a more complex understanding of the relationship between objects and subjects in gendered terms. The objects under consideration range from the quotidian to the exotic, including beds, guns, fans, needle paintings, prints, drawings, mantillas, almanacs, reticules, silver punch bowls, and collage. These material goods may have been intended to enforce and affirm gendered norms, however as the essays demonstrate, their use by subjects frequently put normative formations of gender into question, revealing the impossibility of permanently fixing gender in relation to material goods, concepts, or bodies. This book will appeal to art historians, museum professionals, women's and gender studies specialists, students, and all those interested in the history of objects in everyday life.