The Reformation has traditionally been explained in terms of theology, the corruption of the church and the role of princes. R.W. Scribner, while not denying the importance of these, shifts the context of study of the German Reformation to an examination of popular beliefs and behaviour, and of the reactions of local authorities to the problems and opportunities for social as well as religious reform. This book brings together a coherent body of work that has appeared since 1975, including two entirely new essays and two previously published only in German.

Although previous studies have portrayed Mary Sidney as a demure, retiring woman, Hannay, basing her work on primary sources (account books, legal documents, diaries, family letters), has discovered that she was brilliant, learned, witty, articulate, and adept at self-presentation. Married to the wealthy Earl of Pembroke, she ruled over her little court at Wilton just as Elizabeth ruled in London. Her wisdom, poetry, and scholarship were extravagantly praised by those who sought to gain her favour. When Philip, her older brother, died fighting for the Protestant cause, she moved to London to take up his literary activities, publishing his writings, writing and translating works of which he would have approved, assuming his role as literary patron and supporting the Protestant cause for which he died. All the literary work for which she is celebrated took place between her return to London in 1588 and her husband's death in 1601. While previous biographers contended that her widowhood was quiet and uneventful, Hannay shows, via court cases, that her final years were colourful indeed, as, administering the properties she retained, she contended with jewel thieves, pirates, and murderers, finally bringing them to trial after complex legal and political manoeuvres.

What role did sexual assault play in the conquest of America? How did American attitudes toward female sexuality evolve, and how was sexuality regulated in the early Republic?

Sex and sexuality have always been the subject of much attention, both scholarly and popular. Yet, accounts of the early years of the United States tend to overlook the importance of their influence on the shaping of American culture. Sex and Sexuality in Early America addresses this neglected topic with original research covering a wide spectrum, from sexual behavior to sexual perceptions and imagery. Focusing on the period between the initial contact of Europeans and Native Americans up to 1800, the essays encompass all of colonial North America, including the Caribbean and Spanish territories.

Challenging previous assumptions, these essays address such topics as rape as a tool of conquest; perceptions and responses to Native American sexuality; fornication, bastardy, celibacy, and religion in colonial New England; gendered speech in captivity narratives; representations of masculinity in eighteenth- century seduction tales, the sexual cosmos of a southern planter, and sexual transgression and madness in early American fiction. The contributors include Stephanie Wood, Gordon Sayre, Steven Neuwirth, Else L. Hambleton, Erik R. Seeman, Richard Godbeer, Trevor Burnard, Natalie A. Zacek, Wayne Bodle, Heather Smyth, Rodney Hessinger, and Karen A. Weyler.

This book deals with a provincial town attending to its day-to-day business against the backdrop of an exacting war fought far afield against the Habsburgs (1683-99). The dynamics of long-term economic growth were temporarily disturbed by the wartime economy while realignment in center-periphery relations affected the local power structure and practices of status management. Meanwhile, the local elite continued to dominate public life, hence the lives of commoners. This study opens a window onto this world through a close examination of the court records of the town.

For all that has been written about Renaissance Florence we know relatively little about its musical life, its religious life, and the aspirations of its average citizens. This book contributes significantly to all understanding of all of these by documenting and interpreting the corporate patronage of an important Florentine musical repertory over a period of some 200 years. From the late thirteenth to the early sixteenth centuries at least twelve lay confraternities sponsored a widespread musical activity involving a specialized network of singers and instrumentalists. The meticulous records kept by these companies reveal a wealth of information about the musicians' conditions and patterns of activity, the central role of music in the companies' vernacular liturgy (especially as conditioned by bequests), and vital performance practice issues such as the role of instruments in vocal performance, the shift from monophonic to polyphonic practice, and the interaction of written and unwritten musical traditions. Because the companies were, in many respects, both a microcosm and characteristic manifestation of this remarkable Renaissance city, the author also seeks to explain how mendicant spirituality, guild society, and devotional images and imagination provide the essential context for understanding the function and significance of laudesi practice and repertoire. This book well be welcomed not only by musicologists, but by Italianists and late medieval and early modern scholars in general.

Conceived as another chapter in the European history of religions (Europāische Religionsgeschichte), this book deals with the intense dynamics of the overlapping political, ethnic, and denominational constellations in Reformation and post-Reformation Transylvania. Navigating along multiple narrative tracks, and attempting to treat the religious history of an entire region - over a limited time period - in a differentiated, polyfocal way, the book represents a departure from the master narratives of any singularly oriented religious history. At the same time, the present work seeks to contribute to laying the groundwork at the micro- and meso-contextual level of East-Central European confessionalization processes, and to developing interpretive models for these processes in the region.

From treasure-seekers and the lovesick to quacks and charlatans, from true believers in magic to those eager to exploit them, the people of early modern Saragossa and their wealth of beliefs and customs are brought vividly to life within these pages. Drawing on the graphic and revealing evidence recorded by the different courts in this Spanish city during the 16th and 17th centuries, Tausiet captures the spirit of an age when religious faith vied for people's hearts and minds with centuries-old beliefs in witchcraft and superstition. Magic and religion might be seen as opposing forces but here are shown to be opposite sides of the same coin, as reflected in the book's subtitle, a powerful incantatory phrase combining that most magical of magic words and the essential quality of God Almighty.

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.

This book provides an original study of the sizeable Portuguese community in Ayutthaya, the chief river-state in Siam, during a period of apparent decline (1640-1720). Portuguese populations were displaced from their chief settlements like Melaka and Makassar, and attracted to the river-states of mainland South-East Asia by a protective model of kingship, hopes of international trade and the opportunity to harvest souls. A variety of sources will be used to shed light on the fortunes and make-up of this displaced, mixed-race 'tribe', which was largely independent of the matrices of Portuguese colonial power, and fared poorly alongside other foreign communities in this remarkably open, dynamic environment. Circumstances changed for the better after the National Revolution of 1688, when Portuguese started to fill many of the jobs at court and in commerce previously occupied by Frenchmen and northern Europeans.

This book considers the ideological development of English Catholicism in the sixteenth century, from the complementary perspectives of history, theology, and literature. Wooding shows that Catholicism in this period was neither a defunct tradition, nor one merely reacting to Protestantism, but a vigorous intellectual movement responding to the reformist impulse of the age. Her study makes an important contribution to the intellectual history of the Reformation.

William Penn established Pennsylvania in 1682 as a "holy experiment" in which Europeans and Indians could live together in harmony. In this book, historian Kevin Kenny explains how this Peaceable Kingdom--benevolent, Quaker, pacifist--gradually disintegrated in the eighteenth century, with disastrous consequences for Native Americans.
Kenny recounts how rapacious frontier settlers, most of them of Ulster extraction, began to encroach on Indian land as squatters, while William Penn's sons cast off their father's Quaker heritage and turned instead to fraud, intimidation, and eventually violence during the French and Indian War. In 1763, a group of frontier settlers known as the Paxton Boys exterminated the last twenty Conestogas, descendants of Indians who had lived peacefully since the 1690s on land donated by William Penn near Lancaster. Invoking the principle of "right of conquest," the Paxton Boys claimed after the massacres that the Conestogas' land was rightfully theirs. They set out for Philadelphia, threatening to sack the city unless their grievances were met. A delegation led by Benjamin Franklin met them and what followed was a war of words, with Quakers doing battle against Anglican and Presbyterian champions of the Paxton Boys. The killers were never prosecuted and the Pennsylvania frontier descended into anarchy in the late 1760s, with Indians the principal victims. The new order heralded by the Conestoga massacres was consummated during the American Revolution with the destruction of the Iroquois confederacy. At the end of the Revolutionary War, the United States confiscated the lands of Britain's Indian allies, basing its claim on the principle of "right of conquest."
Based on extensive research in eighteenth-century primary sources, this engaging history offers an eye-opening look at how colonists--at first, the backwoods Paxton Boys but later the U.S. government--expropriated Native American lands, ending forever the dream of colonists and Indians living together in peace.

"Art and War in Japan and its Empire: 1931-1960" is an anthology that investigates the impact of the Fifteen-Year War (1931-1945) on artistic practices and brings together twenty scholars including art historians, historians, and museum curators from the United States, Canada, France, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan. This will be the first art-historical anthology that examines responses to the war within and outside Japan in the wartime and postwar period. The anthology will scrutinize official and unofficial war artists who recorded, propagated, or resented the war; explore the unprecedented transnationality of artistic activity under Japan s colonial expansion; and consider the role of today s museum institutions in remembering the war through art. Contributors include: Asato Ikeda, Aya Lousa McDonald, Ming Tiampo, Akihisa Kawata, Mikiko Hirayama, Mayu Tsuruya, Michael Lucken, Bert Winther-Tamaki, Mark H. Sandler, Maki Kaneko, Kendall Brown, Reita Hirase, Gennifer Weisenfeld, Kari Shepherdson-Scott, Aida-Yuen Wong, Hyeshin Kim, Laura Hein, and Julia Adeney Thomas.

In Poetry and Censorship Jennifer Helm offers insight into motives and strategies of Counter-Reformation censorship of poetry in Italy. Materials of Roman censorial authorities reveal why the control of poetry and of its reception was crucial to Counter-Reformation cultural politics. Censorship of poetry should enable the church to influence human inner life that ---from thought and belief to fantasy and feeling--- was evolving considerably at that time. The control of poetic genres and modes of writing played an important part here. Yet, to what extent censorship could affect poetic creation emerges from a manuscript of the Venetian poet Domenico Venier. The materials suggest the impact of Counter-Reformation censorship on poetry began earlier and was more extensive than has yet been propagated.

Although the Spanish Inquisition looms large in many conceptions of the early modern Hispanic world, relatively few studies have been made of the Spanish state and Inquisition's approach to book censorship in the seventeenth century. Merging archival and rare book research with a case study of the fiction of Baltasar Gracian, this book argues that privileged authors, like the Jesuit Gracian, circumvented publication strictures that were meant to ensure that printed materials conformed to the standards of Catholicism and supported the goals of the absolute monarchy. In contrast to some elite authors who composed readily transparent critiques of authorities and encountered difficulties with the state and Inquisition, others, like Gracian, made their criticisms covertly in complicated texts like El Criticon.

LONGLISTED FOR THE HISTORICAL WRITERS' ASSOCIATION NON-FICTION CROWN A SUNDAY TIMES NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR 'Timely ... a long and engrossing survey of the library' FT 'A sweeping, absorbing history, deeply researched' Richard Ovenden, author of Burning the Books Famed across the known world, jealously guarded by private collectors, built up over centuries, destroyed in a single day, ornamented with gold leaf and frescoes or filled with bean bags and children's drawings - the history of the library is rich, varied and stuffed full of incident. In this, the first major history of its kind, Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen explore the contested and dramatic history of the library, from the famous collections of the ancient world to the embattled public resources we cherish today. Along the way, they introduce us to the antiquarians and philanthropists who shaped the world's great collections, trace the rise and fall of fashions and tastes, and reveal the high crimes and misdemeanours committed in pursuit of rare and valuable manuscripts.

This volume deals with the intellectual Huguenot Refuge (ca 1680-1780), discussing its philosophical, theological, historical, and literary aspects in European context. It uses Berlin as its regional point of departure: In the French-Protestant community of Berlin, the erudites rapidly established networks which pursued a very wide range of interest, communicating with every Protestant scholar who might contribute to the dissemination of Enlightened thought. The first part of the book, therefore, introduces the biggest and most complex centre of the "Refuge" in Germany. Whereas the second and third part examine different fields of knowledge, the fourth focusses on the topic of dissemination. All contributions present new material-be it on 'Huguenot' hermeneutics, journalism, history, or on the relationship between Berlin and the United Provinces. Contributors include: Lutz Danneberg, Joris van Eijnatten, Herbert Jaumann, John Christian Laursen, Fabrizio Lomonaco, Martin Mulsow, Fiammetta Palladini, Sandra Pott, and Annett Volmer.

Drawing on innovative research in the rapidly growing field of Mediterranean studies, this groundbreaking collection explores the key roles that Mediterranean queens played as wives, as mothers, and above all as political actors. Taken together, they form a varied and comprehensive account of the ways in which these royal women negotiated their positions within the context of the court, how they responded to widowhood and other challenging circumstances, and reactions to queens who exercised political power in ways considered to be beyond their accepted roles. Ranging from Byzantine empresses to the consorts of Moroccan sultans to queens regnant and consort in both the Italian and Iberian peninsulas, these remarkable studies offer a bracing new perspective on the concepts and practice of queenship more generally in the medieval and Early Modern eras.

The original essays in Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature mean to provoke rather than reassure, to challenge rather than codify. Instead of summarizing existing knowledge scholars working in the field aim at opening fresh discussion; instead of emphasizing settled consensus they direct their readers to areas of enlivened and unresolved debate.
The deepest periodic division in English literary history has been between the Medieval and the Early Modern, not least because the cultural investments in maintaining that division are exceptionally powerful. Narratives of national and religious identity and freedom; of individual liberties; of the history of education and scholarship; of reading or the history of the book; of the very possibility of persuasive historical consciousness itself: each of these narratives (and more) is motivated by positing a powerful break around 1500.
None of the claims for a profound historical and cultural break at the turn of the fifteenth into the sixteenth centuries is negligible. The very habit of working within those periodic bounds (either Medieval or Early Modern) tends, however, simultaneously to affirm and to ignore the rupture. It affirms the rupture by staying within standard periodic bounds, but it ignores it by never examining the rupture itself. The moment of profound change is either, for medievalists, just over an unexplored horizon; or, for Early Modernists, a zero point behind which more penetrating examination is unnecessary. That situation is now rapidly changing. Scholars are building bridges that link previously insular areas. Both periods are starting to look different in dialogue with each other.
The change underway has yet to find collected voices behind it. Cultural Reformations volume aims to provide those voices. It will give focus, authority, and drive to a new area.

The volume Planning for Death: Wills and Death-Related Property Arrangements in Europe, 1200-1600 analyses death-related property transfers in several European regions (England, Poland, Italy, South Tirol, and Sweden). Laws and customary practice provided a legal framework for all post-mortem property devolution. However, personal preference and varied succession strategies meant that individuals could plan for death by various legal means. These individual legal acts could include matrimonial property arrangements (marriage contracts, morning gifts) and legal means of altering heirship by subtracting or adding heirs. Wills and testamentary practice are given special attention, while the volume also discusses the timing of the legal acts, suggesting that while some people made careful and timely arrangements, others only reacted to sudden events. Contributors are Christian Hagen, R.H. Helmholz, Mia Korpiola, Anu Lahtinen, Marko Lamberg, Margareth Lanzinger, Janine Maegraith, Federica Mase, Anthony Musson, Tuula Rantala, Elsa Trolle OEnnerfors, and Jakub Wysmulek.