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The Reformation in Germany" provides readers with a strong narrative overview of the most recent work on this topic. It addresses the central concerns of Reformation historiography as well as providing a distinct interpretation of the movement.

The book examines the spread and reception of the evangelical movement, the historical dynamic created by the fusion of religious ideas and the social context, the religious imagination of the common man and utopian visions of reform, and the relationship between political culture and religious change. The narrative goes on to consider the long-term legacy of the Reformation movement in Germany. The book provides readers with a fresh perspective on the movement, one which seeks to understand its rise and evolution as a historical process in constant dialogue with the cultural and political context of the age.

Theatre and Dictatorship in the Luso-Hispanic World explores the discourses that have linked theatrical performance and prevailing dictatorial regimes across Spain, Portugal and their former colonies. These are divided into three different approaches to theatre itself - as cultural practice, as performance, and as textual artifact - addressing topics including obedience, resistance, authoritarian policies, theatre business, exile, violence, memory, trauma, nationalism, and postcolonialism. This book draws together a diverse range of methodological approaches to foreground the effects and constraints of dictatorship on theatrical expression and how theatre responds to these impositions.

Stressing the relationship between tsarism's service-state ethos & its utilization of subjects, this study argues that economic & political, rather than judicial or penological, factors primarily conditioned Siberian exile's growth & development.

Who preceded whom? Who wore what? Which form of address should one use? One of the most striking aspects of the early modern period is the crucial significance that contemporaries ascribed to such questions. In this hierarchical world, status symbols did not simply mirror a pre-defined social and political order; rather, they operated as a key tool for defining and redefining identities, relations, and power. Centuries later, scholars face the twofold challenge of evaluating status interaction in an era where its open pursuit is no longer as widespread and legitimate, and of deciphering its highly sophisticated and often implicit codes. Status Interaction during the Reign of Louis XIV addresses this challenge by investigating status interaction - in dress as in address, in high ceremony and in everyday life - at one of its most important historical arenas: aristocratic society at the time of Louis XIV. By recovering actual practices on the ground based on a wide array of printed and manuscript sources, it transcends the simplistic view of a court revolving around the Sun King and reveals instead the multiple perspectives of contesting actors, stakes, and strategies. Demonstrating the wide-ranging implications of the phenomenon, macro-political as well as micro-political, this study provides a novel framework for understanding early modern action and agency.

Looks at the political and social history of the Gold Coast in West Africa from the early 16th century to the second half of the 18th. The book examines how political entities in Nzema were structured territorially, as well as the formation of ruling groups and aspects of their political, economic, and military actions.

This book explains how changing understandings of mind and body in the period 1450-2000 transformed war, military culture, and military theory. This book includes ground-breaking macro study of the experience and culture of war. It uses previously neglected sources, particularly memoirs and autobiographies of pre-1900 soldiers and synthesizes personal memoirs of common soldiers, theoretical military guidebooks, religious conversion narratives, philosophical treatises and visual art.For millennia, war was viewed as a supreme test. In the period 1750-1850 war became much more than a test: it became a secular revelation. This new understanding of war as revelation completely transformed Western war culture, revolutionizing politics, the personal experience of war, the status of common soldiers, and the tenets of military theory.

A different take on a popular topic, this book uncovers the exciting history of the jewels and jewellery worn and used by the later medieval and Tudor Queens of England from Margaret of Anjou to Katherine Parr. Enabling general readers to see how jewellery was used by Queens to assert their power and influence in their husband's courts. Dr Tallis is an experienced writer of non-fiction to a public audience; this book is accessibly written for an educated popular audience and undergraduate students. Explores the lives of ten queen consorts across 100 years, providing students and general readers alike with a long duree view into Queenship, women's history and material culture.

Armed with pistols and wearing jackboots, Bishop Henry Compton rode out in 1688 against his King but in defence of the Church of England and its bishops. His actions are a dramatic but telling indication of what was at stake for bishops in early modern England and Compton's action at the height of the Restoration was the culmination of more than a century and a half of religious controversy that engulfed bishops. Bishops were among the most important instruments of royal, religious, national and local authority in seventeenth-century England. While their actions and ideas trickled down to the lower strata of the population, poor opinions of bishops filtered back up, finding expression in public forums, printed pamphlets and more subversive forms including scurrilous verse and mocking illustrations. "Bishops and Power in Early Modern England" explores the role and involvement of bishops at the centre of both government and belief in early modern England. It probes the controversial actions and ideas which sparked parliamentary agitation against them, demands for religious reform, and even war. "Bishops and Power in Early Modern England" examines arguments challenging episcopal authority and the counter-arguments which stressed the necessity of bishops in England and their status as useful and godly ministers. The book argues that episcopal writers constructed an identity as reformed agents of church authority. Charting the development of this identity over a hundred and fifty years, from the Reformation to the Restoration, this book traces the history of early modern England from an original and highly significant perspective. This book engages with many aspects of the social, political and religious history of early modern England and will therefore be key reading for undergraduates and postgraduates, and researchers working in the early modern field, and anyone who has an interest in this period of history.

This study reexamines the invention of the emblem book and discusses the novel textual and pictorial means that applied to the task of transmitting knowledge. It offers a fresh analysis of Alciato's Emblematum liber, focusing on his poetics of the emblem, and on how he actually construed emblems. It demonstrates that the "father of emblematics" had vernacular forebears, most importantly Johann von Schwarzenberg who composed two illustrated emblem books between 1510 and 1520. The study sheds light on the early development of the Latin emblem book 1531-1610, with special emphasis on the invention of the emblematic commentary, on natural history, and on advanced methods of conveying emblematic knowledge, from Junius to Vaenius.

Through twelve probing essays from leading scholars in the field, this book analyzes the consequences of the accession of James I in 1603 for English and British history, politics, literature and culture. Questioning the extent to which 1603 marked a radical break with the past, the book explores the Scottish and Welsh--as well as the wider European and colonial--contexts to this crucial date in history.

Examining women's agency in the past has taken on new urgency in the current moment of resurgent patriarchy, Women's Marches, and the global #MeToo movement. The essays in this collection consider women's agency in the Renaissance and early modern period, an era that also saw both increasing patriarchal constraints and new forms of women's actions and activism. They address a capacious set of questions about how women, from their teenage years through older adulthood, asserted agency through social practices, speech acts, legal disputes, writing, viewing and exchanging images, travel, and community building. Despite family and social pressures, the actions of girls and women could shape their lives and challenge male-dominated institutions. This volume includes thirteen essays by scholars from various disciplines, which analyze people, texts, objects, and images from many different parts of Europe, as well as things and people that crossed the Atlantic and the Pacific.

This volume serves as an introduction to a rich and as yet under-explored period in the history of women 's ideas. The volume provides a partial insight into the richness and complexity of women 's political ideas in the centuries prior to the French Revolution. The essays in this collection examine women 's political writings with particular reference to the themes of virtue (especially the virtue of phronesis or prudence), liberty, and toleration.

In the seventeenth century, even as the Spanish Habsburg monarchy entered its irreversible decline, the capital of its most important overseas territory was flourishing. Nexus of both Atlantic and Pacific trade routes and home to an ethnically diverse population, Mexico City produced a distinctive Baroque culture that combined local and European influences. In this context, the American-born descendants of European immigrants--or creoles, as they called themselves--began to envision a new society beyond the terms of Spanish imperialism, and the writings of the Mexican polymath Carlos de Siguenza y Gongora (1645-1700) were instrumental in this process. Mathematician, antiquarian, poet, and secular priest, Siguenza authored works on such topics as the 1680 comet, the defense of New Spain, pre-Columbian history, and the massive 1692 Mexico City riot. He wrote all of these, in his words, "out of love for my "patria.""Through readings of Siguenza y Gongora's diverse works, "Baroque Sovereignty" locates the colonial Baroque at the crossroads of a conflicted Spanish imperial rule and the political imaginary of an emergent local elite. Arguing that Spanish imperialism was founded on an ideal of Christian conversion no longer applicable at the end of the seventeenth century, More discovers in Siguenza y Gongora's works an alternative basis for local governance. The creole archive, understood as both the collection of local artifacts and their interpretation, solved the intractable problem of Spanish imperial sovereignty by establishing a material genealogy and authority for New Spain's creole elite. In an analysis that contributes substantially to early modern colonial studies and theories of memory and knowledge, More posits the centrality of the creole archive for understanding how a local political imaginary emerged from the ruins of Spanish imperialism.

Though known today largely for dating the creation of the world to 400BC, James Ussher (1581-1656) was an important scholar and ecclesiastical leader in the seventeenth century. As Professor of Theology at Trinity College Dublin, and Archbishop of Armagh from 1625, he shaped the newly protestant Church of Ireland. Tracing its roots back to St. Patrick, he gave it a sense of Irish identity and provided a theology which was strongly Calvinist and fiercely anti-Catholic. In exile in England in the 1640s he advised both king and parliament, trying to heal the ever-widening rift by devising a compromise over church government. Forced finally to choose sides by the outbreak of civil was in 1642, Ussher opted for the royalists, but found it difficult to combine his loyalty to Charles with his detestation of Catholicism.
A meticulous scholar and an extensive researcher, Ussher had a breathtaking command of languages and disciplines--"learned to a miracle" according to one of his friends. He worked on a series of problems: the early history of bishops, the origins of Christianity in Ireland and Britain, and the implications of double predestination, making advances which were to prove of lasting significance. Tracing the interconnections between this scholarship and his wider ecclesiastical and political interests, Alan Ford throws new light on the character and attitudes of a seminal figure in the history of Irish Protestantism.

This second in a monumental two-volume set on the 1777 campaign of the American Revolution follows the saga from Cornwallis' triumphal march of his British and Hessian troops into Philadelphia in late September to Washington's movement of the weary Continental forces to camp at Valley Forge in December. Based on soldiers' and civilians' vivid accounts - many uncovered for the first time from private collections - the story of the compelling fight for independence reaches its most desperate moments. Defeated at Brandywine and out-manoeuvred near Valley Forge, the Continental forces were worn out and ill equipped. Yet on October 4, Washington would embark on his first major offensive of the war - a surprise attack at dawn on Howe's main camp at Germantown. Again defeated, though narrowly this time, the Continentals gained valuable experience and new confidence in the possibility of victory. The seige of the Delaware River forts - one of the bloodiest and prolonged battles of the war - ended with British success in mid-November, but still Howe failed to end the war. In his last American offensive before his resignation took effect, Howe tried unsuccessfully to draw Washington from the fortified hills of Whitemarsh. Now, as the Continental forces moved to Valley Forge for the winter, they would have to face their greatest challenge - survival.

View the Table of Contents. Read the Introduction.

Winner, The New York Public Library, Best of Reference Award, 2002

"Here is a fascinating chronological history of New York City from 1524-2001, looking at the people, building, instiutions, political events, music and businesses that helped shape the city."
--"Booklist"

"The entries are well written and cover a broad range of topics, including political, social, and cultural, and the reader often cannot help but utter, 'I didn't know that.'"
--"ARBA online"

"[Kroessler] does a fine job of chronicling the city's past, incorporating both little-known, flash-in-the-pan nuggest as well as far-reaching, recurring themes."
--"Queens Chronicle"

If any city deserves a complete chronology, it is surely New York. New York, Year by Year is a cornucopia of the familiar and the forgotten, the historic and the ephemeral, the heroic and the banal. In this handy reference work, Jeffrey A. Kroessler takes us from Verrazano's arrival in 1524 into the new millennium, highlighting the strikes and strikeouts, tunnels and towers, personalities and parades which not only made history in New York, but also proved to be defining moments for the nation.

New York, Year by Year features events such as Mark Twain's first lecture at Cooper Union, and the letter he later wrote when the Brooklyn Public Library tried to restrict access to "Huckleberry Finn," In contrast, we are reminded of the publication in the 1950s of "Eloise, A Book for Precocious Grown-Ups," Kay Thompson's fanciful tale of a little girl's adventures in the Plaza Hotel, the appearance of the Beat Generation, and the flight (literally) of the Dodgers and Giants toCalifornia. New York, Year by Year chronicles the opening of Shea Stadium in April 1964 and the performance by the Beatles there that August. The Sixties also saw the opening of "The Fantastiks," which is still running on Sullivan Street, and the closing of Steeplechase, the last of the great amusement parks at Coney Island. And this chronology makes sure we don't forget when Kitty Genovese was murdered in Kew Gardens and her cries for help were left unanswered because her neighbors "didn't want to get involved." Kroessler leads us on a tour of the city from its first settlers until the November 2001 election of a new mayor for the new millennium.

From the colonial era and the Revolution through the Gilded Age and the Roaring Twenties, Kroessler has compiled a record of cultural, economic, political, and social events. Some are of transient importance, others of lasting significance, but all illuminate the city's fascinating history.

In the first ever book on the Agreements of the People, the essays explore the origins, impact and legacy of the attempt to settle the nation by a written constitution at the height of the English Revolution. The volume sheds new light on the Levellers, the army, the nature of civil war radicalism and the fragmentation of the Parliamentarian cause.

Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc (1580-1637) was, during his lifetime, one of Europe's most famous men. A friend of Pope Urban VIII and Galileo, of Peter-Paul Rubens and Hugo Grotius, of Tommaso Campanella and Marin Mersenne, Peiresc played an important role in the intellectual culture of his time. This book is the first study in English of this extraordinary man, as well as a vivid portrait of his whole circle. Looking through the lens of Peiresc's life, Peter N. Miller brings into focus the early-seventeenth-century world of learning-its people, places, and ideas. Drawing on the extensive Peiresc archive (more than 50,000 pieces of paper), Miller brilliantly evokes the lives of antiquaries, philosophers, theologians, and politicians of Peiresc's day, only some of whom remain known today. He explores the age in which Peiresc's toleration and sociability, his political action and cosmopolitanism, and his serious scholarship without dogmatism were identified as a set of virtues and practices by which to live. Peiresc's notion of scholarship as a moral exercise, the sweep of his interests, and the cross-Continental reach of his intellectual life show with new clarity what it meant to be a man of learning during the decades around 1600.

The rise of civilized conduct and behaviour has long been seen as one of the major factors in the transformation from medieval to modern society. Thinkers and historians alike argue that violence progressively declined as men learned to control their emotions. The feud is a phenomenon associated with backward societies, and in the West duelling codified behaviour and channelled aggression into ritualised combats that satisfied honour without the shedding of blood. French manners and codes of civility laid the foundations of civilized Western values. But as this original work of archival research shows we continue to romanticize violence in the era of the swashbuckling swordsman. In France, thousands of men died in duels in which the rules of the game were regularly flouted. Many duels were in fact mini-battles and must be seen not as a replacement of the blood feud, but as a continuation of vengeance-taking in a much bloodier form. This book outlines the nature of feuding in France and its intensification in the wake of the Protestant Reformation, civil war and dynastic weakness, and considers the solutions proposed by thinkers from Montaigne to Hobbes. The creation of the largest standing army in Europe since the Romans was one such solution, but the militarization of society, a model adopted throughout Europe, reveals the darker side of the civilizing process.

The first English hospitals appeared soon after the Norman Conquest. By the year 1300 they numbered over 500, caring for the sick and needy at every level of society - from the gentry and clergy to pilgrims, travellers, beggars and lepers. Excluded from towns, but placed by main highways where they could gather alms, they had a complex relationship with medieval society: cherished yet marginalised, self-contained yet also parasitic. This book - the first general history of medieval and Tudor hospitals in eighty-five years - traces when and why they originated and follows their development through the crisis periods of the Black Death and the English Reformation when many disappeared. Nicholas Orme and Margaret Webster explore the hospitals' religious, charitable and medical functions, examine their buildings, staffing and finances, and analyse their inmates in terms of social background and medical needs. They reconstruct the daily life of hospitals, from worship to living conditions, food and care. The general survey is complemented by a regional study of hospitals in the south-west of England, including detailed histories of all the recorded institutions in Cornwall and Devon.

In Alfonso de Cartagena's 'Memoriale virtutum' (1422), Maria Morras and Jeremy Lawrance offer a critical edition of an anthology of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, compiled and significantly altered by the major Castilian intellectual of the day, Bishop Alfonso de Cartagena, and addressed to the heir to the throne of Portugal, Crown Prince Duarte. The work is a speculum principis, an education of a future king in the virtues suitable to a statesman. Cartagena's choice of Aristotle was a harbinger of Renaissance ideas. The "memorial" sheds light on a society in transition, setting new ethical guidelines for the ruling class at the crossroads between medieval feudalism and Renaissance absolutism.

From the sixteenth through to the eighteenth century, printed disputations were the main academic output of universities. This genre is especially attractive as it deals with the most significant cultural and scientific innovations of the early modern period, such as the printing revolution and the development of new methods in philosophy, education and scholarly exchange via personal networks. Until recently, academic disputations have attracted comparatively little scholarly attention. This volume provides for the first time a comprehensive study of the early modern disputation culture, both through theoretical discussions and overviews, and numerous case studies that analyze particular features of disputations in various European regions.