The first study of early modern English courtship as a subject in its own right. New historical and anthropological insights into the making of marriage, and an arresting and exciting contribution to the history of the family. Takes the interpretation of the English church court material to a new level of sophistication. Explores new or neglected subjects such as the use of gifts or tokens and the role of go-betweens in English courtship. The fresh and wholly original perspectives on English courtship offered here should redirect and revitalise the history of marriage in early modern England. -- .

Based on the papers of an international conference, this book deals with a turning-point in European history - the dramatic struggle between the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic counter-Reformation, and between princely rulers and landed nobles in 16th- and 17th-century central and eastern Europe. It brings together the results of the latest research by leading scholars from North America and Europe, much of it otherwise unavailable in English; and it throws new light on the victory of the Church and the rulers over Protestantism and the nobility which, leading to the growth of princely absolutions, had such profound long-term consequences.;Other titles in the series include "Studies in the Russian Economy Before 1914", "Perspectives on Literature and Society in Eastern and Western Europe" and "The Movement for Greek Independence, 1770-1821: A Collection of Documents".

This book explores the political and religious world of early Bourbon France, focusing on the search for stable accord that characterised its political and religious life. Chapters examine developments that shaped the Bourbon realm through the century: assertions of royal authority, rules of political negotiation, and the evolution of "Devot "piety.

English Historical Documents is the most ambitious, impressive and comprehensive collection of documents on English history ever published. An authoritative work of primary evidence, each volume presents material with exemplary scholarly accuracy. Editorial comment is directed towards making sources intelligible rather than drawing conclusions from them. Full account has been taken of modern textual criticism. A general introduction to each volume portrays the character of the period under review and critical bibliographies have been added to assist further investigation. Documents collected include treaties, personal letters, statutes, military dispatches, diaries, declarations, newspaper articles, government and cabinet proceedings, orders, acts, sermons, pamphlets, agricultural instructions, charters, grants, guild regulations and voting records. All volumes contain extra apparatus including genealogical tables, lists of officials, chronologies, diagrams, graphs and maps.

Empire of Fortune is vintage Jennings. He writes with as much flair and involvement as his predecessors, while challenging their assumptions and research at every turn. No one has done more to demystify the early American wilderness or worked harder to dynamite the anglocentric folktales of colonial history. Peter H. Wood, Duke University"

'...a masterly study.' Alister McGrath, Theological Book Review '...a splendid read.' J.J.Scarisbrick, TLS '...profound, witty...of immense value.' David Loades, History Today Historians have always known that the English Reformation was more than a simple change of religious belief and practice. It altered the political constitution and, according to Max Weber, the attitudes and motives which governed the getting and investment of wealth, facilitating the rise of capitalism and industrialisation. This book investigates further implications of the transformative religious changes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for the nation, the town, the family, and for their culture.

This book takes a new approach by synthesizing the work of scholars of military and Indigenous history to provide the first chronologically ordered, region-wide, and long-term narrative history of conflict in the Early American Northeast. War and Colonization in the Early American Northeast focuses on war and society, European colonization, and Indigenous peoples in New England from the pre-Columbian era to the mid-eighteenth century. It examines how the New English used warfare against Native Americans as a way to implement a colonial order. These conflicts shaped New English attitudes toward Native Americans, which further aided in the marginalization and the violent targeting of these communities. At the same time, this volume pays attention to the experiences of Indigenous peoples. It explores pre-Columbian Native American conflict, and studies how colonization altered the ways of warfare of Indigenous people. Native Americans contested New English efforts at colonization and used violent warfare strategies and raids to target their enemies - often quite successfully. However, in the long run, depending on time and geographic location, conflict and colonization led to dramatic and violent changes for Native Americans. This volume is an essential resource for academics, students, academic libraries and general readers interested in the history of New England, military, Native American, or U.S. history.

Five hundred years after his death at the stake, Girolamo Savonarola remains one of the most fascinating figures of the Italian Renaissance. This volume, which contains an introduction by historian Alison Brown, is the first comprehensive collection of Savonarola's works in English. It includes translations of his sermons and treatises on pastoral ministry, prophecy, politics and moral reform, as well as the correspondence with Alexander VI that led to Savonarola's silencing and excommunication. Also included are first-hand accounts of religio-civic festivities instigated by Savonarola and of his last moments. This collection demonstrates the remarkable extent of Savonarola's contributions to the religious, political and aesthetic debates of the late fifteenth century. Winner of the 2004 Scaglione Publication Award for a manuscript in Italian literary studies awarded by the MLA.

Originally published in 1827, this historical account of Philip's War, also called the Great Indian War of 1675 and 1676, recounts the causes of the bloody battles which killed 600 colonists and 3,000 Native Americans. The conflict destroyed a number of tribes in the area and opened southern New England to unimpeded colonial expansion.

This book offers the most up to the minute snapshot of scholarship on queer/gay historiographies in a number of geographical regions in western Europe, Asia and the US. It features the work of the most established scholars in the field of the history of same-sex desire and promises to take the study of same-sex relations in the early modern period in radical new directions.

This title, first published in 1979, was ground-breaking in its exploration of the understudied area of the Tudor law of treason. Bellamy first examines the scope of that law, noting the inheritance from the Middle Ages, the effectiveness of the new statutes and interpretation of the law by the judiciary. Mining the archives for official, legal and literary accounts, the following parts consider how the government came to hear of traitors, the use of evidence and witnesses in trials and finally the fate of the traitor at the gallows and beyond. This is a full, useful and interesting title, which will be of great value to students researching Tudor and late medieval statute law, the Tudor concept of treason and the mores of Tudor society.

This title, first published in 1989, was one of the first to directly address the legal dimension of bastard feudalism. John Bellamy explores the role and vulnerability of local officials and juries, the nature of the endemic land wars and the interference in the justice system by those at the top of the social chain. What emerges is a focus on the role of land in disputes, the importance of royal favour and political advantage and the attempt to suppress disruption. This is an interesting title, which will be of particular value to students researching the nature of late medieval and early Tudor feudalism, royal patronage and legal procedure.

By the latter half of the seventeenth century, the practice of drawing up a will had become commonplace, and people were increasingly encouraged to set down their final wishes in a 'last will and testament'. Although intended to clarify ownership, these documents often provoked conflict amongst those who had survived the testator. As John Addy shows in this study, first published in 1992, where there was a will, there were relatives. Drawing on a large corpus of contemporary evidence, this survey analyses numerous cases of the family disputes that arose from wills, to form a picture of the attitudes and priorities possessed by those who contested them. This was one of the first studies to use contested-will material, and remains of great value to students of early modern history, sociology and genealogy, as well as general readers with an interest in local history.

Drawing upon archival material as well as the drama, popular verse and pamphlets, this book reads representations of masters and servants in relation to key Renaissance preoccupations. Apprentices, journeymen, male domestic servants, maidservants and stewards, Burnett argues, were deployed in literary texts to address questions about the exercise of power, social change and the threat of economic upheaval. In this way, writers were instrumental in creating servant 'cultures', and spaces within which forms of political resistance could be realized.

The Parish Church was the primary site of religious practice throughout the early modern period. This was particularly so for the silent majority of the English population, who conformed outwardly to the successive religious upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. What such public conformity might have meant has attracted less attention - and, ironically, is sometimes less well documented - than the non-conformity or semi-conformity of recusants, church-papists, Puritan conventiclers or separatists. In this volume, ten leading scholars of early modern religion explore the experience of parish worship in England during the Reformation and the century that followed it. As the contributors argue, parish worship in this period was of critical theological, cultural and even political importance. The volume's key themes are the interlocking importance of liturgy, music, the sermon and the parishioners' own bodies; the ways in which religious change was received, initiated, negotiated, embraced or subverted in local contexts; and the dialectic between practice and belief which helped to make both so contentious. The contributors - historians, historical theologians and literary scholars - through their commitment to an interdisciplinary approach to the subject, provide fruitful and revealing insights into this intersection of private and public worship. This collection is a sister volume to Martin and Ryrie (eds), Private and Domestic Devotion in Early Modern Britain. Together these two volumes focus and drive forward scholarship on the lived experience of early modern religion, as it was practised in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Miskimin's work considers the religious feuding, hostility, and occasional cooperation of Catholics, Protestants, and Jews in 17th-century Metz. In a series of pointed chapters, she shows how the French Crown benefited from religious disagreement in the town by using that discord to push through its centralizing political agenda. Despite the disapproval of local leaders and the lack of any ideological commitment to coexistence, Catholics, Protestants, and Jews increasingly developed daily contacts in the city as the century progressed. Though these contacts were often hostile, they nonetheless continued and led to more complex interactions which undercut traditional religious verities.

Using numerous examples from local court records, Miskimin explores the multilayered contacts between adherents of these three faiths in one of the only French towns to include this tripartite religious mix during this period. As a result, Metz became a convenient early laboratory for the fundamental intellectual shifts at work in Europe. Building on earlier studies of centralization, this book integrates social and religious history with major political shifts to illustrate the interdependence of members of these three groups, as well as the centrality of their clashes to an understanding of the climate of these turbulent times at the dawn of modernity.

After 500 years Henry VIII still retains a public fascination unmatched by any monarch before or since. Whilst his popular image is firmly associated with his appetites - sexual and gastronomic - scholars have long recognized that his reign also ushered in profound changes to English society and culture, the legacy of which endure to this day. To help take stock of such a multifaceted and contested history, this volume presents a collection of 17 essays that showcase the very latest thinking and research on Henry and his court. Divided into seven parts, the book highlights how the political, religious and cultural aspects of Henry's reign came together to create a one of the most significant and transformative periods of English history. The volume is genuinely interdisciplinary, drawing on literature, art history, architecture and drama to enrich our knowledge. The first part is a powerful and personal account by Professor George W. Bernard of his experience of writing about Henry and his reign. The next parts - Material Culture and Images - reflect a historical concern with non-documentary evidence, exploring how objects, collections, paintings and buildings can provide unrivalled insight into the world of the Tudor court. The parts on Court Culture and Performance explore the literary and theatrical world and the performative aspects of court life, looking at how the Tudor court attempted to present itself to the world, as well as how it was represented by others. The part on Reactions focuses upon the political and religious currents stirred up by Henry's policies, and how they in turn came to influence his actions. Through this wide-ranging, yet thematically coherent approach, a fascinating window is opened into the world of Henry VIII and his court. In particular, building on research undertaken over the last ten years, a number of contributors focus on topics that have been neglected by traditional historical writing, for example gender, graffiti and clothing. With contributions from many of the leading scholars of Tudor England, the collection offers not only a snapshot of the latest historical thinking, but also provides a starting point for future research into the world of this colourful, but often misrepresented monarch.

This book brings together challenging new essays from some of the leaders in Italian scholarship in three countries, to show the range of work that is currently being done not only on Florence but also on Naples, Ferrara and Lucca and on the relationship between cities and countryside.

In Reforming Saints, David J. Collins explains how and why Renaissance humanists composed Latin hagiography in Germany in the decades leading up to the Reformation. Contrary to the traditional wisdom, Collins's research uncovers a resurgence in the composition of saints' lives in the half century leading up to 1520. German humanists, he finds, were among the most active authors and editors of these texts.
Focusing on forty Latin depictions of German saints written between 1470 and 1520, Collins finds patterns both in how these humanists chose their subjects and how they presented their holiness. He argues that the humanist hagiographers took up the writing of saints' lives to investigate Germany's medieval past, to reconstruct and exalt its greatness, and to advocate programs of religious and cultural reform. This literature, says Collins, left a legacy that polemicists and philologists in Catholic Europe would be using for their own purposes by the end of the sixteenth century. These hagiographic writings are thus both reflective and formative of the religious and cultural conflicts that defined this period of European history. To bolster his case, Collins draws not only on the Latin saints' lives, but also on vernacular lives, maps and chorographic documents, personal and professional letters, papal, urban, and municipal archives, painting, sculpture and broadside print, and medieval and early modern histories and chronicles. The result is a fresh, new portrait of the humanism of Renaissance Germany.
With his surprising and insightful conclusions, Collins sheds new light on humanism's appropriation in Germany, particularly in its religious aspect. He approaches the humanists'writings on their own terms and recaptures the creative energy the humanists brought to the task of revising the legends of the saints. His scholarly perspective includes the roles of emperors, princes, abbots, city councilmen, artists, librarians, soldiers, peasants, and pilgrims, showing how humanists reached larger and less learned audiences than many other kinds of writing ever could. The cult of the saints and Renaissance humanism are two topics that have attracted considerable scholarly attention. Reforming Saints considers them as seldom before -- at their intersection.

Discusses the transition from a largely oral to a fundamentally literate society in the early modern period. During this period the spoken word remained of the utmost importance but development of printing and the spread of popular literacy combined to transform the nature of communication. Examines English, Scottish and Welsh Oral culture to provide the first pan-British study of the subject. Covers several aspects of oral culture ranging from tradition, to memories of the civil war, to changing mechanics for the settling of debts. The time-span concentrates on the period 1500-1800 but includes material from outside this time frame, covering a longer chronolgical span than most other studies to show the link between early modern and modern oral and literate cultures. -- .

In The Oxford Handbook of the Old Regime, an international team of 30 contributors surveys and presents current thinking about the world of pre-revolutionary France and Europe.
The idea of the Old Regime (ancien regime) was invented by the French revolutionaries to define what they hoped to destroy and replace. But it was not a precise definition, and although historians have found it conceptually useful, there is wide disagreement about what the Old Regime's main features were, how they worked, how old they were, how far they stretched, how dynamic or inert they were, and how far the revolutionaries succeeded in their ambitions to eradicate them.
In this wide-ranging and authoritative collection, old and newer areas of research into the Old Regime are presented and assessed, and there has been no attempt to impose any sort of consensus. The result shows what a lively field of historical enquiry the Old Regime remains, and points the way towards a range of promising new directions for thinking and writing about the intriguing complex of historical problems which it continues to pose.

Silent Teachers considers for the first time the influence of Ottoman scholarly practices and reference tools on oriental learning in early modern Europe. Telling the story of oriental studies through the annotations, study notes and correspondence of European scholars, it demonstrates the central but often overlooked role that Turkish-language manuscripts played in the achievements of early orientalists. Dispersing the myths and misunderstandings found in previous scholarship, the book offers a fresh history of Turkish studies in Europe and new insights into how Renaissance intellectuals studied Arabic and Persian through contemporaneous Turkish sources. This story hardly has any dull moments: the reader will encounter many larger-than-life figures, including an armchair expert who turned his alleged captivity under the Ottomans into bestselling books; a drunken dragoman who preferred enjoying the fruits of the vine to his duties at the Sublime Porte; and a curmudgeonly German physician whose pugnacious pamphlets led to the erasure of his name from history. Taking its title from the celebrated humanist Joseph Scaliger's comment that books from the Muslim world are 'silent teachers' and need to be explained orally to be understood, this study gives voice to the many and varied Turkish-language books that circulated in early modern Europe and proposes a paradigm-shift in our understanding of early modern erudite culture.

" The results of the Russian-Swedish research team] are presented an exemplary fashion and rigorously edited ... Whoever is interested in the industrial development of European economy and society should read this book." . Vierteljahrschrift fur Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte

..". very well written, clearly arranged and interesting and easy to read ... an important study." . Eva Osterberg, Professor of History, University of Lund.

The title of this book has a double meaning: on the one hand, it deals with two very different societies both of which made iron in the early modern period. On the other hand, iron "made" these societies: the needs of iron production and the resistance to these demands from local peasant communities gave the societies a special kind of cohesion and rationality.

This volume presents the findings of a joint team of Swedish and Russian scholars examining the social organization of work in early modern iron industry and their respective societies. The comparison was carried out against the backdrop of the international discussion on proto-industrialization, its prerequisites and consequences. There has, however, been a certain bias in much of that debate, the focus being mainly on Western Europe, particularly on Britain, and on textile trades. This book offers an important contribution to the debate in that it widens the perspective by discussing Northern and Eastern Europe and by studying the iron industry. More particularly it examines actual production processes, the organization of work, social conflict, questions of ownership and its evolution, as well as the diffusion and organization of technical knowledge. The comparative approach is consistently applied throughout, with each chapter closely integrating the results relating to the two selected geographical areas, thus showing ways of solving some of the problems arising from comparative history.

An exploration of day-to-day urban life in colonial America. The American city was an integral part of the colonial experience. Although the five largest cities in colonial America--Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Charles Town, and Newport--held less than ten percent of the American popularion on the eve of the American Revolution, they were particularly significant for a people who resided mostly in rural areas, and wilderness. These cities and other urban hubs contained and preserved the European traditions, habits, customs, and institutions from which their residents had emerged. They were also centers of commerce, transportation, and communication; held seats of colonial government; and were conduits for the transfer of Old World cultures. With a focus on the five largest cities but also including life in smaller urban centers, Krawczynski's nuanced treatment will fill a significant gap on the reference shelves and serve as an essential source for students of American history, sociology, and culture. In-depth, thematic chapters explore many aspects of urban life in colonial America, including working conditions for men, women, children, free blacks, and slaves as well as strikes and labor issues; the class hierarchy and its purpose in urban society; childbirth, courtship, family, and death; housing styles and urban diet; and the threat of disease and the growth of poverty.