The De Europae dissidiis et republica (On Conflicts in Europe and on the Commonwealth) is a collection published by Vives in 1526 that has been called his "summa politica." It contains five letters, to Henry VIII and three prelates including Cardinal Wolsey; a Lucian-style underworld satire on European wars and the Turkish threat; and Latinizations of two political speeches by Isocrates. It counsels the pursuit of peace following Christian principles, but it also explores the possibility of an aggressive war against the Turks as the means of unifying and saving European Christendom. It urges the calling of a council to deal with Luther. We present critical Latin texts and, for the first time, English translations, with introduction and notes.

Circa AD 750, both the Islamic world and western Europe underwent political revolutions; these raised to power, respectively, the 'Abbasid and Carolingian dynasties. The eras thus inaugurated were similar not only in their chronology, but also in the foundational role each played in its respective civilization, forming and shaping enduring religious, cultural, and societal institutions. The 'Abbasid and Carolingian Empires: Studies in Civilizational Formation, is the first collected volume ever dedicated specifically to comparative Carolingian-'Abbasid history. In it, editor D.G. Tor brings together essays from some of the leading historians in order to elucidate some of the parallel developments in each of these civilizations, many of which persisted not only throughout the Middle Ages, but to the present day. Contributors are: Michael Cook, Jennifer R. Davis, Robert Gleave, Eric J. Goldberg, Minoru Inaba, Jurgen Paul, Walter Pohl, D.G. Tor and Ian Wood.

This book discusses the "long fifteenth century" in Iberian history, between the 1391 pogroms and the forced conversions of Aragonese Muslims in 1526, a period characterized by persecutions, conversions and social violence, on the one hand, and cultural exchange, on the other. It was a historical moment of unstable religious ideas and identities, before the rigid turn taken by Spanish Catholicism by the middle of the sixteenth century; a period in which the physical and symbolic borders separating the three religions were transformed and redefined but still remained extraordinarily porous. The collection argues that the aggressive tone of many polemical texts has until now blinded historiography to the interconnected nature of social and cultural intimacy, above all in dialogue and cultural transfer in later medieval Iberia. Contributors are Ana Echevarria, Gad Freudenthal, Mercedes Garcia-Arenal, Maria Laura Giordano, Yonatan Glazer-Eytan, Eleazar Gutwirth, Felipe Pereda, Rosa M. Rodriguez Porto, Katarzyna K. Starczewska, John Tolan, Gerard Wiegers, and Yosi Yisraeli.

Titoist Yugoslavia is a particularly interesting setting to examine the integrity of the modern nation-state, especially the viability of distinctly multi-ethnic nation-building projects. Scholarly literature on the brutal civil wars that destroyed Yugoslavia during the 1990s emphasizes divisive nationalism and dysfunctional politics to explain why the state disintegrated. But the larger question remains unanswered-just how did Tito's state function so successfully for the preceding forty-six years. In an attempt to understand better what united the stable, multi-ethnic, and globally important Yugoslavia that existed before 1991 Robert Niebuhr argues that we should pay special attention to the dynamic and robust foreign policy that helped shape the Cold War.

The replacement of the Roman Empire in the West with emerging kingdoms like Visigothic Spain and Merovingian Gaul resulted in new societies, but without major population displacement. Societies changed because identities shifted and new points of cohesion formed under different leaders and leadership structures. This volume examines two kingdoms in the post-Roman west to understand how this process took shape. Though exhibiting striking continuities with the Roman past, Gaul and Spain emerged as distinctive, but not isolated, political entities that forged different strategies and drew upon different resources to strengthen their unity, shape social ties, and consolidate their political status.

Fact and Fiction explores the intersection between literature and the sciences, focusing on German and British culture between the eighteenth century and today. Observing that it was in the eighteenth century that the divide between science and literature as disciplines first began to be defined, the contributors to this collection probe how authors from that time onwards have assessed and affected the relationship between literary and scientific cultures. Fact and Fiction's twelve essays cover a wide range of scientific disciplines, from physics and chemistry to medicine and anthropology, and a variety of literary texts, such as Erasmus Darwin's poem The Botanic Garden, George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, and Goethe's Elective Affinities. The collection will appeal to scholars of literature and of the history of science, and to those interested in the connections between the two.

The year is 1932. In Rome, the Fascist leader Benito Mussolini unveils a giant obelisk of white marble, bearing the Latin inscription MVSSOLINI DVX. Invisible to the cheering crowds, a metal box lies immured in the obelisk's base. It contains a few gold coins and, written on a piece of parchment, a Latin text: the Codex fori Mussolini. What does this text say? Why was it buried there? And why was it written in Latin? The Codex, composed by the classical scholar Aurelio Giuseppe Amatucci (1867-1960), presents a carefully constructed account of the rise of Italian Fascism and its leader, Benito Mussolini. Though written in the language of Roman antiquity, the Codex was supposed to reach audiences in the distant future. Placed under the obelisk with future excavation and rediscovery in mind, the Latin text was an attempt at directing the future reception of Italian Fascism. This book renders the Codex accessible to scholars and students of different disciplines, offering a thorough and wide-ranging introduction, a clear translation, and a commentary elucidating the text's rhetorical strategies, historical background, and specifics of phrasing and reference. As the first detailed study of a Fascist Latin text, it also throws new light on the important role of the Latin language in Italian Fascist culture.

In this book Jukka Korpela offers an analysis of the trade in kidnapped Finns and Karelians into slavery in Eastern Europe. Blond slaves from the north of Europe were rare luxury items in Black Sea and Caspian markets, and the high prices they commanded stimulated and sustained a long-distance trade based on kidnapping in special robbery missions and war expeditions. Captives were sold into the Volga slave trade and transported through market webs further south. This business differed and was separate from the large-scale raids carried out on Crimeans for enslavement in Eastern Europe, or the mass kidnappings characteristic of Mediterranean slavery. The trade in Finns and Karelians provides new perspectives on the formation of the Russian state as well as the economic networks of official and unofficial markets in Eastern Europe.