Superstition and Magic in Early Modern Europe brings together a rich selection of essays which represent the most important historical research on religion, magic and superstition in early modern Europe. Each essay makes a significant contribution to the history of magic and religion in its own right, while together they demonstrate how debates over the topic have evolved over time, providing invaluable intellectual, historical, and socio-political context for readers approaching the subject for the first time. The essays are organised around five key themes and areas of controversy. Part One tackles superstition; Part Two, the tension between miracles and magic; Part Three, ghosts and apparitions; Part Four, witchcraft and witch trials; and Part Five, the gradual disintegration of the 'magical universe' in the face of scientific, religious and practical opposition. Each part is prefaced by an introduction that provides an outline of the historiography and engages with recent scholarship and debate, setting the context for the essays that follow and providing a foundation for further study. This collection is an invaluable toolkit for students of early modern Europe, providing both a focused overview and a springboard for broader thinking about the underlying continuities and discontinuities that make the study of magic and superstition a perennially fascinating topic.

Jonathan Harris' new edition of the CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title, Constantinople, provides an updated and extended introduction to the history of Byzantium and its capital city. Accessible and engaging, the book breaks new ground by exploring Constantinople's mystical dimensions and examining the relationship between the spiritual and political in the city. This second edition includes a range of new material, such as: * Historiographical updates reflecting recently published work in the field * Detailed coverage of archaeological developments relating to Byzantine Constantinople * Extra chapters on the 14th century and social 'outsiders' in the city * More on the city as a centre of learning; the development of Galata/Pera; charitable hospitals; religious processions and festivals; the lives of ordinary people; and the Crusades * Source translation textboxes, new maps and images, a timeline and a list of emperors It is an important volume for anyone wanting to know more about the history of the Byzantine Empire.

It is 1890 when three young women head toward a meadow hidden in the woods outside the village of Shipkovtsi, Bulgaria. As Trina, Vella, and Dobrinka meet in front of an old monastery, a family treasure held secret for generations is revealed. In the end, there are three piles of gold-one in front of each sister-but one pile is bigger than the others. An inheritance has been unfairly divided, leaving two sisters feeling cheated.

In "ASHES of WARS," Radka Yakimov narrates the story of the descendents of two of those Bulgarian sisters. Reconstructed historically on the basis of recorded facts, stories handed down from generation to generation, and her own personal recollections, Yakimov chronicles the main events that impacted the lives of four generations of Bulgarians throughout the twentieth century. As she relays a saga about the twenty-three men, women, and children who escaped in search of a safer place, Yakimov takes her readers beyond the confines of Bulgaria into Yugoslavia, to a refugee camp in Trieste, and finally to new lives in Canada and America.

"ASHES of WARS" profiles the courage, grit, and determination of the people of a beautiful Balkan country torn by wars and oppression, but sustained by hopes for a brighter future.

This book-a Leonaur original-contains three rare works by members of Wellington's green sharpshooters. The first was written by Rifleman Knight-a personality who rarely appears in histories of the regiment-but who fought at Waterloo and took part in the pursuit of the French Army to Paris. He subsequently went to Portugal to fight as a mercenary and his account of his adventures on campaign and on the battlefield make riveting reading. Henry Curling wielded the pen that brought to the public the well known memoirs of Rifleman Benjamin Harris. This book contains more military anecdotes recorded by Curling from reports of other British soldiers of the Napoleonic Wars including several more by Harris himself. The final piece is a short history of the Rifles by Jonathan Leach who was an officer of the regiment and his history directly recounts events in which he was a personal and active participant.

This book: covers the essential content in the new specifications in a rigorous and engaging way, using detailed narrative, sources, timelines, key words, helpful activities and extension material helps develop conceptual understanding of areas such as evidence, interpretations, causation and change, through targeted activities provides assessment support for A level with sample answers, sources, practice questions and guidance to help you tackle the new-style exam questions. It also comes with three years' access to ActiveBook, an online, digital version of your textbook to help you personalise your learning as you go through the course - perfect for revision.

As the only daughter of Blanche of Castile, one of France's most powerful queens, and as the sister of the Capetian saint Louis IX, Isabelle of France (1225-1270) was situated at the nexus of sanctity and power during a significant era of French culture and medieval history. In this ground-breaking examination of Isabelle's career, Sean Field uses a wealth of previously unstudied material to address significant issues in medieval religious history, including the possibilities for women's religious authority, the creation and impact of royal sanctity, and the relationship between men and women within the mendicant orders. Field reinterprets Isabelle's career as a Capetian princess. Isabelle was remarkable for choosing a life of holy virginity and for founding and co-authoring a rule for the Franciscan abbey of Longchamp. Isabelle did not become a nun there, but remained a powerful lay patron, living in a modest residence on the abbey grounds. Field maintains that Isabelle was a key actor in creating the aura of sanctity that surrounded the French royal family in the thirteenth century, underscoring the link between the growth of Capetian prestige and power and the idea of a divinely ordained, virtuous, and holy royal family. Her contemporary reputation for sanctity emerges from a careful analysis of the Life of Isabelle of France written by the third abbess of Longchamp, Agnes of Harcourt, and from papal bulls, letters, and other contemporary sources that have only recently come to light. Field also argues that Isabelle had a profound effect on the institutional history of Franciscan women. By remaining outside the official Franciscan and church hierarchies, Isabelle maintained an ambiguous position that allowed her to embrace Franciscan humility while retaining royal influence. Her new order of Sorores minores was eagerly adopted by a number of communities, and her rule for the order eventually spread from France to England, Italy, and Spain. An important study of a medieval woman's agency and power, Isabelle of France explores the life of a remarkable figure in French and Franciscan history.

Sex: Vice and Love from Antiquity to Modernity examines theimpact that sexual fantasies about the classical world have had onmodern Western culture. * Offers a wealth of information on sex in the Greek andRoman world * Correlates the study of classical sexuality with modern Westerncultures * Identifies key influential themes in the evolution of eroticdiscourse from antiquity to modernity * Presents a serious and thought-provoking topic with greataccessibility

This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched. Refugees in Europe, 1919-1959 offers a new history of Europe's mid-20th century as seen through its recurrent refugee crises. By bringing together in one volume recent research on a range of different contexts of groups of refugees and refugee policy, it sheds light on the common assumptions that underpinned the history of refugees throughout the period under review. The essays foreground the period between the end of the First World War, which inaugurated a series of new international structures to deal with displaced populations, and the late 1950s, when Europe's home-grown refugee problems had supposedly been 'solved' and attention shifted from the identification of an exclusively European refugee problem to a global one. Borrowing from E. H. Carr's The Twenty Years' Crisis, first published in 1939, the editors of this volume test the idea that the two post-war eras could be represented as a single crisis of a European-dominated international order of nation states in the face of successive refugee crises which were both the direct consequence of that system and a challenge to it. Each of the chapters reflects on the utility and limitations of this notion of a 'forty years' crisis' for understanding the development of specific national and international responses to refugees in the mid-20th century. Contributors to the volume also provide alternative readings of the history of an international refugee regime, in which the non-European and colonial world are assigned a central role in the narrative.

Can we make sense of anarchism or is that an oxymoron? Guided by the principle that someone else's rationality is not an empirical finding but a methodological presumption, this book addresses that question as it investigates the ideas and action of one of the most prominent and underrated anarchists of all times: the Italian, Errico Malatesta.

The current dogma concerning the origins of the First World War supports the militarist myth that wars are caused by stupid, evil, aggressive nations on the other side of the world who refuse to get along with the intelligent, good, peaceful people on this side.

This book attempts to understand the real causes of war and to dissociate propaganda from historical fact. By reviewing the events of the pre-1914 period, the responsibility of Germany for the outbreak of the war is reconsidered.

It begins with a short account of the situation after the Franco-Prussian War, when France was isolated and Germany secure in the friendship of all the other Great Powers, and proceeds to describe how France created an anti-German coalition. The account of the estrangement of England from Germany attempts to correct the usual pro-British prejudice and to explain the real causes of this development. The centrepiece of the work is the creation of the Triple Entente.

This book is unique in its positive approach to the German Empire of 1871-1918.

CATHERINE THE GREAT and the Expansion of Russia by GLADYS SCOTT THOMSON. A General Introduction to the Series has been undertaken in the conviction that there can be no subject of study more important than history. Great as have been the conquests of natural science in our time such that many think of ours as a scientific age par excellence it is even more urgent and necessary that advances should be made in the social sciences, if we are to gain control of the forces of nature loosed upon us. The bed out of which all the social sciences spring is history; there they find, in greater or lesser degree, subject-matter and material, verification or contradiction. There is no end to what we can learn from history, if only we would, for it is coterminous with life. Its special field is the life of man in society, and at every point we can learn vicariously from the experience of others before us in history. To take one point only the understanding of politics: how can we hope to understand the world of affairs around us if we do not know how it came to be what it is? How to understand Germany, or Soviet Russia, or the United States or ourselves, without knowing something of their history ? There is no subject that is more useful, or indeed indispensable. Some evidence of the growing awareness of this may be seen in the immense increase in the interest of the reading public in history, and the much larger place the subject has come to take in education in our time. This series has been planned to meet the needs and demands of a very wide public and of educa tion they are indeed the same. I am convinced that the most congenial, as well as the most con crete and practical, approach to historyis the biographical, through the lives of the great men whose actions have been so much part of history, and whose careers in turn have been so moulded and formed by events. The key-idea of this series, and what dis tinguishes it from any other that has appeared, is the intention by way of a biography of a great man to open up a significant historical theme; for example, Cromwell and the Puritan Revo lution, or Lenin and the Russian Revolution. My hope is, in the end, as the series fills out and completes itself, by a sufficient number of biographies to cover whole periods and subjects in that way. To give you the history of the United States, for example, or the British Empire or France, via a number of biographies of their leading historical figures. That should be something new, as well as convenient and practical, in education. I need hardly say that I am a strong believer in people with good academic standards writing once more for the general reading public, and of the public being given the best that the univer sities can provide. From this point of view this series is intended to bring the university into the homes of the people. A. L. ROWSE. Contents include: CHAPTER FACE GENERAL INTRODUCTION ... V INTRODUCTORY NOTE ... X I. PROLOGUE I H. THE GRAND-DUCHESS ... 25 III. THE EMPRESS CONSORT 60 IV. THE EMPRESS .... 83 V. RUSSIA AND POLAND . . . IOQ VI. RUSSIA AND TURKEY . . .128 VH. PUGACHEV ..... 149 Vm. POTEMKIN THE CRIMEA TURKEY . 1 70 DC. TURKEY AND POLAND AGAIN . r 94 X. ST. PETERSBURG AND ITS PEOPLE . 215 XI. THE ARTS AND THE SCIENCES . 248 XII. THE LAST YEARS .... 269 FOR FURTHER READING . . . 284 INDEX ...... 287.

The 11th of November 1918, Polish Independence Day, is a curious anniversary whose commemoration has been only intermittently observed in the last century. In fact, the day -- and the several symbols that rightly or wrongly have become associated with it -- has a rather convoluted history, filled with tradition and myth, which deserves attention.
Independence Day is more than just the history of a day, or the evolution of its celebration, but an explanation of what meaning has come to be associated with that date. It offers a re-reading of Polish history, not by a series of dates, but through a series of symbols whose combination allows the Poles to understand who they are by what they have been. Its focus is on the era 1914-2008, and the central actor is the charismatic Jozef Pilsudski. He came to represent a disposition regarding the meaning of Polish history which eventually penetrated virtually all of modern Polish society. The work is constructed by the analysis of memoirs, documents, coins, stamps, films, maps, monuments, and many other features making it a multi-disciplinary and multi-dimensional volume.

Most military historians have difficulty comprehending the miracle that took place in late 1941 and early 1942 in the Soviet Union. In the summer of 1941, the German Army routed the Red Army as it had routed the Polish, British, French and other armies in 1939, 1940, and early 1941. None had been able to withstand German might more than a few weeks. When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, his legions quickly overcame the Soviet divisions they met, and it appeared to most that Hitler would succeed as he had before. A major portion of the prewar Red Army had been completely annihilated, millions of prisoners taken, and the most populous and developed provinces of the Soviet Union occupied by the Germans and their allies. In September, the Germans surrounded and captured a huge bag of divisions east of Kiev, only to encounter a flood of new Red Army divisions when they redirected their intentions on Moscow. In short order the Wehrmacht broke through this line, and approached within sight of the outskirts of the capital. There, they were surprised by a massive offensive mounted by even more new divisions. Other countries had surrendered after losing one army, let alone two. The Soviets came back with a third--which sent the Germans reeling to the rear. How was this possible? Dunn's detailed examination shows that, far from carelessly throwing thousands of disorganized, untrained men into battle, the Soviets wisely used the resources at hand to resist and drive back the invaders once the initial shock had been absorbed. He reveals how the Soviets systematically trained men as replacements for casualties in existing units, often renaming the unit (a move that confused Germanintelligence then and continues to confound historians today). Unit integrity was as significant in the Red Army as in other armies. Men were not robotic clones, and each had strengths and weaknesses. Knowing this led to unit integrity and success on the battlefield. Tracing the formation and commitment to battle of Soviet units, regardless of the changes of designation, is crucial to understanding the success and failure of Soviet operations--and Stalin's "keys to victory."