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Women, Witchcraft, and the Inquisition in Spain and the New World investigates the mystery and unease surrounding the issue of women called before the Inquisition in Spain and its colonial territories in the Americas, including Mexico and Cartagena de Indias. Edited by Maria Jesus Zamora Calvo, this collection gathers innovative scholarship that considers how the Holy Office of the Inquisition functioned as a closed, secret world defined by patriarchal hierarchy and grounded in misogynistic standards. Ten essays present portraits of women who, under accusations as diverse as witchcraft, bigamy, false beatitude, and heresy, faced the Spanish and New World Inquisitions to account for their lives. Each essay draws on the documentary record of trials, confessions, letters, diaries, and other primary materials. Focusing on individual cases of women brought before the Inquisition, the authors study their subjects' social status, particularize their motivations, determine the characteristics of their prosecution, and deduce the reasons used to justify violence against them. With their subjection of women to imprisonment, interrogation, and judgment, these cases display at their core a specter of contempt, humiliation, silencing, and denial of feminine selfhood. The contributors include specialists in the early modern period from multiple disciplines, encompassing literature, language, translation, literary theory, history, law, iconography, and anthropology. By considering both the women themselves and the Inquisition as an institution, this collection works to uncover stories, lives, and cultural practices that for centuries have dwelled in obscurity.

A dedicated career soldier and excellent division and corps commander, Dominique Vandamme was a thorn in the side of practically every officer he served. Outspoken to a fault, he even criticized Napoleon, whom he never forgave for not appointing him marshal. His military prowess so impressed the emperor, however, that he returned Vandamme to command time and again.In this first book-length study of Vandamme in English, John G. Gallaher traces the career of one of Napoleon's most successful midrank officers. He describes Vandamme's rise from a provincial youth with neither fortune nor influence to an officer of the highest rank in the French army. Gallaher thus offers a rare look at a Napoleonic general who served for twenty-five years during the wars of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Empire. This was a time when a general could lose his head if he lost a battle. Despite Vandamme's contentious nature, Gallaher shows, Napoleon needed his skills as a commander, and Vandamme needed Napoleon to further his career. Gallaher draws on a wealth of archival sources in France - notably the Vandamme Papers in Lille - to draw a full portrait of the general. He also reveals new information on such military events as the Silesian campaign of 1807 and the disaster at Kulm in 1813. Gallaher presents Vandamme in the context of the Napoleonic command system, revealing how he related to both subordinates and superiors. Napoleon's Enfant Terrible depicts an officer who was his own worst enemy but who was instrumental in winning an empire.

At its peak the Spanish empire stretched from Italy and the Netherlands to Peru and the Philippines. Its influence remains very significant to the history of Europe and the Americas. Maltby provides a concise and readable history of the empire's dramatic rise and fall, with special emphasis on the economy, institutions and intellectual movements.

The Mixtec peoples were among the major original developers of Mesoamerican civilization. Centuries before the Spanish Conquest, they formed literate urban states and maintained a uniquely innovative technology and a flourishing economy. Today, thousands of Mixtecs still live in Oaxaca, in present-day southern Mexico, and thousands more have migrated to locations throughout Mexico, the United States, and Canada. In this comprehensive survey, Ronald Spores and Andrew K. Balkansky--both preeminent scholars of Mixtec civilization--synthesize a wealth of archaeological, historical, and ethnographic data to trace the emergence and evolution of Mixtec civilization from the time of earliest human occupation to the present.
The Mixtec region has been the focus of much recent archaeological and ethnohistorical activity. In this volume, Spores and Balkansky incorporate the latest available research to show that the Mixtecs, along with their neighbors the Valley and Sierra Zapotec, constitute one of the world's most impressive civilizations, antecedent to--and equivalent to--those of the better-known Maya and Aztec. Employing what they refer to as a "convergent methodology," the authors combine techniques and results of archaeology, ethnohistory, linguistics, biological anthropology, ethnology, and participant observation to offer abundant new insights on the Mixtecs' multiple transformations over three millennia.

Was the outcome of the First World War on a knife edge? In this major new account of German wartime politics and strategy Holger Afflerbach argues that the outcome of the war was actually in the balance until relatively late in the war. Using new evidence from diaries, letters and memoirs, he fundamentally revises our understanding of German strategy from the decision to go to war and the failure of the western offensive to the radicalisation of Germany's war effort under Hindenburg and Ludendorff and the ultimate collapse of the Central Powers. He uncovers the struggles in wartime Germany between supporters of peace and hardliners who wanted to fight to the finish. He suggests that Germany was not nearly as committed to all-out conquest as previous accounts argue. Numerous German peace advances could have offered the opportunity to end the war before it dragged Europe into the abyss.