Early Medieval Venice examines the significant changes that Venice underwent between the late-sixth and the early-eleventh centuries. From the periphery of the Byzantine Empire, Venice acquired complete independence and emerged as the major power in the Adriatic area. It also avoided absorption by neighbouring rulers, prevented serious destruction by raiders, and achieved a stable state organization, all the while progressively extending its trading activities to most of northern Italy and the eastern Mediterranean. This was not a linear process, but the Venetians obtained and defended these results with great tenacity, creating the foundations for the remarkable developments of the following centuries. This book presents the most relevant themes that characterized Venice during this epoch, including war, violence, and the manner in which 'others' were perceived. It examines how early medieval authors and modern scholars have portrayed this period, and how they were sometimes influenced by their own 'present' in their reconstruction of the past.

This book is the first account of British Protestant conversion initiatives directed towards continental Europe between 1600 and 1900. Continental Europe was considered a missionary land-another periphery of the world, whose centre was imperial Britain. British missions to Europe were informed by religious experiments in America, Africa, and Asia, rendering these offensives against Europe a true form of "imaginary colonialism". British Protestant missionaries often understood themselves to be at the forefront of a civilising project directed at Catholics (and sometimes even at other Protestants). Their mission was further reinforced by Britain becoming a land of compassionate refuge for European dissenters and exiles. This book engages with the myth of International Protestantism, questioning its early origins and its narrative of transnational belonging, while also interrogating Britain as an imagined Protestant land of hope and glory. In the history of western Christianities, "converting Europe" had a role that has not been adequately investigated. This is the story of the attempted, and ultimately failed, effort to convert a continent.

This book brings together the large volume of work on late Tsarist Russia published over the last 30 years, to show an overall picture of Russia under the last two tsars - before the war brought down not only the Russian empire but also those of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Turkey. It turns the attention from the old emphases on workers, revolutionaries, and a reactionary government, to a more diverse and nuanced picture of a country which was both a major European great power, facing the challenges of modernization and industrialization, and also a multi-ethnic and multi-confessional empire stretching across both Europe and Asia.

Heresy and Citizenship examines the anti-heretical campaigns in late-medieval Augsburg, Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Strasbourg, and other cities. By focusing on the unprecedented period of persecution between 1390 and 1404, this study demonstrates how heretical presence in cities was exploited in ecclesiastical, political, and social conflicts between the cities and their external rivals, and between urban elites. These anti-heretical campaigns targeted Waldensians who believed in lay preaching and simplified forms of Christian worship. Groups of individuals identified as Waldensians underwent public penance, execution, or expulsion. In each case, the course and outcome of inquisitions reveal tensions between institutions within each city, most often between city councils and local bishops or archbishops. In such cases, competing sides used the persecution of heresy to assert their authority over others. As a result, persecution of urban Waldensians acquired meaning beyond mere correction of religious error. By placing the anti-heretical campaigns of this period in their socio-political and religious context, Heresy and Citizenship also engages with studies of social and political conflict in late medieval towns. It examines the role the exclusion of religiously and socially deviant groups played in the development of urban governments, and the rise of ideologies of good citizenship and the common good. It will be of interest to scholars and students interested in medieval urban and religious history, and the history of heresy and its persecution.

This collection of state-of-the-art essays explores conspiracy cultures in post-socialist Eastern Europe, ranging from the nineteenth century to contemporary manifestations. Conspiracy theories about Freemasons, Communists and Jews, about the Chernobyl disaster, and about George Soros and the globalist elite have been particularly influential in Eastern Europe, but they have also been among the most prominent worldwide. This volume explores such conspiracy theories in the context of local Eastern European histories and discourses. The chapters identify four major factors that have influenced cultures of conspiracy in Eastern Europe: nationalism (including ethnocentrism and antisemitism), the socialist past, the transition period, and globalization. The research focuses on the impact of imperial legacies, nation-building, and the Cold War in the creation of conspiracy theories in Eastern Europe; the effects of the fall of the Iron Curtain and conspiracism in a new democratic setting; and manifestations of viral conspiracy theories in contemporary Eastern Europe and their worldwide circulation with the global rise of populism. Bringing together a diverse landscape of Eastern European conspiracism that is a result of repeated exchange with the "West," the book includes case studies that examine the history, legacy, and impact of conspiracy cultures of Bulgaria, Estonia, Hungary, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Ukraine, the former Yugoslav countries, and the former Soviet Union. The book will appeal to scholars and students of conspiracy theories, as well as those in the areas of political science, area studies, media studies, cultural studies, psychology, philosophy, and history, among others. Politicians, educators, and journalists will find this book a useful resource in countering disinformation in and about the region.

Germany's success in the Second World War was built upon its tank forces; however, many of its leading generals, with the notable exception of Heinz Guderian, are largely unknown. This biographical study of four German panzer army commanders serving on the Eastern Front is based upon their unpublished wartime letters to their wives. David Stahel offers a complete picture of the men conducting Hitler's war in the East, with an emphasis on the private fears and public pressures they operated under. He also illuminates their response to the criminal dimension of the war as well as their role as leading military commanders conducting large-scale operations. While the focus is on four of Germany's most important panzer generals - Guderian, Hoepner, Reinhardt and Schmidt - the evidence from their private correspondence sheds new light on the broader institutional norms and cultural ethos of the Wehrmacht's Panzertruppe.

This new Seminar Study provides students with a rewarding introduction to nineteenth-century Russia. This period of Russian history is, of course, characterised by the flowering of an enormously rich intellectual and cultural life, the origins of which lie in the intelligentsiaA?s opposition to autocratic rule. Here, Professor Offord introduces the reader to the period while focusing particularly on the rise of radicalism. The book opens with two scene-setting chapters: one looking at the political and social structure peculiar to Russia, and the second looking at the cultural and intellectual background. Then, within a chronological framework, the author examines all the great 'events' in the history of Russian radicalism - from the Decembrist Revolt in 1825, to the 'going to the people' in 1874, and the assassination of Alexander II in 1881. However, throughout the text sustained attention is given to the intellectual dimension of nineteenth-century Russian history. Professor Offord examines all the major schools of thought and looks in detail at all the great thinkers of the day, including Chaadaev, Belinsky, Herzen, Chernyshevsky, Bakunin and Tolstoy. This new book will provide essential reading for anyone studying nineteenth-century Russia. Lucid, accessible and immensely readable, it is a formidable achievement.

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the linguistic situation in Europe was one of remarkable fluidity. Latin, the great scholarly lingua franca of the medieval period, was beginning to crack as the tectonic plates shifted beneath it, but the vernaculars had not yet crystallized into the national languages that they would later become, and multilingualism was rife. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world, languages were coming into contact with an intensity that they had never had before, influencing each other and throwing up all manner of hybrids and pidgins as peoples tried to communicate using the semiotic resources they had available. Of interest to linguists, literary scholars and historians, amongst others, this interdisciplinary volume explores the linguistic dynamics operating in Europe and beyond in the crucial centuries between 1400 and 1800. Assuming a state of individual, societal and functional multilingualism, when codeswitching was the norm, and languages themselves were fluid, unbounded and porous, it explores the shifting relationships that existed between various tongues in different geographical contexts, as well as some of the myths and theories that arose to make sense of them.

This book addresses practices of bordering, debordering and rebordering on the territory of the former Austro-Hungarian Monarchy after state borders had been remapped on the negotiation tables of the Paris Peace Treaties following the First World War. As life in borderlands did not correspond to the peaceful Europe articulated in the Paris Treaties, a multitude of (un)foreseen complications followed the drawing of borders and states. The chapters in this book include new case studies on the creation, centralization or peripheralization of border regions, such as Subcarpathian Rus, Vojvodina, Banat and the Carpathian Mountains; on border zones such as the Czechoslovakian harbour in Germany; and on cross-border activities. The book shows how disputes over national identities and ethnic minorities, as well as other factors such as the economic consequences of the new state borders, appeared on the interwar political agenda and coloured the lives of borderland inhabitants. The contributions demonstrate the practices of borderland inhabitants in the establishment, functioning, disorganization or ultimate breakdown of some of the newly created interwar nation-states. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal, European Review of History.

This book provides a comparative view as well as elaborate case studies for scholars, students, and the public who are interested in learning about how the social sciences and history contribute to our understanding of integration, migrations, and religious coexistence / This book will appeal to all those interested in religious minorities in Early Modern Europe / This book investigates the tensions these groups experienced.

This book tells the story of how the "servile arts" turned into the "mechanical arts," which in turn developed into a kind of philosophical apparatus that made modern science possible. Why did the scientific revolution take place in the West and not in China or the Islamic world? How did humanity's progress in science and technology, which had been moving along at a relatively steady pace for tens of thousands of years, end up taking such an unprecedented leap? Subjecting the history of thought and technology to a novel interpretation based on the relationship between theory and practice, Ahmet Selami Caliskan argues that the industrial revolution and modern science-and the scientific revolution that preceded both-did not alone suffice to sort out the philosophical problems of their day or to produce the institutions of the modern age. Both required a new sort of human: Homo economicus faber. Tracing the historical emergence of this figure and its persistence in our own age, this book offers an innovative and holistic assessment of the economic, cultural and political effects of centuries of interaction between East and West and their repercussions in our world today.

With dozens of historical documents and over 400 photographs, the author not only presents a comprehensive history of U-boat crews and the undersea war, but also shows how those with an interest in the U-boat war can find U-boat-related artifacts and how they can trace many to specific boats - and then research what those boats and crews accomplished.

The political culture of absolute monarchy that structured French society into the eighteenth century is generally believed to have emerged late in the sixteenth century. This new interpretation of the origins of French absolutism, however, connects the fifteenth-century conciliar reform movement in the Catholic Church to the practice of absolutism by demonstrating that the monarchy appropriated political models derived from canon law. Tyler Lange reveals how the reform of the Church offered a crucial motive and pretext for a definitive shift in the practice and conception of monarchy, and explains how this First French Reformation enabled Francis I and subsequent monarchs to use the Gallican Church as a useful deposit of funds and judicial power. In so doing, the book identifies the theoretical origins of later absolutism and the structural reasons for the failure of French Protestantism.

Sherri Franks Johnson explores the roles of religious women in the changing ecclesiastical and civic structure of late medieval Bologna, demonstrating how convents negotiated a place in their urban context and in the church at large. During this period Bologna was the most important city in the Papal States after Rome. Using archival records from nunneries in the city, Johnson argues that communities of religious women varied in the extent to which they sought official recognition from the male authorities of religious orders. While some nunneries felt that it was important to their religious life to gain recognition from monks and friars, others were content to remain local and autonomous. In a period often described as an era of decline and the marginalization of religious women, Johnson shows instead that they saw themselves as active participants in their religious orders, in the wider church and in their local communities.

A unique, illustrated book that will change the way you see medieval history The Middle Ages: A Graphic History busts the myth of the 'Dark Ages', shedding light on the medieval period's present-day relevance in a unique illustrated style. This history takes us through the rise and fall of empires, papacies, caliphates and kingdoms; through the violence and death of the Crusades, Viking raids, the Hundred Years War and the Plague; to the curious practices of monks, martyrs and iconoclasts. We'll see how the foundations of the modern West were established, influencing our art, cultures, religious practices and ways of thinking. And we'll explore the lives of those seen as 'Other' - women, Jews, homosexuals, lepers, sex workers and heretics. Join historian Eleanor Janega and illustrator Neil Max Emmanuel on a romp across continents and kingdoms as we discover the Middle Ages to be a time of huge change, inquiry and development - not unlike our own.

The book is divided into ecclesiastical, legal, letters, chronicles, biography, conduct books, literary and medical writings to enable students to find sources relevant for their courses by theme. The sources range from well-known texts such as the letters of Abelard and Heloise, Beowulf and the Canterbury Tales to less familiar sources such as Hincmar of Rheims, Gratian, Peter Damian and Gregory IX, Ibn Hazm's The Ring of the Dove and Boccaccio's De mulieribus Claris. Providing students with a range of examples to use in their seminars and essays. This second edition has been revised throughout to include the literature published since the first edition and expanded to include additional material from European, Jewish and Muslim sources as well as additional material on same-sex relations such as the same-sex marriage rituals. Providing students with the latest debates and sources appropriate for how the field has progressed to inspire them in taking the field forward themselves.

The Exorcist of Sombor examines the life course, practice and mentality of an eighteenth-century Franciscan friar, based on his own letters and documentation, creating a frame around the tightly packed history of events that took place between 1766-1769, and analysing the series of exorcism scandals that erupted in the Hungarian town of Sombor, from the perspectives of social history and cultural history. The author employs a method which reflects historical anthropology, the history of ideas and the influence of Italian microhistory. Based on the activity of an exorcist priest in the early modern period, the documents of the ecclesiastical courts and a considerable body of autograph correspondence are thoroughly examined. Analysing these letters gives the reader a chance to come into close proximity with the way of thinking of a person from the eighteenth century. The research questions in connection to the documentation aim to identify the causes for the conflict. How was it possible to have "correct" and "wrong" methods of exorcism within the practice of one and the same church? What sort of criteria were used when certain previously accepted practices were dubbed superstitious in the second half of the eighteenth century? What were the changes that took place in the attitude of priests and friars within the ecclesiastical society of the period? How can a conflict be focussed on a practice (healing by exorcism) which has roots going back thousands of years? How many different variants of demonology existed in the clerical thinking of the age? As a highly accomplished source analysis within microhistory, The Exorcist of Sombor will be of great interest to early modern historians, anthropologists and culture researchers interested in microhistory and themes such as religion, magic, occultism and witchcraft.

A unique and vivid first hand account of a young soldier, one of the millions who fought in World War I. Walter Williams volunteered at age fifteen and after completing his initial training in Shrewsbury, passed through the notorious training camp at Etaples before being plunged into the horrors of trench warfare. He fought in some of the major battles of the war including Passchendaele, the Somme and Vimy Ridge - and was badly wounded during the final attack on the Hindenburg line in September 1918, when he was hit by machine-gun fire from an enemy plane. After spending some months in a French hospital in Dieppe, he was repatriated to England where he made a full recovery. Walter's story was captured on an ancient reel-to-reel tape recorder during long conversations with his two nephews, Michael and Derek, who went on to research and verify the events he described before producing this remarkable story. Walter died in 1998, by which time he was one of the last veterans of World War I.

Modern society has a negative view of youth as a period of storm and stress, but at the same time cherishes the idea of eternal youth. How does this compare with ancient Roman society? Did a phase of youth exist there with its own characteristics? How was youth appreciated? This book studies the lives and the image of youngsters (around 15-25 years of age) in the Latin West and the Greek East in the Roman period. Boys and girls of all social classes come to the fore; their lives, public and private, are sketched with the help of a range of textual and documentary sources, while the authors also employ the results of recent neuropsychological research. The result is a highly readable and wide-ranging account of how the crucial transition between childhood and adulthood operated in the Roman world.

Russians from all walks of life poured into the streets of the imperial capital after the February Revolution of 1917, joyously celebrating the end of Tsar Nicholas II's monarchy. One year later, with Lenin's Bolsheviks now in power, Petrograd's deserted streets presented a very different scene. No celebrations marked the Revolution's anniversary. Amid widespread civil strife and lawlessness, a fearful citizenry stayed out of sight. In Crime and Punishment in the Russian Revolution, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa offers a new perspective on Russia's revolutionary year through the lens of violent crime and its devastating effect on ordinary people. When the Provisional Government assumed power after Nicholas II's abdication, it set about instituting liberal reforms, including eliminating the tsar's regular police. But dissolving this much-hated yet efficient police force and replacing it with a new municipal police led rapidly to the breakdown of order and services. Amid the chaos, crime flourished. Gangs of criminals, deserters, and hooligans brazenly roamed the streets. Mass prison escapes became common. And vigilantism spread widely as ordinary citizens felt compelled to take the law into their own hands, often meting out mob justice on suspected wrongdoers. The Bolsheviks swept into power in the October Revolution but had no practical plans to reestablish order. As crime continued to escalate and violent alcohol riots almost drowned the revolutionary regime, they redefined it as "counterrevolutionary activity," to be dealt with by the secret police, whose harshly repressive, extralegal means of enforcement helped pave the way for a Communist dictatorship.

This is a study of the intense, complex, and escalating debate over sexuality and sexual morality that roiled politics in Germany between 1880 and 1914. That debate was grounded in the rapid evolution and growing complexity of German society - the multiplication of cultural groupings, professional associations, and social movements; the emergence of new social groups, social milieus, and professions; the rapid development of the media and commercial entertainments; and so on. All parties involved understood it to be a debate over the most fundamental question of modern political life: how to secure both national power and individual freedom in the context of rapid social and cultural change.

Based on rigorous film-analysis and historical comparisons, this book explorers the narrative filmmakers create by summarising complex historical issues, but which can lead to misconceptions about the past. Analysis of films such as Alexander Nevsky, Kryzact (1960)-also known as Knights of the Teutonic Order, The Black Knight, El Cid, The Great Warrior Skanderberg, Braveheart, The Seventh Seal, Spartacus, Gladiator, Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Saladin, Kingdom of Heaven and 300 offers students a broad range of examples to consider alongside the history of antiquity and medieval Europe. This book explores how the past is portrayed in the present and offers students and general readers a framework to unpick 'historical' films to see how the facts are woven into fiction.

In this highly provocative and documented book, Thibault Muzergues describes how war in Europe is now more likely than it has been for at least the past 30 years, how it might come back to Europe and what Europeans can do to avoid getting drawn again in fratricide conflicts. Many consider Europe a continent of peace, with NATO guaranteeing its security and the EU providing the political glue for a Europe Whole and Free. But what if this was not the case anymore? What if, after a decade of crisis, today's Europe was much more fragile than we thought? The author challenges our assumptions about peace in Europe and forces us to face the realities of a world that has become much more dangerous. Far from being apocalyptic, this book serves as an advance warning to the dangers, both internal and external that are now closing in on Europe - and suggests solutions to avoid them. This book will be key reading for those interested in European politics and history, the European Union, security, and strategic studies, and more broadly to current affairs and international relations.

Provides a comprehensive survey of the medical world of the European sixteenth century and clearly explains to students what medicine was and the impact of changes in society such as the print revolution, the Reformation, and the opening-up of new worlds had on medical ideas and practices allowing them to see how the history of medicine (and early modern Europe) was shaped over the course of the century. The chapters in the book explore topics such as new worlds, new drugs and new diseases, urban health, different roles in medicine for men and women, medical communication, the recovery of ancient medicine, religion and medicine and the patient experience providing students with a fascinating overview of medicine, in the broadest sense, in the sixteenth century By including material from Germany and Spain, as well as from a large range of unfamiliar authors, this book offers many new insights into the way in which European medicine was studied, practised and challenged in the age of Leonardo, Vesalius and Paracelsus.

Provides a comprehensive survey of the medical world of the European sixteenth century and clearly explains to students what medicine was and the impact of changes in society such as the print revolution, the Reformation, and the opening-up of new worlds had on medical ideas and practices allowing them to see how the history of medicine (and early modern Europe) was shaped over the course of the century. The chapters in the book explore topics such as new worlds, new drugs and new diseases, urban health, different roles in medicine for men and women, medical communication, the recovery of ancient medicine, religion and medicine and the patient experience providing students with a fascinating overview of medicine, in the broadest sense, in the sixteenth century By including material from Germany and Spain, as well as from a large range of unfamiliar authors, this book offers many new insights into the way in which European medicine was studied, practised and challenged in the age of Leonardo, Vesalius and Paracelsus.