Valerius Maximus was an indefatigable collector of historical anecdotes illustrating vice and virtue. His Memorable Deeds and Sayings are unparalleled as a source for the opinions of Romans in the early empire on a vast range of subjects.
Mueller focuses on what Valerius can tell us about contemporary Roman attitudes to religion, attacking several orthodoxies along the way. He argues that Roman religion could be deeply emotional. That it was possible to believe passionately in the divinity of the emperor - even when, like Tiberius, he was still alive - and that Rome's gods and religious rituals had an important role in fostering conventional morality.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203463269

Judging Faith, Punishing Sin breaks new ground by offering the first comparative treatment of Catholic inquisitions and Calvinist consistories, offering scholars a new framework for analysing religious reform and social discipline in the great Christian age of reformation. Global in scope, both institutions played critical roles in prosecuting deviance, implementing religious uniformity, and promoting moral discipline in the social upheaval of the Reformation. Rooted in local archives and addressing specific themes, the essays survey the state of scholarship and chart directions for future inquiry and, taken as a whole, demonstrate the unique convergence of penitential practice, legal innovation, church authority, and state power, and how these forces transformed Christianity. Bringing together leading scholars across four continents, this volume is an invaluable contribution to our understanding of religion in the early modern world. University students and scholars alike will appreciate its clear introduction to scholarly debates and cutting edge scholarship.

When originally published in 1987, this book was hailed as a landmark in the study of the Roman World. Now back in print with a new preface by the author, it is still the most comprehensive survey of the Roman World available. Ranging from the founding of Rome in the eighth century BC, and throughout the Empire and beyond this book will continue to be an essential resource on the subject for many years to come.

Sparta is one of the best-documented states of ancient Greece. Its political and social systems have fascinated and perplexed generations of classical scholars, as well as having a powerful influence on European civilization to this day. In this fully revised and updated edition of his groundbreaking study, Paul Cartledge uncovers the realities behind the potent myth of Sparta.
The book explores both the city-state of Sparta and the territory of Lakonia which it unified and exploited. Combining the more traditional written sources with archaeological and environmental perspectives, its coverage extends from the apogee of Mycenaean culture, to Sparta's crucial defeat at the battle of Mantinea in 362 BC.

A new global history of Fordism from the Great Depression to the postwar era As the United States rose to ascendancy in the first decades of the twentieth century, observers abroad associated American economic power most directly with its burgeoning automobile industry. In the 1930s, in a bid to emulate and challenge America, engineers from across the world flocked to Detroit. Chief among them were Nazi and Soviet specialists who sought to study, copy, and sometimes steal the techniques of American automotive mass production, or Fordism. Forging Global Fordism traces how Germany and the Soviet Union embraced Fordism amid widespread economic crisis and ideological turmoil. This incisive book recovers the crucial role of activist states in global industrial transformations and reconceives the global thirties as an era of intense competitive development, providing a new genealogy of the postwar industrial order. Stefan Link uncovers the forgotten origins of Fordism in Midwestern populism, and shows how Henry Ford's antiliberal vision of society appealed to both the Soviet and Nazi regimes. He explores how they positioned themselves as America's antagonists in reaction to growing American hegemony and seismic shifts in the global economy during the interwar years, and shows how Detroit visitors like William Werner, Ferdinand Porsche, and Stepan Dybets helped spread versions of Fordism abroad and mobilize them in total war. Forging Global Fordism challenges the notion that global mass production was a product of post-World War II liberal internationalism, demonstrating how it first began in the global thirties, and how the spread of Fordism had a distinctly illiberal trajectory.

As an essential companion to Plato's Apology and Crito this book provides valuable historical and cultural context for our understanding of the trial of Socrates. The complexity and significance of the trial is illuminated through discussion of such important elements as the nature of Athenian democracy, the polis ideal, Greek shame culture, Athenian religion, civil disobedience, and Socrates' rejection of politics.
Colaiaco's approach is unique because he does justice both to Socrates and to Athens by demonstrating their individual strengths and weaknesses - and ultimately, their tragic incompatibility. Another highlight is that he provides a comprehensive picture of this conflict - essentially Socrates' radical challenge to traditional Athenian values - within the necessary historical and cultural context so that readers are better able to grasp the complexity and significance inherent to this trial.

This book is a collection of milestone articles of a leading scholar in the study of the Norman Kingdom of Sicily, a crossroads of Latin-Christian, Greek-Byzantine, and Arab-Islamic cultures and one of the most fascinating but also one of the most neglected kingdoms in the medieval world. Some of his articles were published in influential journals such as English Historical Review, Viator, Mediterranean Historical Review, and Papers of the British School at Rome, while others appeared in hard-to-obtain festschrifts, proceedings of international conferences, and so on. The articles included here, based on analysis of Latin, Greek, and Arabic documents as well as multi-lingual parchments, explore subjects of interest in medieval Mediterranean world such as Norman administrations, multi-cultural courts, Christian-Muslim diplomacy, conquests and migrations, religious tolerance and conflicts, cross-cultural contacts, and so forth. Some of them dig deep into curious specific topics, while others settle disputes among scholars and correct our antiquated interpretations. His attention to the administrative structure of the kingdom of Sicily, whose bureaucracy was staffed by Greeks, Muslims and Latins, has been a particularly important part of his work, where he has engaged in major debates with other scholars in the field.

Brand new resources for Edexcel A level History

Exam Board: Edexcel Level: A level Subject: History First teaching: September 2015 First exams: June 2017 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 both AS and 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.

The Great Christian Jurists series comprises a library of national volumes of detailed biographies of leading jurists, judges and practitioners, assessing the impact of their Christian faith on the professional output of the individuals studied. Spanish legal culture, developed during the Spanish Golden Age, has had a significant influence on the legal norms and institutions that emerged in Europe and in Latin America. This volume examines the lives of twenty key personalities in Spanish legal history, in particular how their Christian faith was a factor in molding the evolution of law. Each chapter discusses a jurist within his or her intellectual and political context. All chapters have been written by distinguished legal scholars from Spain and around the world. This diversity of international and methodological perspectives gives the volume its unique character; it will appeal to scholars, lawyers, and students interested in the interplay between religion and law.

Brand new resources for Edexcel A level History

This business history analyzes the connections between private business, disarmament, and re-armament as they affected arms procurement and military technology transfers in Eastern Europe from 1919 to 1939. Rather than focusing on the negotiations or the political problems involved with the Disarmament Conferences, this study concerns itself with the business effects of the disarmament discussions. Accordingly, Schneider-Creusot, Skoda, Vickers, and their respective business activities in Eastern European markets serve as the chief subjects for this book, and the core primary sources relied upon include their unpublished corporate archival documents. Shifting the scope of analysis to consider the business dimension allows for a fresh appraisal of the linkages between the arms trade, disarmament, and re-armament. The business approach also explodes the myth of the 'merchants of death' from the inside. It concludes by tracing the armaments business between 1939 and 1941 as it transitioned from peacetime to war.

Are Europe's 'Christian values' under threat? Can religion be a pillar of identity and culture? What will be the fate of Christianity in Europe? In this short but bracing book, Olivier Roy traces the Church's long battle against a tide of secularization in Europe. Since the Enlightenment, religion has been losing ground as the source of moral norms. But while the question of truth was contested, Christian values continued to define law and social life in even the most secular and anti-clerical countries--until the 1960s. Ever since, the Church has been swept into a new war of values, reduced to struggling over abortion and same-sex marriage. Mired in scandal, the Church's authority is crumbling, while populist demands pave the way for the final secularization of religion as part of 'national culture'. From one of the most acute observers of our times, 'Is Europe Christian?' represents a persuasive and novel vision of religion's place today.

Brand new resources for Edexcel A level History

'George Grote was one of the most remarkable minds of the early Victorian age Routledge's reissue prefaced with an illuminating new introduction by Paul Cartledge, provides the best chance that there is likely to be of bringing him to a modern readership.' - Richard Jenkins, London Review of Books

An essential introduction to the major political problems, debates and conflicts which are central to the history of the Third Republic in France, from the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 to the fall of France in June 1940.
It provides original sources, detailed commentary and helpful chronologies and bibliographies on topics including:
* the emergence of the regime and the Paris Commune of 1871
* Franco-German relations
* anti-Semitism and the Dreyfus Affair
* the role of women and the importance of the national birth-rate
* the character of the French Right and of French fascism.

Examines Kaiser Wilhelm's political career, from the Hohenzollern court, through the turbulent peacetime decades of the Wilhelmine era, into global war and exile.

Kaiser Wilhelm II is one of the key figures in the history of twentieth-century Europe. He was King of Prussia and German emperor from 1888 to the collapse of Germany in 1918 and a crucial player in the events that led to the outbreak of World War I. Kaiser Wilhelm II presents a new interpretation of this controversial monarch and assesses the impact on Germany of his forty-year reign.

Specially written for the AS/A2 examinations, this book combines extended period cover with detailed focus on exam board-selected topics. The lively, accessible text is supplemented by Spotlights, providing detailed study of sources on key issues and topics, and Document Exercises, which offer opportunities for assessment and exam practice. Covering almost 150 years between unification and reunification, with a particular emphasis on the interwar years, the text encourages students to think for themselves around the issues that have affected German history during this period and to consider important historical debates and controversies.

Czechoslovakia has captured the nation's imagination throughout the twentieth century. The Allied betrayal of the country to Nazi Germany in 1938 was to demonstrate the appalling consequences of naive appeasement of aggression. The wholesale reform of Soviet communism in the Prague Spring of 1968 won western support, and sympathy when it was crushed by Warsaw Pact tanks. The fierce communist regime thereafter was brought down almost magically in 1989. Czechoslovakia added to the international political vocabulary the term, 'Velvet Revolution', and the velvet metaphor has characterised much of the country's path-breaking postcommunist transformation and its peaceful break-up in 1993.
In separate chapters on history, politics, economics, foreign relations and the new Czech identity, this book not only applauds the successes of the Czech Republic since 1993, but also uncovers the frayed edges of the velvet nation.

This new edition of Norman Davies's classic study of the history of Poland has been revised and fully updated with two new chapters to bring the story to the end of the twentieth century. The writing of Polish history, like Poland itself, has frequently fallen prey to interested parties. Professor Norman Davies adopts a sceptical stance towards all existing interpretations and attempts to bring a strong dose of common sense to his theme. He presents the most comprehensive survey in English of this frequently maligned and usually misunderstood country.

During the Second World War, the German occupiers built a coastal defence line along the Dutch, Belgian and French seaboards. The Atlantic Wall was designed to protect the Reich against an Allied invasion. Yet the coastal population suddenly found itself living in a Sperrgebiet of immense strategic importance, as a result of which the dunes and the beaches became no-go zones. Despite the countless restrictions, the rationing and curfews, blackouts, air raids, conscriptions and evacuations, the residents of the coast tried to continue life as normal. The result of a prestigious two-year European research project, Occupied Coast chronicles life behind the Atlantic Wall, from the outbreak of war in 1940 until D-Day. Drawing on over one hundred Belgian, French, Dutch, British and German testimonies, four historians describe the wartime experiences of the coastal population and the impact of the Atlantic Wall upon daily life.

This Very Short Introduction offers a powerfully-written explanation of the war's complex origins and course, and explores its impact on a personal and international scale. It also provides an ethical reflection on the war in the context of Europe's tumultuous twentieth century, highlighting why it has inspired some of the greatest writers of our time, and how it continues to resonate today in Britain, continental Europe, and beyond. Throughout the book, the focus is on the war as an arena of social change where ideas about culture were forged or resisted, and in which both Spaniards and non-Spaniards participated alike. These were conflicts that during the Second World War would stretch from Franco's regime, which envisaged itself as part of the Nazi new order, to Europe and beyond. Accordingly, this book examines Spanish participation in European resistance movements during World War II and also the ongoing civil war waged politically, economically, judicially and culturally inside Spain by Francoism after its military victory in 1939. History writing itself became a battleground and the book charts the Franco regime's attempt to appropriate the past. It also indicates its ultimate failure - as evident in new writings on the war and, above all, in the return of Republican memory now occurring in Spain during the opening years of the twenty-first century. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

For nearly a century, conventional historians have depicted Germany as a rabidly nationalist land, born in a sea of aggression, its nineteenth-century ascent accompanied by militarism and brought to a murderous apex in the Third Reich. Not so, asserts Helmut Walser Smith, who, beginning in 1500, reveals pacific conceptions of the nation and allows us to see the Nazis' extreme form of nationalism not as the dark culmination point of German history but as an essential episode in Germany's centuries-long history of continually conceiving the nation in radically different ways. Whether chronicling the Thirty Years War, the German Enlightenment, the Weimar Republic, the Holocaust or the era of Angela Merkel, Smith has created a new standard for the twenty-first-century.

This book offers a wide-ranging introduction to the way that art was made, valued, and viewed in northern Europe in the age of the Renaissance, from the late fourteenth to the early years of the sixteenth century. Drawing on a rich range of sources, from inventories and guild regulations to poetry and chronicles, it examines everything from panel paintings to carved altarpieces.
While many little-known works are foregrounded, Susie Nash also presents new ways of viewing and understanding the more familiar, such as the paintings of Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, and Hans Memling, by considering the social and economic context of their creation and reception. Throughout, Nash challenges the perception that Italy was the European leader in artistic innovation at this time, demonstrating forcefully that Northern art, and particularly that of the Southern Netherlands, dominated visual culture throughout Europe in this crucial period.