France and England are often seen as monarchies standing at opposite ends of the spectrum of seventeenth-century European political culture. On the one hand the Bourbon monarchy took the high road to absolutism, while on the other the Stuarts never quite recovered from the diminution of their royal authority following the regicide of Charles I in 1649. However, both monarchies shared a common medieval heritage of sacral kingship, and their histories remained deeply entangled throughout the century. This study focuses on the interaction between ideas of monarchy and images of power in the two countries between the execution of Mary Queen of Scots and the Glorious Revolution. It demonstrates that even in periods when politics were seemingly secularized, as in France at the end of the Wars of Religion, and in latter seventeenth- century England, the appeal to religious images and values still lent legitimacy to royal authority by emphasizing the sacral aura or providential role which church and religion conferred on monarchs.

Relationships are the glue that holds the world together. As the author shows, this common belief applies to ancient Greece as much as to contemporary Aotearoa New Zealand. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, this anthropological study dedicates itself to the topic of friendship - this flexible type of sociality that has become increasingly significant in people's lives throughout the world. At the core stand the friendship conceptions and life-worlds of M?ori (the indigenous population) and Pakeha (the descendants of the predominately European settler population) actors in New Zealand. By tracing out people's "friendship worlds" in their wider societal context, the author takes up current debates surrounding issues of identity and sociality, indigeneity and diversity. By furthering our understanding of the social dynamics of friendship in New Zealand, the study not only contributes to the growing field of friendship research, it also reveals important implications for the understanding of group relations in a postcolonial, so-called "multicultural" society.