Books in the Early Modern History: Society and Culture series

For German townsmen, life during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was characterized by a culture of arms, with urban citizenry representing the armed power of the state. This book investigates how men were socialized to the martial ethic from all sides, and how masculine identity was confirmed with blades and guns.

Renaissance map-makers produced ever more accurate descriptions of geography, which were also beautiful works of art. They filled the oceans Europeans were exploring with ships and to describe the real ships which were the newest and best products of technology. Above all the ships were there to show the European conquest of the seas of the world.

The history of the Aztecs has been haunted by the spectre of human sacrifice. Reinvesting the Aztecs with a humanity frequently denied to them, and exploring their spectacular religious violence as a comprehensible element of life, this book integrates a fresh interpretation of gender with an innovative study of the everyday life of the Aztecs.

This timely study analyses the seventeenth-century revival of monasticism by English women who founded convents in France and the Low Countries.

The idea that the Renaissance witnessed the emergence of the modern individual remains a powerful myth. In this important new book Martin examines the Renaissance self with attention to both social history and literary theory and offers a new typology of Renaissance selfhood which was at once collective, performative and porous.

This book examines drinking and attitudes to alcohol consumption in late medieval and early modern England, France, and Italy, especially as they related to sexual and violent behavior and to gender relations.

The author studies the cheap printed literature which was read in eighteenth and nineteenth century Ireland and the cultures of its audience. By addressing questions such as the language shift and the unique social configuration of Ireland in this period, it adds a new dimension to the growing body of studies of popular culture in Europe.

In 1598 a man - branded the Calabrian Charlatan by his Spanish opponents - appeared in Venice claiming to be King Sebastian, the Portuguese monarch who disappeared in battle some twenty years before.

What did it mean to be mad in seventeenth-century England? This book uses vivid autobiographical accounts of mental disorder to explore the ways madness was identified and experienced from the inside, asking how certain people came to be defined as insane, and what we can learn from the accounts they wrote.

Koslofsky examines the human encounter with death in Germany from the eve of the Reformation to the rise of Pietism. By drawing on anthropological interpretations of death ritual, this study explores the changing relationships between the body, the soul, the living and the dead in the daily life of early modern Germany.

This book examines the effects of alcohol on gender relations in traditional Europe, focussing on England, France, and Italy in the late medieval and early modern periods, roughly 1300 to 1700.

In the 19th century, Alessandro Manzoni dedicated himself to writing the novel I promessi sposi that encouraged the Italian Risorgimento. This book traces how the renowned novelist was inspired by an event that occurred at the beginning of the 17th century, which he came to know about thanks to the secret collaboration of a Venetian archivist.

This compelling new study examines the intersection between women, religion and politics in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century in Britain. It demonstrates that what inspired Dissenting and Anglican women to political action was their concern for the survival of the Protestant religion both at home and abroad.

This innovative urban history of Dublin explores the symbols and spaces of the Irish capital between the Restoration in 1660 and the advent of neoclassical public architecture in the 1770s. The meanings ascribed to statues, churches, houses, and public buildings are traced in detail, using a wide range of visual and written sources.

In Renaissance Europe, when 'leisure classes' used social gathering to define civility and the commercialization of leisure was beginning, the human need for recreation became a cultural topos. the spectrum of leisure activities, often gender-specific or appropriate to particular social groups; and the visual representation of leisure.

Hailed as early Christian texts as important as the Dead Sea Scrolls, yet condemned by the Vatican as Islamic heresies, the Lead books of Granada, written on discs of lead and unearthed on a Granadan hillside, weave a mysterious tale of duplicity and daring set in the religious crucible of sixteenth-century Spain.

It is a major argument of the book that money was used only in a limited number of exchanges, and that credit in terms of household reputation, was a 'cultural currency' of trust used to transact most business.

Offering the first comparative survey of public houses in pre-industrial Europe and drawing on a vast range of primary sources, this study establishes inns and taverns as principal communication sites in local communities. Contested and continuously renegotiated, they catered for basic human needs as well as infinite forms of social exchange.

What did it mean to be mad in seventeenth-century England? This book uses vivid autobiographical accounts of mental disorder to explore the ways madness was identified and experienced from the inside, asking how certain people came to be defined as insane, and what we can learn from the accounts they wrote.

The story of conflict in an island community offers a valuable case study for the analysis of early modern German political culture.

This is a study of the social and cultural implications of the growth of governance in England in the century after 1550. and analyses litigation, arbitration, social welfare, criminal justice, moral regulation and parochial analyses administration as manifestations of the increasing role of the state in early modern England.

Here are explored the actual extent of Barbary Coast slavery, the dynamic relationship between master and slave, and the effects of this slaving on Italy, one of the slave takers' primary targets and victims.

This book reconstructs the worldview of a Lutheran merchant from the city of Augsburg in the seventeenth century. Yet, despite its individual focus, the book explores universal institutions of early modern Europe: patriarchy, hierarchy, honor, community, and confession.

Koslofsky examines the human encounter with death in Germany from the eve of the Reformation to the rise of Pietism. By drawing on anthropological interpretations of death ritual, this study explores the changing relationships between the body, the soul, the living and the dead in the daily life of early modern Germany.

This study reveals the more complex reality of Early Modern Naples than what has commonly been represented, in which royal representatives in the city came to depend on the assistance of a series of merchants, financiers, and bureaucrats who shared a common identity as conversos, descendants of converted Jews.

Accounting for Affection examines the multifaceted nature of early modern motherhood by focusing on the ideas and strategies of Roman aristocratic mothers during familial conflict. Illuminating new approaches to the maternal and the familial employed by such women, it demonstrates how interventions gained increasing favor in early modern Rome.

A unique study of how syphilis, better known as the French disease in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, became so widespread and embedded in the society, culture and institutions of early modern Venice due to the pattern of sexual relations that developed from restrictive marital customs, widespread migration and male privilege.

This book reconstructs the worldview of a Lutheran merchant from the city of Augsburg in the seventeenth century. Yet, despite its individual focus, the book explores universal institutions of early modern Europe: patriarchy, hierarchy, honor, community, and confession.

It is a major argument of the book that money was used only in a limited number of exchanges, and that credit in terms of household reputation, was a 'cultural currency' of trust used to transact most business.