Books in the Haney Foundation Series series

In 1573, the alchemist Anna Zieglerin gave her patron, the Duke of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, the recipe for an extraordinary substance she called the lion's blood. She claimed that this golden oil could stimulate the growth of plants, create gemstones, transform lead into the coveted philosophers' stone—and would serve a critical role in preparing for the Last Days. Boldly envisioning herself as a Protestant Virgin Mary, Anna proposed that the lion's blood, paired with her own body, could even generate life, repopulating and redeeming the corrupt world in its final moments.In Anna Zieglerin and the Lion's Blood, Tara Nummedal reconstructs the extraordinary career and historical afterlife of alchemist, courtier, and prophet Anna Zieglerin. She situates Anna's story within the wider frameworks of Reformation Germany's religious, political, and military battles; the rising influence of alchemy; the role of apocalyptic eschatology; and the position of women within these contexts. Together with her husband, the jester Heinrich Schombach, and their companion and fellow alchemist Philipp Sommering, Anna promised her patrons at the court of Wolfenbüttel spiritual salvation and material profit. But her compelling vision brought with it another, darker possibility: rather than granting her patrons wealth or redemption, Anna's alchemical gifts might instead lead to war, disgrace, and destruction. By 1575, three years after Anna's arrival at court, her enemies had succeeded in turning her from holy alchemist into poisoner and sorceress, culminating in Anna's arrest, torture, and public execution.In her own life, Anna was a master of self-fashioning; in the centuries since her death, her story has been continually refashioned, making her a fitting emblem for each new age. Interweaving the history of science, gender, religion, and politics, Nummedal recounts how one resourceful woman's alchemical schemes touched some of the most consequential matters in Reformation Germany.

Launched in 1609 as the greatest English merchant vessel of its era, the Trades Increase and nearly all who sailed it perished three years later on the far side of the world. This is the engrossing account of the ship's tragic expedition and global capitalism at its hour of emergence.

A sweeping assessment of the entire career of Frank Furness that features more than one hundred illustrations, George E. Thomas's book argues that modern American architecture, in design and genealogy, is rooted in the industrial culture of Philadelphia and the office of Frank Furness.

The Strangers Book explores how a constellation of nineteenth-century African American writers radically reframed the terms of humanism by redefining what it meant to be a stranger.

Republican Character examines the role of temperament, personality, character, and leadership ability in political success. Donald T. Critchlow compares the strengths and weaknesses of four key Republicans-Richard Nixon, Nelson Rockefeller, Barry Goldwater, and Ronald Reagan-as well as the uneasy alliances that arose between them.

In Knowing Fictions, Barbara Fuchs engages the picaresque as a set of literary strategies that interrogate the mechanisms of truth-telling itself and shows how picaresque texts effectively encouraged readers to adopt a critical stance toward the truth claims implicit in the forms of authoritative discourse proliferating in Imperial Spain.

In Nuclear Country, Catherine McNicol Stock explores the question of why, between 1968 and 1992, most voters in the Dakotas abandoned their distinctive ideological heritage and came to embrace the New Right. Stock focuses on how this transformation coincided with the coming of the military and national security states to the countryside.

Through in-depth studies of composting and soil amendment, local food, winemaking, and hedgerows, Digging the Past illuminates how the seventeenth century continues to shape both material practices and popular ways of imagining and describing what farming should be and do.

In an exploration of antitheatrical incidents from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, Lisa A. Freeman demonstrates that at the heart of antitheatrical disputes lies a struggle over the character of the body politic that governs a nation and the bodies public that could be said to represent that nation.

Examining the writings of twentieth-century thinkers such as Raymond Aron, Isaiah Berlin, Norberto Bobbio, Michael Oakeshott, and Adam Michnik, Faces of Moderation argues that moderation remains crucial for today's encounters with new forms of extremism.

In Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child, Eileen Hunt Botting contends that Frankenstein is a profound work of speculative fiction designed to engage a radical moral and political question: do children have rights?

Holy War, Martyrdom, and Terror examines the ways Christian theology has shaped centuries of violence from Christianity's first centuries up to our own day, through the crusades, the French Revolution, and more recent American wars.

This book examines charisma as the force in art, literature, and film that engages the reader's or viewer's consciousness and inspires admiration and imitation. Thirteen chapters analyze the workings of charisma and its effects, ranging from Homer to Woody Allen.

As the first major study of Shakespeare's Birthplace during the nineteenth century, Shakespeare's Shrine draws on extensive archival research to describe the invention of the Birthplace in the Victorian period, when the site was purchased for the nation, extensively restored, and transformed into a major tourist attraction.

In Levinas's Politics, Annabel Herzog argues that Levinas's Talmudic readings embody a political pragmatism which complements, revises, and challenges the ethical analyses he offers in his phenomenological works.

Throughout his life, Niccolo Machiavelli's overriding central concerns were the present and future strength and independence of Florence. Presenting a wide sample of the many genres in which he wrote, this volume highlights and explores this underappreciated aspect of Machiavelli's intellectual preoccupations.

Presenting nineteen primary source documents, including lesser known texts by Machiavelli and Guicciardini, several of which are here translated into English for the first time, this useful compendium shows how the Renaissance political imagination can be productively applied to pressing civic questions.

Financial crises happen time and again in post-industrial economies—and they are extraordinarily damaging. Building on insights gleaned from many years of work in the banking industry and drawing on a vast trove of data, Richard Vague argues that such crises follow a pattern that makes them both predictable and avoidable.A Brief History of Doom examines a series of major crises over the past 200 years in the United States, Great Britain, Germany, France, Japan, and China—including the Great Depression and the economic meltdown of 2008. Vague demonstrates that the over-accumulation of private debt does a better job than any other variable of explaining and predicting financial crises. In a series of clear and gripping chapters, he shows that in each case the rapid growth of loans produced widespread overcapacity, which then led to the spread of bad loans and bank failures. This cycle, according to Vague, is the essence of financial crises and the script they invariably follow.The story of financial crisis is fundamentally the story of private debt and runaway lending. Convinced that we have it within our power to break the cycle, Vague provides the tools to enable politicians, bankers, and private citizens to recognize and respond to the danger signs before it begins again.

James Bernard Murphy challenges widely shared assumptions about personhood and its development through discrete stages, arguing they undermine our ability to see our lives as a whole. Drawing on classic and contemporary thinkers, Murphy argues that we live our whole lives as children, adolescents, and adults all at the same time.

Michael Davis explores the "musical" quality of thinking in the work of Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Plato, revealing the complex and profound ways in which they each plumbed the depths of reason's prerational foundations.

The essays collected in Between Utopia and Realism reflect on and refract Judith N. Shklar's major preoccupations throughout a lifetime of thinking and demonstrate the ways in which her work illuminates contemporary debates across political theory, international relations, and law.

Unfaithful places a distinctive view of adultery at the center of efforts to reform marriage in the nineteenth-century United States, connecting communitarians, free lovers, feminists, spiritualists, bohemians, and abolitionists who all challenged the restrictive legal institution of marriage.

In Heroines and Local Girls, Pamela L. Cheek explores the rise of women's writing as a distinct, transnational category in Britain and Europe over the long eighteenth century, characterized by stories about heroines who transcend their gendered destiny.

God's Internationalists is the first comprehensive study of World Vision, the largest Christian humanitarian organization in the world. David P. King explores how the organization rearticulated its Christian identity and expanded beyond traditional evangelism to become a leader in global relief and development.

Political Corruption considers the different ways in which a metaphor of impurity, disease, and dissolution was deployed by political philosophers from the Renaissance to the early twentieth century. It argues that speaking coherently about political corruption in our present moment requires a robust account of the good regime.

William Livingston's American Revolution explores how New Jersey's first governor guided the daily operations of a revolutionary-era government and examines the complex nature of the conflict, including the limits of patriot governance and the ways in which wartime experiences affected the creation of the Constitution.

In Wordsworth's Poetry, 1815-1845, Tim Fulford argues that Wordsworth's later work reveals an unexpectedly varied and innovative poet. Writing from the perspective of age, Wordsworth remodeled the poetry of his youth, creating a body of work that changed the terms of love poetry, political poetry, and the poetry of memorialization.

The Psychology of Inequality shows how amour-propre can be transformed into the demand for praise, whether or not one displays praiseworthy qualities, and demonstrates the ways in which this pathology continues to play a leading role in the psychology and politics of modern liberal democracies.

Fateful Transitions offers a new perspective on the debate about China's ascendance and the global power shift. The book examines how democratic nations have navigated the rise of other states from 1895 to the present and explains what today's leaders can learn from history.

Thomas Prendergast's Poetical Dust offers a provocative and far-reaching analysis of Poets' Corner. Covering nearly a thousand years of political and literary history, the book examines the chaotic, sometimes fitful process through which Britain has consecrated its poetry and poets.