Books in the Routledge Research in Early Modern History series

The Enlightenment brought forth the idea that the future was uncertain and could be shaped by human beings. Those who sought support for their plans needed to reflect, develop new arguments, and offer new reasons to address an anonymous public. This book explores these "languages of reform."

This book examines the role of women in Jewish family negotiations, using the setting of Italy from the end of the Renaissance to the Baroque. In ghettos at night and under the scrutiny of inquisitions, Jews flourished. Life and learning were enriched by Jews from the Iberian Peninsula, the Ottoman Empire, transalpine Europe, west and east, and Catholic neighbors. Rabbinic discourse represented conflicting customs in family formation and dissolution, especially at moments of crisis for women: forced betrothal; physical, mental and financial abuse; polygamy, and abandonment. In this book, case studies illustrate the ambiguity, drama, and danger to which women were exposed, as well as opportunities to make their voices heard and to extricate themselves from situations by forcing a divorce, collecting or seizing assets, and going to Catholic notaries to bequeath their assets outside traditional inheritance, often to other women.  Despite intrusion by rabbis, their ability for coercion was limited, and their threats of punishments reflected the rhetoric of weakness rather than realistic options for implementation. The focus of this text is not what the law says, but rather how it enabled individual Jews, especially women, to speak and to act.

Authorities ranging from philosophers to politicians nowadays question the existence of concepts of society, whether in the present or the past. This book argues that social concepts most definitely existed in late medieval and early modern England, laying the foundations for modern models of society. The book analyzes social paradigms and how they changed in the period. A pervasive medieval model was the "body social," which imagined a society of three estates ΓÇô the clergy, the nobility, and the commonalty ΓÇô conjoined by interdependent functions, arranged in static hierarchies based upon birth, and rejecting wealth and championing poverty. Another model the book describes as "social humanist," that fundamentally questioned the body social, advancing merit over birth, mobility over stasis, and wealth over poverty. The theory of the body social was vigorously articulated between the 1480s and the 1550s. Parts of the old metaphor actually survived beyond 1550, but alternative models of social humanist thought challenged the body concept in the period, advancing a novel paradigm of merit, mobility, and wealth. The bookΓÇÖs methodology focuses on the intellectual context of a variety of contemporary texts.

This volume explores the complex and fascinating social, cultural and confessional relations in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (1795) through close readings of newly discovered or long neglected sources, emphasizing urban and rural spaces, families, communities, networks and travels.

How did exile impact an early modern writer's personal and national identity? This project explores that and other questions in a series of case studies drawn from early modern English texts. It traces the development of a phenomenon called the "mind of exile" and engages in a study of marginalization's impact on English literary consciousness.

This volume investigates the history of the representative assemblies of Sweden (the riksdag), Poland (the sejm) and Hungary (the diaeta) in the final period of the ancien régime. It concentrates on the practices and ideas of parliamentarism and constitutionalism, and examines the ideologies that motivated the members of these parliaments. Attempts at the suppression as well as the restoration of the estates' power in all these three countries are examined, as well as, in the case of Hungary, the establishment of popular representation that eventually replaced the estates. These three early modern representative assemblies have never before been explored systematically in a comparative framework.

"Originally published in Italian as Il governo della lettura: chiesa e libri nell'Italia del Settecento; Bologna: Il Mulino, 2007"--Title page verso.

This book analyzes conversion as the acquisition of a set of historically contingent social practices, which facilitated the process of social, political or religious acculturation. Exploring the role conversion played in the fabrication of cosmopolitan Mediterranean identities, the book examines the idea of the convert as a mediator and translator between cultures.

Honourable Intentions? compares the significance and strategic use of ideas of honour in two colonial societies, the Cape Colony and the early British settlements in Australia, between 1750 and 1850. In both regions swirled a free, and often transient, population of emigrants with diverse backgrounds and transnational experiences. The contributors explore the transmutations and yet resilience of concepts of honour in the face of radical challenges posed by commercialisation, democratisation and the experiences of colonization, to explain how during these times of flux, concepts of honour and status were radically reconstructed.