This wide-ranging study examines the role of the dream in medieval culture with reference to philosophical, legal and theological writings as well as literary and autobiographical works. Stephen Kruger studies the development of theories of dreaming, from the Neoplatonic and patristic writers to late medieval re-interpretations, and shows how these theories relate to autobiographical accounts and to more popular treatments of dreaming. He considers previously neglected material including one important dream vision by Nicole Oresme, and arrives at a new understanding of this literary genre,...

European dominance of the shipping lanes in the early modern period was a prelude to the great age of European imperial power, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet in the present age of a new global interdependence we can see that the pre-imperial age was in fact more an "age of partnership" or an "age of competition" when Westerners and Asians vied on even terms. The essays in this volume examine on a global basis the many different trading empires from the end of the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century.

This volume brings together the work of twenty scholars who have tried to examine the nature of the encounter between Europeans and the other peoples of the world from roughly 1450 to 1800, the Early Modern era. This volume is world-wide in scope but is unified by the central underlying theme that implicit understandings influence every culture's ideas about itself and others. These understandings, however, are changed by experience in a constantly shifting process in which both sides participate, and that makes such encounters complex historical events and moments of discovery.

The essays presented in this volume describe a phenomenon so widespread in human time and space that its importance is easily overlooked. City walls shaped the history of warfare; the mobilization of manpower and resources needed to build them favored some kinds of polities over others; and their massive strength, appropriately ornamented, created a visual language of authority. Chapters by historians and art historians explore how separate traditions throughout the world illustrate universal themes of defensive strategy and the symbolism of power, each time embedded in a distinctive local...

How did state power impinge on the religion of the common people? The contributing historians of this collection uncover the process of "confessionalization," or "acculturation," by which officials of state and church collaborated in ambitious programs of Protestant or Catholic reform. Thirteen essays reveal a spectrum of possibilities which early modern governments tried to achieve by regulating religious life, as well as how religious communities consequently evolved in new directions.

The essays presented in this volume describe a phenomenon so widespread in human time and space that its importance is easily overlooked. City walls shaped the history of warfare; the mobilization of manpower and resources needed to build them favored some kinds of polities over others; and their massive strength, appropriately ornamented, created a visual language of authority. Chapters by historians and art historians explore how separate traditions throughout the world illustrate universal themes of defensive strategy and the symbolism of power, each time embedded in a distinctive local...

How did state power impinge on the religion of the common people? The contributing historians of this collection uncover the process of "confessionalization," or "acculturation," by which officials of state and church collaborated in ambitious programs of Protestant or Catholic reform. Thirteen essays reveal a spectrum of possibilities which early modern governments tried to achieve by regulating religious life, as well as how religious communities consequently evolved in new directions.