"Furnishing the 18th Century "is a collection of original essays that delves into the history of furniture, examining every day items such as tea tables, jewelry boxes, dressers and sofas to uncover the social practices of the 18th century, including tea drinking, gambling, prostitution, conversation, and letter writing, both in Europe and in the colonies. The essays take serious consideration of what the furniture of one's house has to say about 18th century taste, social hierarchies, consumerism, gender, and even sex.

In this innovative volume, leading scholars examine the role of the body as a primary site of political signification in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France. Some essays focus on the sacralization of the king's body through a gendered textual and visual rhetoric. Others show how the monarchy mastered subjects' minds by disciplining the body through dance, music, drama, art, and social rituals. The last essays in the volume focus on the unmaking of the king's body and the substitution of a new, republican body. Throughout, the authors explore how race and gender shaped the body politic...

This volume, one of the books in the "Making of Modern Freedom" series, is a collection of essays by eminent historians who explore the relationship between state finance and political development in fifteenth and sixteenth century Europe. They analyze how during this period European states were engaged in nearly continuous warfare and how those warfares produced fiscal crises. As a result, rulers were forced to enter into novel fiscal agreements with their subjects, often providing their subjects more political power, in exchange.

The volume begins with two essays on England....

"Re-examining seventeenth-century French style"
Between 1678 and 1710, Parisian presses printed hundreds of images of elegantly attired men and women dressed in the latest "mode, "and posed to display every detail of their clothing and accessories. Long used to illustrate dress of the period, these fashion prints have been taken at face value and used uncritically. Drawing on perspectives from art history, costume history, French literature, museum conservation and theatrical costuming, the essays in this volume explore what the prints represent and what they reveal about fashion and...