Kategoria BISAC: History >> Modern - 17th Century

In this essay from 1614, the Neo-Latin poet, translator, and commentator John Barclay describes the manners and mores of his European contemporaries. He derives the sources of an individual's peculiarities of behavior and temperament from the "genius" the individual character created by each person's upbringing, time of life, and profession. Barclay likewise describes each nation's genius, its national character, and provides some of the geographical and historical background from which he claims this genius arose. The essay is a valuable study, not only for the illustration it offers of a...

The Habsburg Court of Brussels remains one of the few early modern princely courts that have never been thoroughly studied by historians. Yet it offers a unique case, particularly with regard to the first decades of the seventeenth century. Once home to the Dukes of Burgundy, the ancient palace on the Coudenberg hill in Brussels became the principal residence of the Habsburg governors in the Low Countries and, in the period 1598 1621, that of Archduke Albert and his wife, the Spanish Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia. Eager to reassert the dynasty's authority in these parts, the Archdukes...

Armed with pistols and wearing jackboots, Bishop Henry Compton rode out in 1688 against his King but in defence of the Church of England and its bishops. His actions are a dramatic but telling indication of what was at stake for bishops in early modern England and Compton's action at the height of the Restoration was the culmination of more than a century and a half of religious controversy that engulfed bishops. Bishops were among the most important instruments of royal, religious, national and local authority in seventeenth-century England. While their actions and ideas trickled down to...

This collection of essays studies the expression and diffusion of radical ideas in Britain from the period of the English Revolution in the mid-seventeenth century to the Romantic Revolution in the early nineteenth century. It covers almost two hundred years of radical history and literature and aims to establish transnational parallels as well as trace transhistorical continuities between forms and vehicles of radicalism. The essays included in the volume explore the modes of articulation and dissemination of radical ideas in the period by focusing on actors ('radical voices') and a...

For nearly two centuries Spain was the world s most influential nation, dominant in Europe and with authority over immense territories in America and the Pacific. Because none of this was achieved by its own economic or military resources, Henry Kamen sets out to explain how it achieved the unexpected status of world power, and examines political events and foreign policy through the reigns of each of the nation s rulers, from Ferdinand and Isabella at the end of the fifteenth century to Philip V in the 1700s.

He explores the distinctive features that made up the Spanish experience,...

A new international maritime order was forged in the early modern age, yet until now histories of the period have dealt almost exclusively with the Atlantic and Indian oceans. Catholic Pirates and Greek Merchants shifts attention to the Mediterranean, providing a major history of an important but neglected sphere of the early modern maritime world, and upending the conventional view of the Mediterranean as a religious frontier where Christians and Muslims met to do battle.

Molly Greene investigates the conflicts between the Catholic pirates of Malta--the Knights of St....

In the 1930s and 1940s, the military historian and strategic analyst Basil Liddell Hart developed the British 'Way in Warfare' thesis, which characterised British practice in warfare as a 'naval body' with two arms - one financial, expressed through trade, and the other military, comprising the deployment of combined army-naval operations. Though this theory has been the subject of much criticism, Reassessing the British Way in Warfare offers a much needed re-evaluation of its merits during the reigns of William and Anne.

By examining the origins, progress and consequences of...