Explore the vast range of titles available.

\"This book contains thirteen original essays about Puritan culture in colonial New England. Prompted by the growing interest in secular studies, as well as postnational, transnational, and postcolonial critique in the humanities, American Literature and the New Puritan Studies seeks to represent and advance contemporary interest in a field long recognized, however problematically, as foundational to the study of American literature. It invites readers of American literature and culture to reconsider the role of seventeenth-century Puritanism in the creation of the United States of America and its consequent cultural and literary histories. It also records the significant transformation in the field of Puritan studies that has taken place in the last quarter century. In addition to re-reading well known texts of seventeenth-century Puritan New England, the volume contains essays focused on unknown or lesser studied events and texts, as well as new scholarship on post-Puritan archives, monuments, and historiography\"-- Provided by publisher.

In accounting for the rapid development of American obstetrics as a hegemonic profession, we tend to locate a rupture in the eighteenth century that was brought about by the importation of European technologies, such as the forceps, but in fact the groundwork for such dramatic change was laid in advance of these developments, and within the context of gendered power struggles. The tools that found their way into the hands of male surgeons (and stayed out of the hands of female midwives) heralded the decline of midwifery in America and the dawning of an age of highly medicalized childbirth; as I argue, the forceps in particular enabled an unprecedented level of intervention on the part of birth attendants who were sometimes seeking happier outcomes, and sometimes just trying to hurry things up.

Even though the difficulty of transporting books across the Atlantic in the seventeenth century limited collecting, surviving records indicate that certain titles ofhusbandry and medicine appeared in many English American colonial libraries. This article examines the circulation of texts by Gervase Markham and Nicholas Culpeper to illuminate the function of English imprints as valuable markers of identity in the unfamiliarity of the \"New World.\" Driven by fear of degeneration due to exposure to \"savage\" lands and peoples, colonists sought to fix a stable, invulnerable English identity, and book ownership became instrumental for colonists determined to self-identify as English. By setting these manuals within the context of English land use, medicine, and ethnography, this article recovers the ideological work these \"practical\" books performed for early colonists. Exploration of the apparent mismatch between the predominant economic and agricultural practices of the English Atlantic world and the manuals' contents highlights the importance of discourses of self-sufficiency promoted by Markham and Culpeper.

Traveling to archives in Tunisia, Morocco, France, and England, with visits to Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Spain, Nabil Matar assembles a rare history of Europe's rise to power as seen through the eyes of those who were later subjugated by it. Many historians of the Middle East believe Arabs and Muslims had no interest in Europe during this period of Western discovery and empire, but in fact these groups were very much engaged with the naval and industrial development, politics, and trade of European Christendom. Beginning in 1578 with a major Moroccan victory over a Portuguese invading army, Matar surveys this early modern period, in which Europeans and Arabs often shared common political, commercial, and military goals. Matar concentrates on how Muslim captives, ransomers, traders, envoys, travelers, and rulers pursued those goals while transmitting to the nonprint cultures of North Africa their knowledge of the peoples and societies of Spain, France, Britain, Holland, Italy, and Malta. From the first non-European description of Queen Elizabeth I to early accounts of Florence and Pisa in Arabic, from Tunisian descriptions of the Morisco expulsion in 1609 to the letters of a Moroccan Armenian ambassador in London, the translations of the book's second half draw on the popular and elite sources that were available to Arabs in the early modern period. Letters from male and female captives in Europe, chronicles of European naval attacks and thetaqayid(newspaper) reports on Muslim resistance, and descriptions of opera and quinine appear here in English for the first time. Matar notes that the Arabs of the Maghrib and the Mashriq were eager to engage Christendom, despite wars and rivalries, and hoped to establish routes of trade and alliances through treaties and royal marriages. However, the rise of an intolerant and exclusionary Christianity and the explosion of European military technology brought these advances to an end. In conclusion, Matar details the decline of Arab-Islamic power and the rise of Britain and France.

The phrase “The Black Legend” was coined in 1912 by a Spanish journalist in protest of the characterization of Spain by other Europeans as a backward country defined by ignorance, superstition, and religious fanaticism, whose history could never recover from the black mark of its violent conquest of the Americas. Challenging this stereotype, Rereading the Black Legend contextualizes Spain’s uniquely tarnished reputation by exposing the colonial efforts of other nations whose interests were served by propagating the “Black Legend.” A distinguished group of contributors here examine early modern imperialisms including the Ottomans in Eastern Europe, the Portuguese in East India, and the cases of Mughal India and China, to historicize the charge of unique Spanish brutality in encounters with indigenous peoples during the Age of Exploration. The geographic reach and linguistic breadth of this ambitious collection will make it a valuable resource for any discussion of race, national identity, and religious belief in the European Renaissance.

[...] the startling opening sentence of Judaism as a Civilization asserted a stunning, possibly even disturbing, paradox of history: \"Before the beginning of the nineteenth century all Jews regarded Judaism as a privilege; since then most Jews have come to regard it as a burden.\" Kaplan was, of course, not nearly so institutionally bound, and if Judaism as a Civilization is indeed the founding text of Reconstructionism, its great intellectual interest stems from Kaplan's bold demands about salvaging Judaism in the modern world, the problem raised by Miller for the seventeenth-century Calvinism and by Niebuhr for naive modern Christians.

Blood and ashes dominate the central chapters of the essay, which assume, for the most part, that [Isaac] was indeed killed but that he rose from the dead. In fact, the midrashim cited relate that Isaac's body was burned to ash and offered to the Lord as 'a burnt offering.' The Hebrew term throughout is olah, which is the technical term for the sacrifice; in Greek this was translated as holokau(s)ton (all-burnt); in English it is 'holocaust.' Let me hasten to state that I am not relying on a superficial verbal association. The term 'Holocaust' referring to the destruction and cremation of European Jewry was not current until the late 1950s, even though the word in English can already be found in the 17th century referring to a massive destruction.(4) For Spiegel, the word is central to those texts claiming that Isaac's sacrifice, his being offered as an olah, a holocau(s)ton, was considered an atonement whose zekhut (merit) might protect the victims of later atrocities, such as the Crusades. The same is true for the ashes and blood of the ram that was sacrificed, according to Scripture, 'instead of' or 'after' (in midrashic interpretations of tahat) Isaac. This assertion, with all of its documentation, prepares the ground for the vivid portrayals of Christian atrocities during the Crusades that end the essay. Focusing on one verse from the scriptural story of the Akedah, Spiegel weaves an elaborate and powerful thesis of 'double dying.' In Genesis 22:15 we read: 'The angel of the Lord called to [Abraham A. Neumann] a second time.' While a casual reader might read this verse without undue concern, the rabbis were clearly troubled by it. 'Why a second time?' they asked. Many explanations are presented: some emphasize the crucial fact that Abraham, in his love for God, was willing to sacrifice his son even though he did not consummate the act; others argue that Abraham failed to perform the commandment and that the act was completed only in the days of [Jesus]. Spiegel ascribes the latter to the deplorable fact that 'the ancient pagan demand for actual sacrifice of children was not uprooted from the world, nor perhaps from the heart either' (129). He has to repeat this point here because he wants to conclude his essay with an introduction to the poem of Rabbi [Ephraim] of Bonn, which he is publishing for the first time since 'there may be something of this spiritual climate' (129) in the poem. Spiegel answers his question with a series of gory accounts of 'second slayings' taken from medieval chronicles. In 1096 -- 900 years ago -- the Mainz community elected to be slain for the Sanctification of the Name rather than escape by conversion. We are told that, after the Jews were slain, the 'uncircumsized ones' came upon them to strip their bodies and hurl them out the window. When they found some Jews still barely alive, they taunted them with offers of baptism. When the Jews refused again, they 'proceeded to torture some of them some more, until, they killed them a second time' (132). In the village of Mehr, a Jew named Shemariah killed his family and tried to commit suicide. When he failed at this, he was buried alive twice. After the first burial, the Christians discovered he was still alive and dug him up, offering life in exchange for conversion. When he refused again, they buried him alive a second time until he finally died. Spiegel brings somewhat similar stories from Blois and Orleans of Jews being burned alive -- all told in great detail. Some six pages (131-37) vibrate with graphic accounts of atrocities, one piled upon another. Although these passages might prove Spiegel's point that Rabbi Ephraim's notion of a second slaying is indeed based on historical fact, they are a fitting climax to the essay: in a crescendo of detailed violence, they realize dramatically the arguments that Spiegel has mustered throughout his study. These brutal accounts, in turn, constitute the immediate introduction to Rabbi Ephraim's poem on the Akedah.

Professor of History and College of Social Studies Tutor Richard Elphick specializes in South African history and the history of Christianity. The story is interesting--at the height of apartheid, the Afrikaaner nationalist were very anxious to fund every kind of research that could be done on the history of the whites in South Africa.

Heather Kopelson, an assistant professor of history at the University of Alabama, begins with the radically simple premise of refusing to accept the familiar narratives of English/Native contact as asymmetrical or unilateral, and instead conjures a colonial world where categories of faith and identity are evolving and contingent.