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"Early Modern History (1500 to 1700)"
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Technology of the medieval and early modern worlds
The growth of technology in the Middle Ages.
Book
When Gossips Meet
This book explores how women of the poorer and middling sorts in early modern England negotiated a patriarchal culture in which they were generally excluded, marginalized, or subordinated. It focuses on the networks of close friends (‘gossips’) which gave them a social identity beyond the narrowly domestic, providing both companionship and practical support in disputes with husbands and with neighbours of either sex. The book also examines the micropolitics of the household, with its internal alliances and feuds, and women's agency in neighbourhood politics, exercised by shaping local public opinion, exerting pressure on parish officials, and through the role of informal female juries. If women did not openly challenge male supremacy, they could often play a significant role in shaping their own lives and the life of the local community.
eBook
A nation upon the ocean sea : Portugal's Atlantic diaspora and the crisis of the Spanish Empire, 1492-1640
With the opening of sea routes in the 15th century, groups of men and women left Portugal to establish themselves across the ports and cities of the Atlantic or Ocean Sea. They were refugees and migrants, traders and mariners, Jews, Catholics, and the Marranos of mixed Judaic-Catholic culture. They formed a diasporic community known by contemporaries as the Portuguese Nation. By the early 17th century, this nation without a state had created a remarkable trading network that spanned the Atlantic, reached into the Indian Ocean and Asia, and generated millions of pesos that were used to bankroll the Spanish Empire. This book traces the story of the Portuguese Nation from its emergence in the late 15th century to its fragmentation in the middle of the 17th, and situates it in relation to the parallel expansion and crisis of Spanish imperial dominion in the Atlantic. Against the backdrop of this relationship, the book reconstitutes the rich inner life of a community based on movement, maritime trade, and cultural hybridity. We are introduced to mariners and traders in such disparate places as Lima, Seville and Amsterdam, their day-to-day interactions and understandings, their houses and domestic relations, private reflections and public arguments. This account reveals how the Portuguese Nation created a cohesive and meaningful community despite the mobility and dispersion of its members; how its forms of sociability fed into the development of robust transatlantic commercial networks; and how the day-to-day experience of trade was translated into the sphere of Spanish imperial politics as merchants of the Portuguese Nation took up the pen to advocate a program of commercial reform based on religious-ethnic toleration and the liberalization of trade.
eBook
The Resilience of the Spanish Monarchy 1665-1700
For too long the history of seventeenth-century Spain has been dismissed as a story of imperial decline after the achievement of the sixteenth century. Resilience of the Spanish monarchy presents a fresh appraisal of the survival of Spain and its European and overseas empire under the last Spanish Habsburg, Carlos II (1665–1700). Hitherto it has largely been assumed that in the ‘Age of Louis XIV’ Spain collapsed as a military and naval power, and only retained its empire because states which had hitherto opposed Spanish hegemony came to its aid. Spain's allies did play a role, but this view seriously underestimates the efforts of Carlos II and his ministers to find men for Spain's various armies – in Flanders, Lombardy and Catalonia – and to ensure a continued naval presence in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. These commitments were costly, adding to the fiscal pressure upon Carlos's subjects, and to political tensions within the monarchy, but Spain managed the burden of imperial defence more successfully than has been acknowledged. This was due to various factors, including the continued contribution of Castile and American silver, some administrative development, and the contribution of both the non-Castilian territories within Spain and the non-Spanish territories within Europe, such as Naples. This book revises our understanding of the last decades of Habsburg Spain, which is shown to have been a state and society more committed to the retention of empire and more successful in doing so than a preoccupation with the ‘decline of Spain’ has recognised.
eBook
The last Plantagenet consorts : gender, genre, and historiography, 1440-1627
\"Most modern accounts of fifteenth-century queens understandably focus on separating what really happened from what was fabricated. What has not been considered in any detail, however, is the fabrications themselves as narratives, and as reflections of questions and anxieties that haunted their writers. By focusing on the relationship between gender and genre and the way embedded literary narratives echo across texts as disparate as chronicles, parliamentary proceedings, diplomatic correspondence, ballads, poetry, and drama, this study reveals hitherto unexplored tensions within these texts, generated by embedded narratives and their implications\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns
What do we know about early modern sex, and how do we know it? How, when, and why does sex become history? In Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns, Valerie Traub addresses these questions and, in doing so, reorients the ways in which historians and literary critics, feminists and queer theorists approach sexuality and its history. Her answers offer interdisciplinary strategies for confronting the difficulties of making sexual knowledge.Based on the premise that producing sexual knowledge is difficult because sex itself is often inscrutable, Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns leverages the notions of opacity and impasse to explore barriers to knowledge about sex in the past. Traub argues that the obstacles in making sexual history can illuminate the difficulty of knowing sexuality. She also argues that these impediments themselves can be adopted as a guiding principle of historiography: sex may be good to think with, not because it permits us access but because it doesn't.
eBook
The Anglo-Scottish border and the shaping of identity, 1300-1600
\"Theorizing the Borders: Scotland and the Shaping of Identity in Medieval Britain explores the roles that Scotland and England play in one another's imaginations. This collection of essays brings together eminent scholars and emerging voices from the frequently divergent fields of English and Scottish medieval studies to address such questions as: How do subjects on both sides of the Anglo-Scottish border define themselves in relation to one another? In what ways do they influence each other's sense of historical, cultural, and national identity? What stories do they tell about one another, and to what ends? How does the shifting political balance--as well as the shifting border--between the two kingdoms complicate notions of Scottishness and Englishness? What happens to important texts, genres, and even poetic forms when they cross this border? How do texts produced in the Anglo-Scottish borderlands transform mainstream notions of Scottish and English identities?\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
England on edge : crisis and revolution, 1640-1642
This book deals with the collapse of the government of Charles I, the disintegration of the Church of England, and the accompanying cultural panic that led to civil war. Focused on the years 1640 to 1642, it examines stresses and fractures in social, political, and religious culture, and the emergence of an unrestrained popular press. Hundreds of people not normally seen in historical surveys make appearances here, in a drama much larger than the struggle of king and parliament. Historians commonly assert that royalists and parliamentarians parted company over issues of principle, constitutional scruples, and religious belief, but a more complex picture emerges from the environment of anxiety, mistrust, and fear. Rather than seeing England's revolutionary transformation as a product of the civil war, as has been common among historians, the book finds the world turned upside down in the two years preceding the outbreak of hostilities. The humbling of Charles I, the erosion of the royal prerogative, and the rise of an executive parliament were central features of the revolutionary drama of 1640–1642. The collapse of the Laudian ascendancy, the splintering of the established church, the rise of radical sectarianism, and the emergence of an Anglican resistance all took place in these two years before the beginnings of bloodshed. The world of public discourse became rapidly energised and expanded, in counterpoint with an exuberantly unfettered press and a deeply traumatised state.
eBook