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A masterful, highly engaging analysis of how Shakespeare's plays intersected with the politics and culture of Elizabethan EnglandWith an ageing, childless monarch, lingering divisions due to the Reformation, and the threat of foreign enemies, Shakespeare's England was fraught with unparalleled anxiety and complicated problems. In this monumental work, Peter Lake reveals, more than any previous critic, the extent to which Shakespeare's plays speak to the depth and sophistication of Elizabethan political culture and the Elizabethan imagination. Lake reveals the complex ways in which Shakespeare's major plays engaged with the events of his day, particularly regarding the uncertain royal succession, theological and doctrinal debates, and virtue andvirtùin politics. Through his plays, Lake demonstrates, Shakespeare was boldly in conversation with his audience about a range of contemporary issues. This remarkable literary and historical analysis pulls the curtain back on what Shakespeare was really telling his audience and what his plays tell us today about the times in which they were written.

InRedeeming \"The Prince,\"one of the world's leading Machiavelli scholars puts forth a startling new interpretation of arguably the most influential but widely misunderstood book in the Western political tradition. Overturning popular misconceptions and challenging scholarly consensus, Maurizio Viroli also provides a fresh introduction to the work. Seen from this original perspective, five centuries after its composition,The Princeoffers new insights into the nature and possibilities of political liberation. Rather than a bible of unscrupulous politics,The Prince, Viroli argues, is actually about political redemption--a book motivated by Machiavelli's patriotic desire to see a new founding for Italy. Written in the form of an oration, following the rules of classical rhetoric, the book condenses its main message in the final section, \"Exhortation to liberate Italy from the Barbarians.\" There Machiavelli creates the myth of a redeemer, an ideal ruler who ushers in an era of peace, freedom, and unity. Contrary to scholars who maintain that the exhortation was added later, Viroli proves that Machiavelli composed it along with the rest of the text, completing the whole by December 1513 or early 1514. Only if we readThe Princeas a theory of political redemption, Viroli contends, can we at last understand, and properly evaluate, the book's most controversial pages on political morality, as well as put to rest the cliché of Machiavelli as a \"Machiavellian.\" Bold, clear, and provocative,Redeeming \"The Prince\"should permanently change how Machiavelli and his masterpiece are understood.

Federico and Ferrante Gonzaga came of age during a time of intense change in sixteenth-century Italy: the Italian Wars (1494-1559). The first and third-born sons of Isabella d'Este and Francesco Gonzaga spent their formative years at the courts of Francis I of France and Charles V of Spain, where, as effectively diplomatic hostages, they learned valuable lessons about the transnational social codes and rituals central to sixteenth-century political life. As adults, they applied these lessons in their political and martial collaborations with Charles V: supporting his dominions in Italy, facilitating his attempted colonisation of northern Africa, and praising his attacks on Muslim pirates in the Italian Mediterranean. This book uses epistolary, literary, and material sources to argue that the boyhood and adult experiences of Federico and Ferrante Gonzaga are illustrative of wider strategies adopted by elite Italians to respond to conflict and crisis in a global age.

The story of a Venetian-Albanian family in the late sixteenth century forms the basis of a sweeping account of the interaction between East and West Europe and the Ottoman Empire at a pivotal moment in history.

In early modern English medicine, the balance of fluids in the body was seen as key to health. Menstruation was widely believed to regulate blood levels in the body and so was extensively discussed in medical texts. Sara Read examines all forms of literature, from plays and poems, to life-writing, and compares these texts with the medical theories.

Known as a time of revolutions in science, the early modern era in Europe was characterized by the emergence of new disciplines and ways of thinking. Taking this conceit a step further, Sacred Habitat shows how Spanish friars and missionaries used new scholarly approaches, methods, and empirical data from their studies of ecology to promote Catholic goals and incorporate American nature into centuries-old church traditions. Ran Segev examines the interrelated connections between Catholicism and geography, cosmography, and natural history-fields of study that gained particular prominence during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries-and shows how these new bodies of knowledge provided innovative ways of conceptualizing and transmitting religious ideologies in the post-Reformation era. Weaving together historical narratives on Spain and its colonies with scholarship on the Catholic Reformation, Atlantic science, and environmental history, Segev contends that knowledge about American nature allowed pious Catholics to reconnect with their religious traditions and enabled them to apply their beliefs to a foreign land. Sacred Habitat presents a fresh perspective on Catholic renewal. Scholars of religion and historians of Spain, colonial Latin America, and early modern science will welcome this provocative intervention in the history of empire, science, knowledge, and early modern Catholicism.

A Winner of the 2024 Association for Jewish Studies' Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication Award This book contains a collection of eight annotated translations of responsa, alongside the original Hebrew texts, focusing on the post-expulsion Spanish-Portuguese communities of the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries. This collection will acquaint the reader with Jews who, following their expulsion, settled in the Ottoman Empire, in Palestine under the Mamluks, in Amsterdam and in Brazil. The period of the expulsion of the Jews from the Iberian Peninsula was a tragic time in Jewish history, but the revitalization of the post-expulsion Spanish-Portuguese Jewish communities in new locales is testimony to the human spirit and determination. The volume includes eight chapters, each built around one responsum from one of the great halakhic authorities of the time. Topics include excommunication in Amsterdam, ʻ agunot , inheritance rights of a converso son, obligatory contracts and breach of agreement, heresy and humanist scholarship, informing on someone to the Venetian Inquisition, and more

Outlining the full range of practises that publishers performed, including the acquisition of copy and titles, compiling, alteration to texts, and reissuing,Elizabethan Publishing and the Makings of Literary Cultureconsiders links between the book trade and the literary culture of Elizabethan England.