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This text represents some of the foremost in American, British, and Italian scholarship and offers a critical overview of the key problems of the emergence of the state in Europe. Some of the topics covered include the political legitimacy of the aborning regional states, the changing legal culture, the conflict between church and state, the forces shaping public finances, and the creation of the Italian League.

Renowned as a period of cultural rebirth and artistic innovation, the Renaissance is cloaked in a unique aura of beauty and brilliance. Its very name conjures up awe-inspiring images of an age of lofty ideals in which life imitated the fantastic artworks for which it has become famous. But behind the vast explosion of new art and culture lurked a seamy, vicious world of power politics, perversity, and corruption that has more in common with the present day than anyone dares to admit. In this liv...

An Intellectual History of Modern China, first published in 2002, is a comprehensive book on modern China's intellectual development from the nineteenth to the end of the twentieth century. Merle Goldman and Leo Ou-fan Lee introduce and set the contemporary, scholarly context for this collection of essays, drawn from the later volumes (Volumes 12-15) of The Cambridge History of China. The chapters, authored by eminent historians and social scientists in the field of Chinese studies, together tra...

Barnet Litvinoff argues that the most significant year of the last ten centuries falls halfway through the millenium. In 1492 Europe, newly revitalized as the Renaissance swept northward from Italy, was never before a centre of intellectual excellence, of geographical exploration or of trade. But it took the voyage of Christopher Columbus to fully establish the destiny of this Western promontory of the Eurasian landmass. Only with his discovery of America were the ancient countries which made up...

The Revolution in Time explores the idea that people in Western Europe changed the way they thought about the concept of time over the early modern period, by examining reactions to the 1688-1689 revolution in England. The study examines how those who lived through the extraordinary collapse of James II's regime perceived this event as it unfolded, and how they set it within their understanding of history. It questions whether a new understanding of chronology - one which allowed fundamental a...

This is a cross-cultural study of the political economy of war in South Asia. Randolf G. S. Cooper combines an overview of Maratha military culture with a battle-by-battle analysis of the 1803 Anglo-Maratha Campaigns. Building on that foundation he challenges ethnocentric assumptions about British superiority in discipline, drill and technology. He argues that these campaigns, in which Arthur Wellesley served with distinction, represent the military high-water mark of the Marathas who posed the...

This is the first book to examine the history of the country in a way that connects global processes to local developments. Taking account of social, political and economic dynamics over the last thousand years, the book addresses key questions that get to the heart of the Netherlands' role in the world, both historically and in more recent times: * Why did the 'West' become such a significant actor in the world, and what part did the Netherlands play? * What were the driving fo...

Montaigne (1533-1592) is known as the inventor of the essay. His relativism, his craving for self-knowledge and his taste for freedom and tolerance have had a long-lasting influence in Europe. It is therefore surprising that until present no substantial study has been devoted to the multiple relationships between Montaigne and the Low Countries. This volume aims to fill this gap. It studies the Netherlandish presence in Montaigne's Essays, represented by Erasmus and Lipsius and by contemporary h...

The poetry of John Stewart of Baldynneis, one of James VI's soi disant Castalian Band, is a relatively unknown phenomenon of the Renaissance period. This book is a critical edition of his epic poem Roland Furious, supposedly a translation of Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso into Scots but actually a brilliantly original poem which directly follows guidelines given by James VI for the creation of such literature in the Scottish vernacular. A fully annotated version of the text is given, along w...

Wer sich der Erforschung des reformierten Protestantismus widmet, setzt sich mit einer komplexen Bewegung auseinander: Religioese, theologische und kulturelle Traditionen werden kritisch reflektiert, bisweilen verworfen oder aber in neuer Interpretation weitergefuhrt. Politische und soziale Veranderungen zeitigen gravierende Konsequenzen fur Einzelne wie fur ganze Landschaften. Gewollt oder ungewollt bleiben dabei Veranderung und Beharrung eng ineinander verwoben. Historians recognize that the...

"Prayer is real religion," said Auguste Sabatier. If so, the academic study of prayer allows scholars to examine the very heart of religious practices, beliefs, and convictions. Since prayers exist in a wide variety of content, contexts, forms, and practices, a comprehensive approach to the study of prayer is required. Therefore, this volume includes scholars from a wide range of disciplines, in order to discover the breadth of "real religion" from the first to the fifteenth centuries. This volu...

Literature on confessionalization has opened new vistas for considering early-modern Christianity and its place in Western social-political contexts, but the ecclesiastical cultures of the period need further research and analysis to refine our focus on how Christians lived in their own communities and related to society at large. This volume's essays assess eight elements of Lutheran life (its foundation in sixteenth-century processing of Luther's legacy, university teaching, preaching, cateche...