Title search results
Showing 41 - 60 of 894 items
The Last Knight: The Twilight of the Middle Ages and the Birth of the Modern Era
By Norman F. Cantor. 2004
There may not be a more fascinating a historical period than the late fourteenth century in Europe. The Hundred Years'…
War ravaged the continent, yet gallantry, chivalry, and literary brilliance flourished in the courts of England and elsewhere. It was a world in transition, soon to be replaced by the Renaissance and the Age of Exploration -- and John of Gaunt was its central figure. In today's terms, John of Gaunt was a multibillionaire with a brand name equal to Rockefeller. He fought in the Hundred Years' War, sponsored Chaucer and proto-Protestant religious thinkers, and survived the dramatic Peasants' Revolt, during which his sumptuous London residence was burned to the ground. As head of the Lancastrian branch of the Plantagenet family, Gaunt was the unknowing father of the War of the Roses; after his death, his son usurped the crown from his nephew, Richard II. Gaunt's adventures represent the culture and mores of the Middle Ages as those of few others do, and his death is portrayed in The Last Knight as the end of that enthralling period.Royal Romances: Sex, Scandal , and Monarchy in Print, 1780–1821
By Kristin Flieger Samuelian. 2010
This text explores the reception of the royal family during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and its representation in…
fiction, poetry, and the popular press. Samuelian finds that popular response to the royal family has reflected the public's belief in their right of access to the private life of royalty.Charles I and the Aristocracy, 1625-1642
By Richard Cust. 2013
This is a major new study of Charles I's relationship with the English aristocracy. Rejecting the traditional emphasis on the…
'Crisis of the Aristocracy', Professor Richard Cust highlights instead the effectiveness of the King and the Earl of Arundel's policies to promote and strengthen the nobility. He reveals how the peers reasserted themselves as the natural leaders of the political nation during the Great Council of Peers in 1640 and the Long Parliament. He also demonstrates how Charles deliberately set out to cultivate his aristocracy as the main bulwark of royal authority, enabling him to go to war against the Scots in 1639 and then build the royalist party which provided the means to fight parliament in 1642. The analysis is framed throughout within a broader study of aristocratic honour and the efforts of the heralds to stabilise the social order.Image Wars: Kings and Commonwealths in England, 1603-1660
By Kevin Sharpe. 2010
Spin and photo opportunities may appear to have emerged onto the political scene only recently, but in fact image and…
its manipulation have always been vital to the authority of rulers. This book, the second in Kevin Sharpe's trilogy exploring image, power, and communication in early modern England, examines its importance during the turbulent seventeenth century. From the coronation of James I to the end of Cromwell's protectorate, Sharpe considers how royalists and parliamentarians--often using the same vocabularies--sought to manage their public image through words, pictures, and performances in order to win support and secure and enhance their authority.Writing the Monarch in Jacobean England
By Jane Rickard. 2015
King James VI and I's extensive publications and the responses they met played a key role in the literary culture…
of Jacobean England. This book is the first sustained study of how James's subjects commented upon, appropriated and reworked these royal writings. Jane Rickard highlights the vitality of such responses across genres - including poetry, court masque, sermon, polemic and drama - and in the different media of performance, manuscript and print. The book focuses in particular on Jonson, Donne and Shakespeare, arguing that these major authors responded in illuminatingly contrasting ways to James's claims as an author-king, made especially creative uses of the opportunities that his publications afforded and helped to inspire some of what the King in turn wrote. Their literary responses reveal that royal writing enabled a significant reimagining of the relationship between ruler and ruled. This volume will interest researchers and advanced students of Renaissance literature and history.The Foreign Relations of Elizabeth I
By Charles Beem. 2011
This collection brings together provocative essays examining various facets of Elizabethan foreign affairs, encompassing England and The British Isles, continental…
Europe, and the Islamic world. As an entirely domestic queen who never physically left her realm, Elizabeth I cast an inordinately large shadow internationally. This volume reveals a ruler and her kingdom more connected and integrated into the wider world than is usually acknowledged in conventional studies of Elizabethan foreign affairs.Tudor Queenship
By Anna Whitelock, Alice Hunt. 2010
This book brings together a selection of recent, cutting-edge research which, for the first time, challenges commonplace arguments about Mary…
and Elizabeth's relative successes or failures in order to rethink Tudor queenship.Theodosius II
By Christopher Kelly. 2013
Theodosius II (AD 408-450) was the longest reigning Roman emperor. Ever since Edward Gibbon, he has been dismissed as mediocre…
and ineffectual. Yet Theodosius ruled an empire which retained its integrity while the West was broken up by barbarian invasions. This book explores Theodosius' challenges and successes. Ten essays by leading scholars of late antiquity provide important new insights into the court at Constantinople, the literary and cultural vitality of the reign, and the presentation of imperial piety and power. Much attention has been directed towards the changes promoted by Constantine at the beginning of the fourth century; much less to their crystallisation under Theodosius II. This volume explores the working out of new conceptions of the Roman Empire - its history, its rulers and its God. A substantial introduction offers a new framework for thinking afresh about the long transition from the classical world to Byzantium.The Last Plantagenet Consorts
By Kavita Mudan Finn. 2012
Imprudent King: A New Life of Philip II
By Geoffrey Parker. 2014
Philip II is not only the most famous king in Spanish history, but one of the most famous monarchs in…
English history: the man who married Mary Tudor and later launched the Spanish Armada against her sister Elizabeth I. This compelling biography of the most powerful European monarch of his day begins with his conception (1526) and ends with his ascent to Paradise (1603), two occurrences surprisingly well documented by contemporaries. Eminent historian Geoffrey Parker draws on four decades of research on Philip as well as a recent, extraordinary archival discovery--a trove of 3,000 documents in the vaults of the Hispanic Society of America in New York City, unread since crossing Philip's own desk more than four centuries ago. Many of them change significantly what we know about the king. Â The book examines Philip's long apprenticeship; his three principal interests (work, play, and religion); and the major political, military, and personal challenges he faced during his long reign. Parker offers fresh insights into the causes of Philip's leadership failures: was his empire simply too big to manage, or would a monarch with different talents and temperament have fared better?The Autobiography Of An African Princess
By Vivian Seton, Konrad Tuchscherer, Arthur Abraham. 2013
This critical edition of Princess Fatima Massaquoi's memoirs begins with her birth in southern Sierra Leone, continues through her childhood…
in Liberia, moves on to Hamburg, Germany, where she lived and experienced the rise of the Nazi movement, and ends with her life in the United States.Mother Queens And Princely Sons
By Sid Ray. 2012
This study explores representations of the Madonna and Child in early modern culture. It considers the mother and son as…
a conceptual, religio-political unit and examines the ways in which that unit was embodied and performed. Of primary interest is the way mothers derived agency from bearing incipient rulers. By focusing on agency and authority, the book traces a pattern between the symbiotic unity of Madonna and Child and other influential, dimorphic concepts, what author Sid Ray calls 'accolated bodies, ' in early modern thought: the king's two bodies, marital coverture, and the doctrine of the hypostatic union of man and God in Christ, each with its variation on how the two bodies in question share authority. Attuned to Catholic historical and cultural reverberations of the Madonna and Child and debates about the origins of power, this book reassesses the mother-son unit, focusing on its inversion of conventional gender roles and potential to destabilize and redefine the ways in which gender and power operate. Ultimately, the book argues that representations of the mother-son unit contested Protestant patriarchal authority by offering meritocratic and egalitarian alternatives to established models of governance.Reading and Writing During the Dissolution
By Mary C. Erler. 2013
In the years from 1534, when Henry VIII became head of the English church, until the end of Mary Tudor's…
reign in 1558, the forms of English religious life evolved quickly and in complex ways. At the heart of these changes stood the country's professed religious men and women, whose institutional homes were closed between 1535 and 1540. Records of their reading and writing offer a remarkable view of these turbulent times. The responses to religious change of friars, anchorites, monks and nuns from London and the surrounding regions are shown through chronicles, devotional texts, and letters. What becomes apparent is the variety of positions that English religious men and women took up at the Reformation and the accommodations that had to be made, both spiritual and practical. Of particular interest are the extraordinary letters of Margaret Vernon, head of four nunneries and personal friend of Thomas Cromwell.Saint Margaret, Queen Of The Scots
By Catherine Keene. 2013
Margaret, saint and 11th-century Queen of the Scots, remains an often-cited yet little-understood historical figure. Keene's analysis of sources in…
terms of both time and place - including her Life of Saint Margaret , translated for the first time - allows for an informed understanding of the forces that shaped this captivating woman.The Name of a Queen
By Dennis Moore, Charles Beem. 2013
Itinerarium ad Windsor concerns a central question of the Elizabethan era: Why should a woman be allowed to rule with…
the same powers as a king? The man who poses this controversial question within Itinerarium is none other than Queen Elizabeth's powerful favorite Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. On hand to provide answers are the statesman and poet Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, and William Fleetwood antiquary, Recorder of London, and dutiful chronicler of their 1575 conversation. This critical edition of Itinerarium reproduces Fleetwood's text with annotations and a host of interpretive and contextualizing essays from leading scholars. Taken together, they constitute the definitive introduction to this remarkable discussion of regnant queenship, providing a valuable tool for understanding contemporary notions of and underlying fears concerning the efficacy and desirability of female rule in Elizabethan England.Berenice II Euergetis
By Branko F. van Oppen de Ruiter. 2015
Berenice II Euergetis (ca. 267-6-221 BCE), one of the better known Ptolemaic queens, remains fairly unknown outside specialist circles. Berenice…
was queen at an important juncture in Hellenistic history. She was both the daughter of King Magas of Cyrene (modern day Libya) and wife to King Ptolemy III of Egypt. This collection of essays focuses on aspects of chronology, genealogy, and marital practices, as well as issues of royal ideology. The essays rely especially on literary evidence andart works in order to illuminate Berenice's status and position at the courts of Cyrene and Egypt. It offers new interpretations of the few known events of Berenice's life until the early reign of Ptolemy III, as well her influence and authority in Cyrene and Egypt.Three Medieval Queens
By Lisa Benz St. John. 2012
This book is an innovative study offering the first examination of how three fourteenth-century English queens, Margaret of France, Isabella…
of France, and Philippa of Hainault, exercised power and authority. It takes advantage of a previously unstudied period of medieval queenship in which three queens, whose time as consorts and dowagers in England overlapped, creating a continuous transition from one queen to the next, and thus providing a unique opportunity to form conclusions about normative queenly behaviour and political culture. This study frames its examination around four major themes: gender; status; the concept of the crown; and power and authority.Making Toleration: The Repealers and the Glorious Revolution
By Scott Sowerby. 2013
In the reign of James II, minority groups from across the religious spectrum, led by the Quaker William Penn, rallied…
together under the Catholic King James in an effort to bring religious toleration to England. Known as repealers, these reformers aimed to convince Parliament to repeal laws that penalized worshippers who failed to conform to the doctrines of the Church of England. Although the movement was destroyed by the Glorious Revolution, it profoundly influenced the post-revolutionary settlement, helping to develop the ideals of tolerance that would define the European Enlightenment. Based on a rich array of newly discovered archival sources, Scott Sowerby’s groundbreaking history rescues the repealers from undeserved obscurity, telling the forgotten story of men and women who stood up for their beliefs at a formative moment in British history. By restoring the repealer movement to its rightful prominence, Making Toleration also overturns traditional interpretations of King James II’s reign and the origins of the Glorious Revolution. Though often depicted as a despot who sought to impose his own Catholic faith on a Protestant people, James is revealed as a man ahead of his time, a king who pressed for religious toleration at the expense of his throne. The Glorious Revolution, Sowerby finds, was not primarily a crisis provoked by political repression. It was, in fact, a conservative counter-revolution against the movement for enlightened reform that James himself encouraged and sustained.Titled Elizabethans
By Arthur F. Kinney, Jane A. Lawson. 2014
Published over forty years ago, the original edition of Titled Elizabethans provided a ready reference source to Elizabethan court, state,…
and household. This long-awaited revised edition expands considerably upon the original, adding new categories and a host of previously overlooked figures.The Sanctity of Louis IX: Early Lives of Saint Louis by Geoffrey of Beaulieu and William of Chartres
By Geoffrey Of Beaulieu, William Of Chartres. 2014
Louis IX of France reigned as king from 1226 to 1270 and was widely considered an exemplary Christian ruler, renowned…
for his piety, justice, and charity toward the poor. After his death on crusade, he was proclaimed a saint in 1297, and today Saint Louis is regarded as one of the central figures of early French history and the High Middle Ages. In The Sanctity of Louis IX, Larry F. Field offers the first English-language translations of two of the earliest and most important accounts of the king’s life: one composed by Geoffrey of Beaulieu, the king’s long-time Dominican confessor, and the other by William of Chartres, a secular clerk in Louis’s household who eventually joined the Dominican Order himself. Written shortly after Louis’s death, these accounts are rich with details and firsthand observations absent from other works, most notably Jean of Joinville’s well-known narrative The introduction by M. Cecilia Gaposchkin and Sean L. Field provides background information on Louis IX and his two biographers, analysis of the historical context of the 1270s, and a thematic introduction to the texts. An appendix traces their manuscript and early printing histories. The Sanctity of Louis IX also features translations of Boniface VIII’s bull canonizing Louis and of three shorter letters associated with the earliest push for his canonization. It also contains the most detailed analysis of these texts, their authors, and their manuscript traditions currently available.