You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The England of Elizabeth was a nation under threat. This book challenges stale notions about espionage in Renasissance England and presents complex material so that the reign of Elizabeth I is shown in a compellingly light.
During the past 25 years Elizabethan history has been transformed by the work of Simon Adams. Famous for the depth and breadth of his research in libraries and archives throughout Britain, Western Europe and the USA, he has brought to life the most enigmatic of the greater Elizabethans: Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. Together with his edition of Leicester's accounts and his reconstruction of Leicester's papers, Adams has published numerous essays and articles on Leicester's influence and activities. They have reshaped our knowledge of Elizabeth and her Court, Parliament, the localities from Wales to Warwickshire and such subjects of recent debate as the power of the nobility and the noble affinity, the politics of faction and the role of patronage. Sixteen of Simon Adams' essays are found in this collection, organized into three groups: the Court, Leicester and his affinity, and Leicester and the regions. The collection ranges from much-cited essays in standard textbooks to papers at international conferences, as well as articles in a variety of journals.
Exposing a subculture only beginning to enter the imagination of mainstream America, this is the story of live action role-playing (LARP) games. A hybrid of games—such as Dungeons & Dragons, historical reenactment, fandom, and good old-fashioned pretend—LARP games are thriving and this book explores its multifaceted culture and related phenomenon, including the Society for Creative Anachronism, a medieval reenactment group that boasts more than 32,000 members. The history of LARP is detailed and is shown to have arisen from the pageantry of Tudor England and is currently being used as a training tool for the U.S. military. Along the way, the author duels foes with foam-padded weapons, lets the great elder god Cthulhu destroy her parents' beach house, and endures an existential awakening in the high-art LARP scene of Scandinavia.
The Walsingham Gambit provides the reader with a new and unique insight into the hidden history associated with the regicide of Mary, Queen of Scots. This hidden history is revealed in great detail by R. Kent Tiernan, who describes how the English deception planners led by Sir Francis Walsingham designed, engineered, and executed a complex seven-year operation to expand Queen Elizabeth I’s power by ending Mary’s life. Tiernan presents a counterintelligence analytical approach utilizing conspiracies and deception between two religious mortal enemies. Historians have explained what happened during this tumultuous period, but this book tells how it happened. Whether interested in history or deception, the reader will be well rewarded with an enhanced understanding of both. This book is a timeless must read for anyone interested in how Mary Stuart was entrapped by Walsingham’s gambit.
Walsingham, Elizabeth's spymaster had established an extensive spy network the world had ever seen, placing secret agents throughout Europe, especially in the Catholic courts of Spain, Italy, and France, to ferret out Catholic plots against Elizabeth. Yet Elizabeth ignored her spymaster. Walsingham, distrusted for being too powerful.
While it is true that there have been forms of drag, both private and public, since earliest times, as a form of modern entertainment drag in recent years has developed into a phenomenon which is now a world-wide multi-million pound entertainment industry in itself. This penetrating study, giving a depth background of the world drag scene is, however, primarily a book about one drag artist - the hugely-successful Danny La Rue, himself a veritable Industry of Drag and unquestionably the highest-paid performer of his type in the world. Strangely, no one has previously written a book about Danny la Rue, probably because he is a very private person despite his huge public persona. To write this ...
Male Friendship and Testimonies of Love in Shakespeare’s England reveals the complex and unfamiliar forms of friendship that existed between men in the late sixteenth century. Using the unpublished letter archive of the Elizabethan spy Anthony Bacon (1558-1601), it shows how Bacon negotiated a path through life that relied on the support of his friends, rather than the advantages and status that came with marriage. Through a set of case-studies focusing on the Inns of Court, the prison, the aristocratic great house and the spiritual connection between young and ardent Protestants, this book argues that the ‘friendship spaces’ of early modern England permitted the expression of male same-sex intimacy to a greater extent than has previously been acknowledged.
In the 1850s, "Drapetomania" was the medical term for a disease found among black slaves in the United States. The main symptom was a strange desire to run away from their masters. In earlier centuries gout was understood as a metabolic disease of the affluent, so much so that it became a badge of uppercrust honor—and a medical excuse to avoid hard work. Today, is there such a thing as mental illness, or is mental illness just a myth? Is Alzheimer's really a disease? What is menopause—a biological or a social construction? Historically one can see that health, disease, and illness are concepts that have been ever fluid. Modern science, sociology, philosophy, even society—among other fa...
Kit Marlowe was the bad boy of Elizabethan drama. His ‘mighty line’ of iambic pentameter transformed the miracle plays of the Middle Ages into modern drama and he paved the way for Shakespeare and a dozen other greats who stole his metre and his ideas. When he died, stabbed through the eye in what appeared to be a tavern brawl in Deptford in May 1593, he was only 29 and many people believed that he had met his just deserts. But Marlowe’s death was not the result of a brawl. And it did not take place in a tavern. The facts tell a different story, one involving intrigue, espionage, alchemy and the highest in the land. Born the son of a shoemaker in Canterbury, Marlowe read Theolo...
Two boys met in the Grand Central Station in New York one warm afternoon in late September and, greeting each other, passed hurriedly toward the gate beyond which the Hartford Express waited. Each was good-looking, well-built, alert and self-possessed. But a few months separated their ages, although Jack Brewton had seen his eighteenth birthday and Stuart Harven had not. In the train, their bags at their feet, they plunged into conversation. While they had been close friends at Manning School, they had not met during vacation, nor had they corresponded. At seventeen and eighteen one is far too busy for letter writing, and, fortunately, friendship doesn’t demand it. There was, consequently, much to be said, and the journey to Safford was half over before the subject of summer adventures had been exhausted. Then Stuart gave the talk a new turn with the careless announcement...FROM THE BOOKS.