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The Sinews of Habsburg Power explores the domestic foundations of the immense growth of central European Habsburg power from the rise of a permanent standing army after the Thirty Years' War to the end of the Napoleonic wars. With a force that grew irregularly in size from around 25,000 soldiers to as many as half a million in the War of the Sixth Coalition, the Habsburg monarchy participated in shifting international constellations of rivalry from western Europe to the Near East and in some two dozen, partly overlapping armed conflicts. Raising forces of such magnitude constituted a central task of Habsburg government, one that ultimately required the cooperation of society and its elites. ...
The Shroud at the Court analyses, through various essays characterized by a multidisciplinary and diachronic perspective, the strict ties created between the Shroud and the Savoy court from the fifteenth to twentieth centuries. Presented as proof of the divine legitimacy of Savoy lineage, the Shroud (of which the Savoy dynasty came into possession in 1453, keeping it first in Chambéry and then from 1578 in Turin) was central to their propagandistic strategies. The court – its spaces, protagonists, and rituals – became the natural setting for a relationship reinforced over time through customs, ceremonies, and images intended to celebrate the excellence of the Savoy, both within their own state and in Europe’s “society of princes”. Contributors are Paola Caretta, Paolo Cornaglia, Paolo Cozzo, Davide De Franco, Bernard Dompnier, Laura Gaffuri, Pierangelo Gentile, Luisella Giachino, Andrea Merlotti, Frédéric Meyer, Andrea Nicolotti, Almudena Pérez de Tudela, Laurent Ripart, Alessandro Serra and Franca Varallo.
Diplomats had multiple tasks: not only negotiating with the representatives of other states, but also mediating culture and knowledge, and not least elaborating reports on their observations of politics, society, and culture. Culture, according to the studies featured in this book, is defined as a complex sphere including aspects like systems of communication, literature, music, arts, education, and the creation of knowledge. This edition containing contributions from six conferences held in Vienna and Istanbul by the Don Juan Archiv Wien focuses on the complex diplomatic and cultural relations between the Ottoman Empire and Europe from the time of the early embassies to Istanbul up to "Tanzimat".
David Oppenheim (1664-1736), chief rabbi of Prague in the early eighteenth century, built an unparalleled collection of Jewish books and manuscripts, all of which have survived and are housed in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. His remarkable collection testifies to the myriad connections Jews maintained with each other across political borders, and the contacts between Christians and Jews that books facilitated. From contact with the great courts of European nobility to the poor of Jerusalem, his family ties brought him into networks of power, prestige, and opportunity that extended across Europe and the Mediterranean basin. Containing works of law and literature alongside prayer and poetry,...
"This volume is the first work to cover post-Communist developments in historical studies in six Eastern European countries (Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria) from a comparative and critical perspective, written by scholars from the region itself. It is a building block for scholars of the history of European and global historical studies, and a useful pedagogical tool for classes on the history of historical studies. Each individual chapter is in itself a guide to further research through a wealth of detailed notes and references."--BOOK JACKET.
This text offers a collective exploration of aspects of cross-border and transnational interaction in the Holy Roman Empire.
This is the 1st volume in a 4-volume work entitled The Mage’s Images. The work provides the first in-depth examination of the life and works of Heinrich Khunrath (1560-1605), ‘one of the great Hermetic philosophers’, whose Amphitheatre of Eternal Wisdom (1595/1609) has been described as ‘one of the most important books in the whole literature of theosophical alchemy and the occult sciences’. Khunrath is best known for his novel combination of ‘scripture and picture’ in the complex engravings in his Amphitheatre. In this richly illustrated monograph, Forshaw analyses occult symbolism, with previously unpublished material, offering insight into Khunrath’s insistence on the necessary combination of alchemy, magic, and cabala in ‘Oratory and Laboratory’.
The book is divided into two sections. The first half provides a historiography of the literature on state formation from antiquity to the present day. In the second, Gordon identifies a new theme using the methodologies of economic history, the history of economic thought, and the history of ideas. His interdisciplinary approach demonstrates that the process of state formation is best understood through the prism of science, economy, and culture. The narrative highlights significant events and institutions as markers of change in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern era. The core of the book focuses on England's economic culture and its impact on state management. University elites in science and Aristotle's philosophy educated literate and numerate professionals for the Royal court. They became indispensable for the ever-growing complexity of governing. England was unique because it embraced statistical thinking and quantitative reasoning at the heart of the English State.
To mark the 800th anniversary of the ratification of the Magna Carta by King John at Runnymede, Magna Carta provides the central European perspectives on this monumental document and its impact on the political and legal experiences of freedom, from the medieval period to the present day. The volume gives rise to a discussion about the legacy of the Magna Carta as one of the fundamental elements of European identity. Supported by previously untranslated sources at the end of each chapter, the team of contributors consider the lasting legacy of Magna Carta in Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland and Lithuania. The authors present the successful attempts to limit royal power by law while protec...
Although state transformation – continuous struggle and bargaining between rulers and their subjects, producing an unpredictable variety of political structures – is often overlooked, the process is crucial in assessing the organizational development of early modern composite monarchies and deserves further investigation. In Austria, the monarchy’s emergence as a great power required it to overcome several successive crises that culminated in the decades around 1700. The Habsburgs succeeded more by adjusting relations between Crown and lordships than through institution building. This unusual interaction of state and non-state actors resulted in an Austria that markedly deviated from t...