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In the seventeenth century, riots, rebellions, and revolts flared around Europe. Concerned about their internal stability, many states responded by closely observing the violent upheavals that plagued their neighbors. Rebellion and Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe investigates how in this struggle for intelligence about internal discord, diplomats emerged as key information brokers and interpreters of Europe’s tumultuous political landscape. The contributions in this volume uncover how diplomatic actors interacted with rulers, opposition leaders, informers, media entrepreneurs, and different audiences in their efforts to understand, communicate, and draw lessons from the insurrections in their time. Rebellion and Diplomacy also examines how diplomats actively tried to shape the course of internal conflicts by managing the dissemination of news, supporting political factions at their court of residence, and even instigating violence. Covering different European regions from the Iberian Peninsula to Scandinavia and from the British Isles to the Carpathian Basin, the book will appeal to all students and researchers interested in early modern diplomacy, politics, and news cultures.
From Court to Forest is a critical and historical study of the beginnings of the modern literary fairy tale. From Court to Forest is a critical and historical study of the beginnings of the modern literary fairy tale. Giambattista Basile's Lo cunto de Ii cunti written in Neapolitan dialect and published in 1634-36, comprises fifty fairy tales and was the first integral collection of literary fairy tales to appear in Western Europe. It contains some of the best known fairy-tales types, such as Sleeping Beauty, Puss in Boots, Cinderella, and others, many in their earliest versions. Although it became a central reference point for subsequent fairy tale writers, such as Perrault and the Grimms, ...
"Love drives and gives life to the commerce of mankind." Thus, the sixteen year old Ferdinando Galiani (1728-1787) presented his project to understand the sociable nature of man. This observation, a reflection of his own position on the relation between trade and virtue, hinted at what the mature works of Galiani, one of the most noteworthy economists and wits in eighteenth-century Italy, would eventually yield. In Love, Self-Deceit, and Money, Koen Stapelbroek reconstructs the Early Neapolitan Enlightenment debate on the morality of market societies, a debate that hinged on the preservation of Naples' independent statehood in a global arena of commercial and military competition. Galiani re...
In 17th century Rome, where women are expected to be chaste and yet are viewed as prey by powerful men, the extraordinary painter Artemisia Gentileschi fends off constant sexual advances as she works to become one of the greatest painters of her generation. Frustrated by the hypocritical social mores of her day, Gentileschi releases her anguish through her paintings and, against all odds, becomes a groundbreaking artist. Meticulously rendered in ballpoint pen, this gripping graphic biography serves as an art history lesson and a coming-of-age story. Resonant in the #MeToo era, I Know What I Amhighlights a fierce artist who stood up to a shameful social status quo.
Naples is always a shock, flaunting beauty and squalor like nowhere else. Naples is the only city in Europe whose ancient past still lives in its irrepressible people. Their ancestors came from all over the early Mediterranean to the wide bay and its islands, shadowed by a dormant volcano. Not all of them found what they were looking for, but they made a great and terribly human city. Peter Robb's Street Fight in Naples ranges across nearly three thousand years of Neapolitan life and art, from the first Greek landings in Italy to his own less auspicious arrival thirty-something years ago. In 1503 Naples became the Mediterranean capital of Spain's world empire and the base for the Christian s...
Naples was one of the largest cities in early modern Europe, and for about two centuries the largest city in the global empire ruled by the kings of Spain. Its crowded and noisy streets, the height of its buildings, the number and wealth of its churches and palaces, the celebrated natural beauty of its location, the many antiquities scattered in its environs, the fiery volcano looming over it, the drama of its people’s devotions, the size and liveliness - to put it mildly - of its plebs, all made Naples renowned and at times notorious across Europe. The new essays in this volume aim to introduce this important, fascinating, and bewildering city to readers unfamiliar with its history. Contr...
Considered the most original thinker in the Italian philosophical tradition, Giambattista Vico has been the object of much scholarly attention but little consensus. In this new interpretation, David L. Marshall examines the entirety of Vico's oeuvre and situates him in the political context of early modern Naples. Marshall presents Vico's work as an effort to resolve a contradiction. As a professor of rhetoric at the University of Naples, Vico had a deep investment in the explanatory power of classical rhetorical thought, especially that of Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian. Yet as a historian of the failure of Naples as a self-determining political community, he had no illusions about the possibility or worth of democratic and republican systems of government in the post-classical world. As Marshall demonstrates, by jettisoning the assumption that rhetoric only illuminates direct, face-to-face interactions between orator and auditor, Vico reinvented rhetoric for a modern world in which the Greek polis and the Roman res publica are no longer paradigmatic for political thought.
The sixteenth century was a critical period both for Spain’s formation and for the imperial dominance of her Crown. Spanish monarchs ruled far and wide, spreading agents and culture across Europe and the wider world. Yet in Italy they encountered another culture whose achievements were even prouder and whose aspirations often even grander than their own. Italians, the nominally subaltern group, did not readily accept Spanish dominance and exercised considerable agency over how imperial Spanish identity developed within their borders. In the end Italians’ views sometimes even shaped how their Spanish colonizers eventually came to see themselves. The essays collected here evaluate the broa...
The Society of Jesus was founded by Ignatius Loyola on a principal of strict obedience to papal and superiors’ authorities, yet the nature of the Jesuits's work and the turbulent political circumstances in which they operated, inevitably brought them into conflict with the Catholic hierarchy. In order to better understand and contextualise the debates concerning obedience, this book examines the Jesuits of south-western Europe during the generalate of Claudio Acquaviva. Acquaviva’s thirty year generalate (1581-1615) marked a challenging time for the Jesuits, during which their very system of government was called into doubt. The need for obedience and the limits of that obedience posed a...