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In Le Bestiare d'amour and the Response, a medieval chancellor's erotic bestiary to a woman is countered by the woman's passionate protest against the cleric's misogynistic presuppositions. Beer presents a close, linear reading of the two literary texts.
Philip Hoffman shatters the widespread myth that traditional agricultural societies in early modern Europe were socially and economically stagnant and ultimately dependent on wide-scale political revolution for their growth. Through a richly detailed historical investigation of the peasant agriculture of ancien-régime France, the author uncovers evidence that requires a new understanding of what constituted economic growth in such societies. His arguments rest on a measurement of long-term growth that enables him to analyze the economic, institutional, and political factors that explain its forms and rhythms. In comparing France with England and Germany, Hoffman arrives at fresh answers to ...
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James M. Powell here offers a new interpretation of the Fifth Crusade's historical and social impact, and a richly rewarding view of life in the thirteenth century. Powell addresses such questions as the degree of popular interest in the crusades, the religious climate of the period, the social structure of the membership of the crusade, and the effects of the recruitment effort on the outcome.
Benjamin William Badcock, my Grandfather, was an ordinary Englishman. Yet like millions of others of his generation, he lived through extra-ordinary times. In 1880, the year of his birth, between twenty five and thirty million people lived in Great Britain, yet its industry and economy dominated the world, and its Queen/Empress, Victoria, held more than a quarter of its 1.5 2 billion population in thrall through her vast navy and tiny army. But the following year, in 1881, a handful of Boer farmers threw down a challenge that reverberated across Africa and the world and set a pattern for the 20th Century that would lead to the dissolution of the old imperial world order, and ultimately to th...
Heller refutes Roland Mousnier's thesis that early modern France was a society of orders in which most people knew and accepted their status in society. This concept of order certainly had meaning for the sixteenth-century élite because of aristocratic domination over land and people, but it is not clear that this was also the view of the commoners. Heller maintains that for peasants, craftsmen, and merchants the decline of the French economy started at the beginning rather than the middle of the sixteenth century. This resulted in unrest which spread from town to countryside, culminating in the three great popular movements of the civil wars: the Calvinist Revolt of the 1560s, the Catholic...