The Leveller movement of the 1640s campaigned for religious toleration and a radical remaking of politics in post-civil war England. This book, the first full-length study of the Levellers for fifty ...years, offers a fresh analysis of the originality and character of Leveller thought. Challenging received ideas about the Levellers as social contract theorists and Leveller thought as a mere radicalisation of parliamentarian thought, Foxley shows that the Levellers' originality lay in their subtle and unexpected combination of different strands within parliamentarianism. The book takes full account of recent scholarship, and contributes to historical debates on the development of radical and republican politics in the civil war period, the nature of tolerationist thought, the significance of the Leveller movement and the extent of the Levellers' influence in the ranks of the New Model Army.
"How did the arguments developed in the debate to abolish the slave trade help to construct a British national identity and character in the late eighteenth century? Srividhya Swaminathan examines ...books, pamphlets, and literary works to trace the changes in rhetorical strategies utilized by both sides of the abolitionist debate. Framing them as competing narratives engaged in defining the nature of the Briton, Swaminathan reads the arguments of pro- and anti-abolitionists as a series of dialogues among diverse groups at the center and peripheries of the empire. Arguing that neither side emerged triumphant, Swaminathan suggests that the Briton who emerged from these debates represented a synthesis of arguments, and that the debates to abolish the slave trade are marked by rhetorical transformations defining the image of the Briton as one that led naturally to nineteenth-century imperialism and a sense of global superiority. Because the slave-trade debates were waged openly in print rather than behind the closed doors of Parliament, they exerted a singular influence on the British public. At their height, between 1788 and 1793, publications numbered in the hundreds, spanned every genre, and circulated throughout the empire. Among the voices represented are writers from both sides of the Atlantic in dialogue with one another, such as key African authors like Ignatius Sancho, Phillis Wheatley, and Olaudah Equiano; West India planters and merchants; and Quaker activist Anthony Benezet. Throughout, Swaminathan offers fresh and nuanced readings that eschew the view that the abolition of the slave trade was inevitable or that the ultimate defeat of pro-slavery advocates was absolute."--Publisher's description.
Dans un monde actuel soumis à la privatisation de la guerre et de la défense, où les armées traditionnelles cèdent le pas devant des milices de tout poil : mercenaires, comités de défense, SMP ...(Société militaire privée, ou PMC : Private military company), soldats de Dieu, etc., il est légitime de s'interroger sur ce temps qui a précédé l'affirmation des armées nationales, longtemps ciment de notre citoyenneté. Que furent les milices de la première modernité, au sortir du Moyen Âge et jusqu'à la grande révolution militaire qui suit la guerre de Trente Ans (1618-1648) ? Les études présentées ici ont le rare avantage de se départir de cadres – et donc d'historiographies – nationaux. En confrontant une France déchirée par les guerres civiles et religieuses – que certains n'hésiteront pas à rapprocher du Moyen-Orient actuel – avec l'empire mondial de l'Espagne, leurs auteurs n'hésitent pas à revisiter nos histoires. Ainsi, les milices de France ne sont pas interprétées ici seulement à l'aune de l'expression d'une identité locale qui s'effacerait progressivement devant les conquêtes d'un sentiment national, vieux poncif d'une Troisième République triomphante. L'usage des milices locales dans l'empire espagnol nous alerte sur l'erreur qui consisterait à penser la disparition des milices comme inscrite dans une pseudo-modernité. L'actualité nous rappelle cruellement combien cette approche téléologique de l'histoire est controversée. Bien au contraire, des Philippines au Pérou, c'était leur persistance et leur vitalité qui soutenaient et structuraient un empire planétaire que l'armée espagnole n'aurait jamais pu tenir par ses seules forces. Confrontation d'histoires, confrontation d'historiographies ; les études rassemblées dans cet ouvrage novateur – voire iconoclaste – entendent apporter une contribution à l'écriture d'une Histoire post-nationale.
The essays in this book provide stimulating contributions to the ongoing debate concerning the representation of differing cultures, i.e., the “image of the Other” in the early modern period. They ...deal with images, projections, and perceptions, based on various experiences of coexistence. Although the individual contributions contain sources and references of iconography, this is not just another volume of art history or visual studies. As examples of practices in diverse historical contexts, the book includes a variety of textual material, such as literary productions, rhetorical exercises, dramatic applications, chronicles, epistles, and diary-like historical accounts that express ethnographic sensitivities. Another novel feature of the volume is the deliberate digression of traditional scholars’ focus, and the investigation of rarely examined regions and practices. This approach allows the contributors to spotlight their special areas of research and to share a fresh new look at early modernity. Thus, supported by a thorough research apparatus, these studies propose a new cultural history of the early modern coexistence of various communities, as identified in current research by young scholars.
In the series of wars that raged between France and Britain from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries,seapower was of absolute vital importance. Not only was each nation's navy a key to ...victory, but was a prerequisite for imperial dominance. These ongoing struggles for overseas colonies and commercial dominance required efficient navies which in turn insured the economic strength for the existence of these fleets as instruments of state power.This new book, by the distinguished historian Jonathan Dull, looks inside the workings of both the Royal and the French navies of this tumultuous era, and compares the key elements of the rival fleets. Through this balanced comparison, Dull argues that Great Britain's final triumph in a series of wars with France was primarily the result of superior financial and economic power.This accessible and highly readable account navigates the intricacies of the British and French wars in a way which will both enlighten the scholar and fascinate the general reader. Naval warfare is brought to life but also explained within the framework of diplomatic and international history. An important new work.
Print, in the early modern period, could make or break power. This volume addresses one of the most urgent and topical questions in early modern history: how did European authorities use a new medium ...with such tremendous potential? The eighteen contributors develop new perspectives on the relationship between the rise of print and the changing relationships between subjects and rulers by analysing print’s role in early modern bureaucracy, the techniques of printed propaganda, genres, and strategies of state communication. While print is often still thought of as an emancipating and destabilizing force of change in early modern societies, the resulting picture shows how instrumental print was in strengthening existing power structures. Readership: This volume will appeal to historians of early modern print culture as well as historians of media and anyone with broad interest in early modern cultural and political history.
The reign of Mary Tudor has been remembered as an era of sterile repression, when a reactionary monarch launched a doomed attempt to reimpose Catholicism on an unwilling nation. Above all, the ...burning alive of more than 280 men and women for their religious beliefs seared the rule of "Bloody Mary" into the protestant imagination as an alien aberration in the onward and upward march of the English-speaking peoples.
In this controversial reassessment, the renowned reformation historian Eamon Duffy argues that Mary's regime was neither inept nor backward looking. Led by the queen's cousin, Cardinal Reginald Pole, Mary's church dramatically reversed the religious revolution imposed under the child king Edward VI. Inspired by the values of the European Counter-Reformation, the cardinal and the queen reinstated the papacy and launched an effective propaganda campaign through pulpit and press.
Even the most notorious aspect of the regime, the burnings, proved devastatingly effective. Only the death of the childless queen and her cardinal on the same day in November 1558 brought the protestant Elizabeth to the throne, thereby changing the course of English history.
"There are no studies of a sacred grand style in the English Renaissance," writes Debora Shuger, "because even according to its practitioners it was not supposed to exist." Yet the grand style forms ...the unacknowledged center of traditional rhetorical theory. In this first history of the grand style, Professor Shuger explores the growth of a Christian aesthetic out of the Classical grand style, showing its development from Isocrates to the sacred rhetorics of the Renaissance. These rhetorics advocate a Christian grand style neither pedantically mimetic nor playfully sophistic, whose models include Tacitus and the Bible, as well as Cicero, and whose theoretical sources embrace not only Cicero and Quintilian, but Hermogenes and Longinus. This style dominates the best and most scholarly rhetorics of the period--texts written in Latin and, while ignored by most recent scholars, extensively used in England throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These works are the first attempts since Augustine's pioneering revision of Ciceronian rhetoric to reground ancient rhetorical theory on Christian epistemology and theology.
According to Professor Shuger, the Christian grand style is passionate, vivid, dramatic, metaphoric--yet this emotional energy and sensuousness is shaped and legitimated by Renaissance religious culture. Thus sacred rhetoric cannot be considered apart from contemporary theories of cognition, emotion, selfhood, and signification. It mediates between word and world. Moreover, these texts suggest the almost forgotten centrality of neo-Latin scholarship during these years and provide a crucial theoretical context for England's great flowering of devotional prose and poetry.
Originally published in 1988.
ThePrinceton Legacy Libraryuses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Newly assembled macroeconomic statistics for early modern Portugal reveal one of Europe's most vigorous colonial traders but one of its least successful growth records. Was the empire a blessing or a ...drag to the economy? Using an estimated dynamic model, we conclude that intercontinental trade had a substantial and increasingly positive impact on economic growth. In the heyday of colonial expansion, eliminating the economic links to empire would have reduced Portugal's per capita income by at least a fifth. While the empire helped the domestic economy, it was not sufficient to annul the tendency of the latter toward decline in relation to Europe's advanced core, which began to set in from the seventeenth century onward, but only became definite after 1800. We conclude that the explanation for Portugal's long-term backwardness must be sought primarily in domestic conditions.
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