Best of
17th-Century

1985

A Splendid Defiance


Stella Riley - 1985
    Famous for his romantic conquests, Justin had never before let a woman touch his heart. But Abby was no ordinary woman. She was beautiful and she was brave. She was also young and terrfied of her brother, a religious fanatic and self-sworn enemy of all Royalists.When the rebel army unleashed its might on the castle, Justin fought tirelessly to break the siege. But even his closest friends did not know what tormented him. And Abby, as she sat with the rebel commanders at her brother's table, dreamed of a man she could not, must not love...

Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life


Steven Shapin - 1985
    Does the story of Roundheads and Restoration have something to do with the origins of experimental sci-ence? Schaffer and Shapin believed it does.Focusing on the debates between Boyle and his archcritic Thomas Hobbes over the air-pump, the authors proposed that solutions to the problem of knowledge are solutions to the problem of social order. Both Boyle and Hobbes were looking for ways of establishing knowledge that did not decay into ad hominem attacks and political division. Boyle proposed the experiment as cure. He argued that facts should be manufactured by machines like the air-pump so that gentlemen could witness the experiments and produce knowledge that everyone agreed on. Hobbes, by contrast, looked for natural law and viewed experiments as the artificial, unreliable products of an exclusive guild.The new approaches taken in Leviathan and the Air-Pump have been enormously influential on historical studies of science. Shapin and Schaffer found a moment of scientific revolution and showed how key scientific givens--facts, interpretations, experiment, truth--were fundamental to a new political order. Shapin and Schaffer were also innovative in their ethnographic approach. Attempting to understand the work habits, rituals, and social structures of a remote, unfamiliar group, they argued that politics were tied up in what scientists did, rather than what they said.

A History of Philosophy 4-6


Frederick Charles Copleston - 1985
    Volume V covers British philosophy during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, marked by such giants as Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, as well as other movements of far-reaching significance. Copleston takes up the eighteenth-century continental philosophers in Volume VI - beginning with the French Enlightenment (including Fontenelle, HelvĂ©tius, Robinet, Rousseau) and then going to the German Enlightenment (which includes the work of Lessing and Wolff) and finally to an intense treatment of Immanuel Kant.These individual volumes have been hailed as "profound and well organized ... a remarkable accomplishment [marked by] dispassionate objectivity ... a magnificent survey." Now available as a three-in-one paperback, it will be welcomed by students and scholars of modern philosophy as a reference work that no library should be without.

Bonnie Dundee


Rosemary Sutcliff - 1985
    Some said "Bloody Claver'se" was in league with the devil - but Hugh was determined to follow the dashing soldier anywhere. Joining Claverhouse - Bonnie Dundee - meant turning against his own family, religious rebels called Covenanters, who were terrorizing the land. It meant fighting battles that would decide the fate of his king and country - and that were more harrowing than he could have imagined. Most of all it meant leaving Darklis, the beautiful, mysterious girl who shared his secrets - and his love. [close]

Dido And Aeneas (Kalmus Edition)


Henry Purcell - 1985
    This is from the Baroque era.

Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-Century France: State Power and Provincial Aristocracy in Languedoc


William Beik - 1985
    Starting with a critical examination of current approaches to state and society by institutional, social Annales, and Marxist historians, the author calls for a new class analysis based on the findings of all these schools.

Sedgemoor 1685: An Account and an Anthology


David G. Chandler - 1985
    

Splendours of the Raj: British Architecture in India, 1660-1947


Philip Davies - 1985
    

The Origins Of Museums: The Cabinet Of Curiosities In Sixteenth And Seventeenth Century Europe


Oliver Impey - 1985
    

Anne of Austria: Queen of France


Ruth Kleinman - 1985