Merry Wiesner has updated and expanded her prize-winning study; she has added new sections on topics such as sexuality, masculinity, the impact of colonialism, and women's role as consumers. Other themes investigated include the female life cycle, literacy, women's economic role, artistic creation, female piety--and witchcraft--and the relationship between gender and power. Accessible, engrossing, and lively, this book will be of central importance for those interested in gender history, early modern Europe, and comparative history.

    Clarendon held the offices of Lord High Chancellor of England and Chancellor of the University of Oxford; he began his great work after the Restoration of Charles II at the behest of the King himself. This classic work, long unavailable, has been reissued by Oxford University Press in a facsimile of the much-admired 1888 edition. The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England chronicles in absorbing detail the intrigues and upheavals, the alliances and confrontations, and the triumphs and the tragedies of the 1640s and 1650s. In elegant and vital prose it brings to life the personalities who shaped this era--and the principles for which a nation was divided.

    From the early rise of Assyrians, Persians, Carthaginians, and Romans, view the ascendency of Parthians, Goths, Byzantines, Mongols, and the Ottoman Empire, and follow it to the 20th-century triumphs of Texas Rangers, Russian Cossacks, Bengal Lancers, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

    In contrast, no fewer than a million Swiss troops served as mercenaries in the armies of Europe during the preceding 500 years. Swiss mercenaries form a significant strand in the rope of European military history, and this book draws on many French and German-language sources to describe how the Swiss emerged from the isolated valleys of the Alps with a new method of warfare. Their massed columns of pike-carrying infantry were the first foot-soldiers since Roman times who could hold their own against the cavalry. For a brief period at the end of the 15th century the Swiss army appeared unbeatable, and after Swiss independence had been ensured they were hired out as mercenaries throughout Europe. Kings and generals competed to hire these elite combat troops. Nearly half of the million served with the French, their centuries of loyal service culminating with the massacre of the Swiss Guards during the French Revolution. Marlborough, Frederick the Great and Napoleon all hired large numbers of Swiss troops, and three Swiss regiments served in the British Army.