A country divided by faith.London 1609...Elspet Leviston’s greatest ambition is to continue the success of her father Nathaniel’s lace business. But her dreams are thrown into turmoil with the arrival of her mysterious cousin Zachary Deane – who has his own designs on Leviston’s Lace.Zachary is a dedicated swordsman with a secret past that seems to invite trouble. So Nathaniel sends him on a Grand Tour, away from the distractions of Jacobean London. Elspet believes herself to be free of her hot-headed relative but when Nathaniel dies her fortunes change dramatically. She is forced to leave her beloved home and go in search of Zachary - determined to claim back from him the inheritance that is rightfully hers.Under the searing Spanish sun, Elspet and Zachary become locked in a battle of wills. But these are dangerous times and they are soon embroiled in the roar and sweep of something far more threatening, sending them both on an unexpected journey of discovery which finally unlocks the true meaning of family . . . A Divided Inheritance is a breathtaking adventure set in London just after the Gunpowder Plot and in the bustling courtyards of Golden Age Seville.

    Newly married to a wealthy spice merchant, Kate Finche believes all her dreams of a happy family life are just around the corner until the Great Fire rages through London. She watches in horror as their livelihood goes up in flames, filling the air with the heady scents of cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves.As the city is devastated, Kate's husband Robert is forced to seek employment to ensure their survival, but when he is found drowned, Kate refuses to believe that he has taken his own life. Widowed and penniless, she seeks refuge in The House of Perfume, the home of blind perfumer Gabriel Harte, who awakens Kate's senses to a whole new world. But as she flees from this forbidden love, her husband's murderer comes looking for her . . . The Spice Merchant's Wife is a stunning novel, bursting with the colour and flavour of Restoration London - perfect for readers of Phillipa Gregory, Joanne Harris and Patrick Suskind's Perfume.

    North and South America, too, suffered turbulence. The distinguished historian Geoffrey Parker examines first-hand accounts of men and women throughout the world describing what they saw and suffered during a sequence of political, economic and social crises that stretched from 1618 to the 1680s. Parker also deploys scientific evidence concerning climate conditions of the period, and his use of ‘natural’ as well as ‘human’ archives transforms our understanding of the World Crisis. Changes in the prevailing weather patterns during the 1640s and 1650s – longer and harsher winters, and cooler and wetter summers – disrupted growing seasons, causing dearth, malnutrition, and disease, along with more deaths and fewer births. Some contemporaries estimated that one-third of the world died, and much of the surviving historical evidence supports their pessimism.Parker’s demonstration of the link between climate change and worldwide catastrophe 350 years ago stands as an extraordinary historical achievement.  And the contemporary implications of his study are equally important: are we at all prepared today for the catastrophes that climate change could bring tomorrow?

    Given the scarcity of surviving garments, it also tells us most of what we know about Tudor and Stuart dress. We’re all familiar with the stockings, voluminous breeches, and elaborate lace ruffs, but did you know that the clothing seen in many of these paintings cost more than the paintings themselves? For In Fine Style, Anna Reynolds, curator of paintings at the Royal Collection, has drawn on the art of the period, as well as wardrobe inventories, literary references, contemporary accounts, and surviving garments to offer a fascinating account of the elite fashions of the day and the ways in which they were recreated in paint. The gold threads seen throughout the forepart of Elizabeth’s gown were costly, while the red dye that colored it came from crushed beetles and would have had to have been imported from Spain. Other works show their subjects with intricate ruffs, bright stockings, or broad farthingales, each item extravagantly adorned. Indeed, the main focus of Tudor and Stuart clothing was on rich materials that communicated the ability of the wearer to afford them, and, with the rise of the moneyed merchant class, sumptuary laws were established to limit their use to the nobility. Other forms of attire, including ornate hairdos held in place with wire and pleats that had to be set each time the garment was worn left absolutely no doubt as to the fact that the wearer had an army of servants and a wealth of spare time with which to attend to appearance. Published to accompany an exhibition that will open at Buckingham Palace in May, In Fine Style features works by, among many others, Rembrandt, Rubens, Lely, and Holbein, and is the first book to examine Tudor and Stuart fashion through the use of art.

    What did they have to do with the rise of industrial power in Europe? Read Kim's story and find out! A novel set in Eric Flint's 1632 Universe.This story was previously serialized in the Grantville Gazette.

    The result is the most authoritative, most comprehensive book yet written on speaking Shakespeare’s words.Throughout the book, the author subjects Shakespeare’s language to rigorous examination, illuminating his extraordinary ability to bring his characters to life by a simple turn of phrase, a breath or even a pause. Block shows how we can only fully understand these characters, and the meaning of the plays, by speaking the words out loud.Drawing on characters from across all of Shakespeare’s plays – and looking in detail at Macbeth, The Winter’s Tale, Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice and Much Ado About Nothing – Block covers everything the actor needs to know, including: the essential distinctions between prose, rhymed verse and unrhymed verse, and the different strategies to be used when speaking them; the difference between ‘you’ and ‘thou’; Shakespeare’s use of silence; and the vital importance of paying attention to Shakespeare’s ‘original’ punctuation.Speaking the Speech is a book for actors and directors who want to improve their understanding of Shakespeare’s language in order to speak it better. It is also a fascinating read for anyone who wants to deepen their appreciation of Shakespeare’s language and the way it comes to life when spoken aloud.

    An island in the iron grip of Oliver Cromwell's Protectorate.The forces of King Charles have been utterly defeated. The sovereign is dead, his supporters beaten, humiliated and scattered.But it is not just former Cavaliers who find themselves hounded by the new regime. Many of those who fought for Parliament have fallen foul of the oppressive rule of the Major-Generals.One such man is Major Samson Lyle: Roundhead, outlaw, fugitive. Forced into exile after a dispute with the ruling elite, he has returned, intent on waging war against those now in command. Skilled with pistol and blade, Lyle takes the fight onto the busy roads south of the capital, forging a formidable reputation as a notorious highwayman.Along with his trusted young ward Bella, and Eustace Grumm, an irascible former smuggler, Lyle dodges the ever-present threat of capture to menace those against whom he has sworn revenge. But when the robbery of a powerful lawyer alerts Lyle to the imprisonment of a former comrade, the Major is plunged into a dangerous game of intrigue and deceit that may finally prove his undoing. And he must tread carefully, for Parliament have dispatched their own man to hunt the elusive outlaw. The villainous Colonel John Maddocks is tracking Lyle's every move, and soon he will come face to face with the Ironside Highwayman.

    Its painstaking work has transformed our understanding of building practices in the colonial and early national periods and thereby greatly enriched the experience of visiting historic sites. In this beautifully illustrated volume, a team of historians, curators, and conservators draw on their far-reaching knowledge of historic structures in Virginia and Maryland to illuminate the formation, development, and spread of one of the hallmark building traditions in American architecture. The essays describe how building design, hardware, wall coverings, furniture, and even paint colors telegraphed social signals about the status of builders and owners and choreographed social interactions among everyone who lived or worked in gentry houses, modest farmsteads, and slave quarters. The analyses of materials, finishes, and carpentry work will fascinate old-house buffs, preservationists, and historians alike. The lavish color photography is a delight to behold, and the detailed catalogues of architectural elements provide a reliable guide to the form, style, and chronology of the region's distinctive historic architecture.

    When the twenty-year-old prince contracts smallpox in 1660, however, his life takes a decidedly sinister turn. Obsessed with Henry from afar, Contessa Griselda di Cuorenero - one of the Devil's concubines - turns him into a vampire and plunges him into the world of night. But Henry soon discovers that not all horrors are of the paranormal kind... In the unnaturally close village of Coffin's Bishop, Henry encounters a severely abused young woman - Susanna Edmonds - a woman who has suffered under humans more monstrous than vampires. Could love save them from the evil they have known? And at what cost? Henry must choose between his humanity and his monstrous, insatiable desire for human blood. From the author of "His Last Mistress," The Stuart Vampire is a dark gothic tale in the vein of The Monk.

    This study focuses on the company's clashes with Tokugawa Japan in the seventeenth century, particularly in the areas of diplomacy, sovereignty, and violence. In each encounter, the Dutch were forced to abandon claims to sovereign powers and refashion themselves -- from subjects of a fictive king to loyal vassals of the shogun, from aggressive pirates to meek merchants, and from insistent defenders of colonial rule to legal subjects of the Tokugawa state. The first book to treat the Dutch East India Company as more than a commercial enterprise, this text offers unprecedented perspective on one of the most important, long-lasting unions between an Asian state and a European overseas enterprise and the surprisingly limited influence of Europeans operating in early-modern Asia.*The Jerry Bentley Prize is awarded by the American Historical Association to the best book dealing with global or world-scale history, with connections or comparisons across continents.

    Rebecca was an ordinary country girl when she became John and Grace Hooke’s maidservant—a little light-fingered, perhaps, but never malicious. In the Hookes’ service, however, she finds herself caught between a vicious mistress and a rapacious master, with their quiet but kind son, Richard, the only benevolent face in view.In Samuel Thomas' e-original short story, Rebecca recounts her escape from this desperate situation, and bears witness to the choices that have turned her from a naïve young woman into the ruthless Rebecca Hooke. The question she would ask the reader is simple, “What else would you have had me do?” 10,700 words

    When her friend Mary Dyer defies banishment and faces the gallows in the same quest, what will Herod do?Herod also challenges convention at home as she seeks to keep personal scandal hidden. Though she has taken George Gardner's name and borne his children, they have never wed. When the couple is called to court, does it mean that their secret has been revealed?The Reputed Wife is the second volume in the Scandalous Life series about Herodias Long, the most notorious resident of 17th-century Newport, Rhode Island.

    While European courts targeted and executed overwhelmingly female suspects, often on charges of compacting with the devil, the tsars' courts vigorously pursued men and some women accused of practicing more down-to-earth magic, using poetic spells and home-grown potions. Instead of Satanism or heresy, the primary concern in witchcraft testimony in Russia involved efforts to use magic to subvert, mitigate, or avenge the harsh conditions of patriarchy, serfdom, and social hierarchy.Broadly comparative and richly illustrated with color plates, Desperate Magic places the trials of witches in the context of early modern Russian law, religion, and society. Piecing together evidence from trial records to illuminate some of the central puzzles of Muscovite history, Kivelson explores the interplay among the testimony of accusers, the leading questions of the interrogators, and the confessions of the accused. Assembled, they create a picture of a shared moral vision of the world that crossed social divides. Because of the routine use of torture in extracting and shaping confessions, Kivelson addresses methodological and ideological questions about the Muscovite courts equation of pain and truth, questions with continuing resonance in the world today. Within a moral economy that paired unquestioned hierarchical inequities with expectations of reciprocity, magic and suspicions of magic emerged where those expectations were most egregiously violated.Witchcraft in Russia surfaces as one of the ways that oppression was contested by ordinary people scrambling to survive in a fiercely inequitable world. Masters and slaves, husbands and wives, and officers and soldiers alike believed there should be limits to exploitation and saw magic deployed at the junctures where hierarchical order veered into violent excess.

    But life as part of a regiment of mercenaries is hard and cruel, while the brutal war destroying mainland Europe has shown him horrors he never thought possible. Stryker has few allies, and much to prove. When his company are assigned an apparently simple task - collect a spy at a remote ford and bring him safely back to his Swedish masters - Stryker seizes the opportunity to distinguish himself. But unbeknown to the mercenaries, their enemies in the Catholic League are already aware of the spy. They have enlisted the help of Sweden's old rivals, the Poland-Lithuania Commonwealth and, as Stryker's mission goes bloodily awry, his company are shattered by the most fearsome cavalrymen on the continent; the winged husaria of Poland. In the terrors that follow, Stryker must make his choice. He must run, or he must stand and fight.

    Yet, surprisingly, few if any of their ferocious African wars are known to English-speaking readers. In this impeccably researched and spellbinding new book, John Leband seeks to redress this imbalance expertly recalling this remarkable saga in full.

    

    However, by 1650 it had become the greatest wealth-producing area in the English-speaking world, the center of an exchange of people and goods between the British Isles, the Gold Coast of West Africa, and the New World. By the early seventeenth century, more than half a million enslaved men, women, and children had been transported to the island. In "A New World of Labor," Simon P. Newman argues that this exchange stimulated an entirely new system of bound labor.Free and bound labor were defined and experienced by Britons and Africans across the British Atlantic world in quite different ways. Connecting social developments in seventeenth-century Britain with the British experience of slavery on the West African coast, Newman demonstrates that the brutal white servant regime, rather than the West African institution of slavery, provided the most significant foundation for the violent system of racialized black slavery that developed in Barbados. Class as much as race informed the creation of plantation slavery in Barbados and throughout British America. Enslaved Africans in Barbados were deployed in radically new ways in order to cultivate, process, and manufacture sugar on single, integrated plantations. This Barbadian system informed the development of racial slavery on Jamaica and other Caribbean islands, as well as in South Carolina and then the Deep South of mainland British North America. Drawing on British and West African precedents, and then radically reshaping them, Barbados planters invented a new world of labor.

    Aware her marriage is already in trouble, Bronwyn finds herself increasingly drawn to the life of Nell, the 5th Duchess of Loxley and guardian of its ancient walls, at a time when the country was engaged in a bloody Civil War. What is Nell's secret, and why is her tortured ghost said to haunt the Hall? Bronwyn's search for answers reveals parallels with her own life that she could never have imagined...

    Key topics include baroque Rome, Dutch paintings of the Golden Age, Georgian London, the Paris salon, and the impact of the discovery of the South Pacific.

    Accompanied by full scholarly apparatus, the edition demonstrates the breadth of the author of some of the most brilliant and delirious prose in English Literature.Lauded by writers ranging from Coleridge to Virginia Woolf, from Borges to W.G. Sebald, Browne's distinct style and the musicality of his phrasing have long been seen as a pinnacle of early modern prose. However, it is Browne's range of subject matter that makes him truly distinct. His writings include the hauntingly meditative Urn-Burial, and the elaborate The Garden of Cyrus, a work that borders on a madness of infinite pattern. Religio Medici, probably Browne's most famous work, is at once autobiography, intricate religious-scientific paradox, and a monument of tolerance in the era of the English civil war. This volume also includes his Pseudodoxia Epidemica, an encyclopaedia of error which contains within its vast remit the entire intellectual landscape of the seventeenth century-its science, its natural history, its painting, its history, its geography and its biblical oddities. The volume enables students to experience the ways in which Browne brings his lucid, baroque and stylish prose to bear across this range of diverse material, together with a carefully poised wit. This volume contains almost all of the author's work that was published in his lifetime, as well as a selection of writings published after his death.Explanatory notes and commentary are included, to enhance the study, understanding, and enjoyment of these works, and the edition includes an Introduction to the life and works of Browne.

    Andy Wood charts how custom and popular memory generated a usable past that legitimated claims to rights, space, and resources in the present.

    To know her was to love her.Born in the very heart of the dangers of the English Civil War, smuggled out of the clutches of Parliament as a toddler and then raised in near penury in exile in France, the charming and beautiful Princess Henrietta-Anne Stuart, youngest daughter of Charles I and Henrietta Maria is the original Cinderella, waiting breathlessly and with some trepidation for the moment when her family’s fortunes will be restored and she can reclaim her proper place in the world.A treat for all fans of The Secret Diary of a Princess by the same author, Minette leads the reader into the flamboyant, exciting and treacherous world of Louis XIV's Paris and Charles II's raucous Restoration court as seen through the eyes of an enchanting and unforgettable heroine.This is the first book in a two part series about the youngest and favourite sister of Charles II.

    Renowned for his sublimely beautiful depictions of everyday Dutch life, Vermeer created exquisite paintings that are sought out by any art lover. Music was a key facet of 17th-century Dutch life, in both public and private. Of Vermeer’s thirty-six surviving paintings, twelve depict musical themes or a musical instrument. These include the magnificent Young Woman Standing at a Virginal, Young Woman Seated at a Virginal, The Music Lesson, and The Guitar Player, all featured in this book.The book also includes paintings by Vermeer’s contemporaries, such as Gerard ter Borch (1617–1681), Gabriel Metsu (1629–1667), and Jan Steen (c. 1626–1679). Vermeer and Music provides new insight into the cultural significance of these images. A historical overview of musical instruments and entertainment in the Dutch Republic, including the abundant publication of songbooks filled with love songs and poems, some richly illustrated, contextualizes the fascinating relationship between music and the visual arts.

    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.

    It is difficult for a contemporary person to reconcile these elegant clothes and accessories with the image of cloistered nuns. For many of the some thousand nuns in early modern Venice, however, these fashions were the norm.    Often locked in convents without any religious calling—simply to save their parents the expense of their dowry—these involuntary nuns relied on the symbolic meaning of secular clothes, fabrics, and colors to rebel against the rules and prescriptions of conventual life and to define roles and social status inside monastic society.    Calling upon mountains of archival documents, most of which have never been seen in print, Forbidden Fashions is the first book to focus specifically upon the dress of nuns in Venetian convents and offers new perspective on the intersection of dress and the city’s social and economic history.

    Visitors regularly commented on the relatively peaceful coexistence of this bewildering array of peoples, languages, and faiths. In Kith, Kin, and Neighbors, David Frick shows how Wilno's inhabitants navigated and negotiated these differences in their public and private lives.This remarkable book opens with a walk through the streets of Wilno, offering a look over the royal quartermaster's shoulder as he made his survey of the city's intramural houses in preparation for King Wladyslaw IV's visit in 1636. These surveys (Lustrations) provide concise descriptions of each house within the city walls that, in concert with court and church records, enable Frick to accurately discern Wilno's neighborhoods and human networks, ascertain the extent to which such networks were bounded confessionally and culturally, determine when citizens crossed these boundaries, and conclude which kinds of cross-confessional constellations were more likely than others. These maps provide the backdrops against which the dramas of Wilno lives played out: birth, baptism, education, marriage, separation or divorce, guild membership, poor relief, and death and funeral practices. Perhaps the most complete reconstruction ever written of life in an early modern European city, Kith, Kin, and Neighbors sets a new standard for urban history and for work on the religious and communal life of Eastern Europe.

    James I's peace treaty with Spain in 1604 rendered travel to Catholic Europe both safer and more respectable than it had been under the Tudors and opened up the continent to a new generation of aristocratic explorers, enquirers and adventurers. This book examines the political and cultural significance of the encounters that resulted, focusing in particular on two of England's greatest, and newly united, families: the Cecils and the Howards. It also considers the ways in which Protestants and Catholics experienced the aesthetic and intellectual stimulus of European travel and how the cultural experiences of the travelers formed the essential ingredients in what became the Grand Tour.

    With the help of recent archival discoveries, the biography recasts each phase of Browne's life (1605-82) and situates his incomparable writings within the diverseintellectual and social contexts in which he lived, including London, Winchester, Oxford, Montpellier, Padua, Leiden, Halifax, and Norwich. The book makes the case that, as his contemporaries fervently believed, Browne influenced the intellectual and religious direction of seventeenth-centuryEngland in singularly rich and dynamic ways.Special attention is paid in the biography to Browne's medical vocation but also to his place within the scientific revolution. New information is offered regarding his childhood in London, his European travels and medical studies, the setting in which he first wrote Religio Medici, his impact onreaders during the English civil wars, and the contemporary view of his medical practice. Overall, the image of Browne that emerges is far bolder and more cosmopolitan, less complacent and provincial, than biographers have assumed ever since Samuel Johnson doubted Browne's claim that his life up toage thirty resembled a romantic fiction filled with miracles and fables. The biography has extensive material for anyone interested in the histories of religion, education, science and medicine, seventeenth-century England, and early modern philosophy and literature.

    In this comprehensive history of the rise and fall of the RAC, William A. Pettigrew grounds the transatlantic slave trade in politics, not economic forces, analyzing the ideological arguments of the RAC and its opponents in Parliament and in public debate. Ultimately, Pettigrew powerfully reasons that freedom became the rallying cry for those who wished to participate in the slave trade and therefore bolstered the expansion of the largest intercontinental forced migration in history. Unlike previous histories of the RAC, Pettigrew's study pursues the Company's story beyond the trade's complete deregulation in 1712 to its demise in 1752. Opening the trade led to its escalation, which provided a reliable supply of enslaved Africans to the mainland American colonies, thus playing a critical part in entrenching African slavery as the colonies' preferred solution to the American problem of labor supply.