General

Why do Italians believe that they have a national character and that this character is a major reason for their political woes? Why is their self-image so frequently derogatory? In this meticulous study of the role of national character in Italian...

By the time of the Calvinist Reformation, the cities of Holland had established a very long tradition of social provision for the poor in the civic community. Calvinists however intended to care for their own church members, who were by definition...

The grain trade, a crucial sector of the French economy, caused enormous concern throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Bread was the staple of French diets, so harvest shortfalls triggered unrest. The royal government had only the...

This book is a major history of the dramatic and enduring changes in the daily lives of poor European women and men in the nineteenth century. Rachel G. Fuchs conveys the extraordinary difficulties facing the destitute from England to Russia, paying...

France and the Great War tells the story of how the French community embarked upon, sustained, and in some ways prevailed in the Great War. In this 2003 book, Leonard Smith and his co-authors synthesize many years of scholarship, examining the origins of...

The opening of the archive of the former Congregation of the Holy Office in Rome (the office of the 'Inquisition') yielded an extraordinary wealth of documentation, altering dramatically many long-standing views on the repressive activity of the Roman...

Sorry no description is available for this book at this time.

Drawing on anthropology, religious studies, history, and literary theory, Plagues, Priests, and Demons explores significant parallels in the rise of Christianity in the late Roman empire and colonial Mexico. Evidence shows that new forms of infectious...

This study of the social, geographical and disciplinary composition of the scholarly community at the University of Paris in the early fourteenth century is based on the reconstruction of a remarkable document: the financial record of tax levied on...

The 'personal rule' of Louis XIV witnessed a massive increase in the size of the French army and an apparent improvement in the quality of its officers, its men and the War Ministry. However, this is the first book to treat the French army under Louis...

For over 1400 years the Histories of Gregory of Tours (538-594) - the principal work of Merovingian history - have been understood as a 'history of the Franks' and as an objective portrayal of history, albeit told by a naive narrator succeeding only in...

This book provides a full account of the Italian nobility in the post-unification era. It challenges interpretations which have stressed the rapid fusion of old and new elites in Italy and the marginality of the nobility after 1861, and instead...

Clement V, the first 'Avignon' pope, led the Church during nine critical years, 1305-14. Elected two years after the outrage committed upon Boniface VIII at Anagni, Clement saw as his main goal the restoration of harmonious relations with the leading...

Sorry no description is available for this book at this time.

Sorry no description is available for this book at this time.

This book is the first major study in English of a group of late twelfth-century religious enthusiasts, the early Humiliati, who were condemned by the Church as heretics in 1184. However, in a remarkable transition, they were reconciled seventeen years...

Sorry no description is available for this book at this time.

German identity began to take shape in the late Middle Ages during a period of political weakness and fragmentation for the Holy Roman Empire, the monarchy under which most Germans lived. Between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, the idea that...

This lucid and wide-ranging survey is the first study in English to identify a distinctive urban phase in the history of the early modern crowd. Through close analysis of the behaviour of protesters and authorities in more than fifteen...

Sorry no description is available for this book at this time.

Focusing on policy, rather than religious institutions, Professor Ward offers a brief, but comprehensive, account of religious belief and practice of all kinds in Europe between the Westphalia settlements in 1648 and the French Revolution. The book is...

The performance of the German economy between the Great Crash and the Second World War has been the subject of intense academic debate. The problems of economic growth were acute in inter-war Germany, and the depression of the early 1930s intensified...

This book presents a concise survey of the Spanish economy from the end of the Civil War of 1936-9 to the present. In it the author analyses the transformation of Spain from a backward agrarian economy - committed by Franco and the country's military...

Why did 60 million people leave Europe for overseas destinations in the hundred years after the Napoleonic Wars? What were the social and economic causes and effects of this mass migration? Why did some people emigrate and not others, and why did so many...

In this wide-ranging account, Ivan Berend traces the post-war fortunes of the countries lying between Germany and the former Soviet Union. Professor Berend draws both on his academic expertise and personal involvement in many of the events which he...

This book examines the origins, development and reasons for change of the first Soviet economic system. Programmes are compared with outcomes and theory with practice in the fields of nationalization, workers' control and management, money and planning,...

The early and middle decades of the nineteenth century in Europe (1815-81) have long been regarded as the major period of assimilation in post-medieval Jewish history. Moreover the established historiography dealing with those years has tended to focus...

This book examines Gibbon's interpretations of empire and the intellectual context in which he formulated them against a background of the eighteenth- and late twentieth-century knowledge of late antiquity and the Middle Ages. Gibbon's ideas of empire,...

This 1995 book explores how political power was exerted and family identity expressed in the context of reconstruction of the noble families of the medieval duchies of Gaeta, Amalfi and Naples. Localised forms of power, and the impact of the Norman...

Ending the Terror makes accessible a major revisionist assessment of a crucial moment in the history of the French Revolution. The months that followed the fall of Robespierre in July 1794 mark not only a turning point in the history of the Revolution:...

This is a collection of original essays on the relationship between property and power, a fundamental theme in medieval history. It addresses four main issues: the meaning of power over property; the ways in which property conveyed power; the nature of...

Medieval dynasties frequently relied upon the cult of royal saints for legitimacy. After the early medieval emergence of this type of sainthood, in the central Middle Ages most royal dynasties had saints in their family: Edward the Confessor, Olaf,...

This 1994 book examines the development of the modern idea of militarism from its inception in the 1860s until the outbreak of World War I. Often regarded as the archetypical militarist state, imperial Germany in fact witnessed a major controversy over...

This book investigates the problems that committed Catholics allegedly faced if they sought careers in state employment under the Third French Republic. Using ministerial and Masonic archives, the book explores the broad divergence of practice between...

This book is a survey of the history of work in general and of European urban artisans in particular, from the late middle ages to the era of industrialization. Unlike traditional histories of work and craftsmen, this book offers a multi-faceted...

This book is a collection of original essays on gift in the early Middle Ages, from Anglo-Saxon England to the Islamic world. Focusing on the languages of gift, the essays reveal how early medieval people visualized and thought about gift, and how they...

This collection of essays provides an introduction to 'proto-industrialization': the growth of export-oriented domestic industries which took place all over Europe between about 1500 and 1800. Often these industries expanded alongside agriculture,...

Spanish Agriculture: The Long Siesta, 1765-1965, first published in 1996, is a major study in English of Spanish agrarian history. James Simpson examines how traditional agriculture responded to population growth and the integration of commodity markets,...

In general terms, one way of describing the world we live in is to say that it is made up of nature and society, and that human beings belong to both. This was the first volume to be published which addresses the historical contexts of the relations...

The image of Hitler as a demagogic 'pied piper' leading astray the 'little people' of Austria is as misleading as it is powerful. Nazism and the Working Class in Austria is a case study of the ambiguous relationship between state and society in Austria...