General

In what is sometimes called the age of absolutism, Castilian nobles and commoners, tribunes and towns, were to a considerable degree able to resist and shape royal commands. Whereas there was little open conflict, there was sometimes a surprising degree...

Relations between town and country are central to Europe's long-term economic, political and social evolution. This 2001 book surveys and re-interprets these relations in particular countries and regions in the light of the most recent debates on state...

Things which we regard as the everyday objects of consumption (and hence re-purchase), and essential to any decent, civilised lifestyle, have not always been so: in former times, everyday objects would have passed from one generation to another, without...

The authors in this collection of essays address the largely neglected but significant economic aspects of the national question in its historical context during the course of the twentieth century. There exists a large gap in our understanding of the...

This volume investigates the ways in which people in western Europe between the fall of Rome and the twelfth century used the past: to legitimate the present, to understand current events, and as a source of identity. Each essay examines the mechanisms...

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...

Scholars have long debated whether Heinrich Bruning, head of the German government from 1930 to 1932, was the 'last democratic chancellor'of the Weimar Republic or the trailblazer of the Nazi dictatorship. His memoirs (published in 1970) damaged his...

Centred on a study of the early archives of the Venerabile Collegio Inglese in Rome, the predecessor of the English College of today, this book is more than a study of the beginnings of English institutions in Rome. It attempts to place the English...

This 1999 book is a serious study of Henry IV's relationship with the towns of France, and offers an in-depth analysis of a crucial aspect of his craft of kingship. Set in the context of the later Wars of Religion, it examines Henry's achievement in...

The years 1936-1945 in Spain saw catastrophic civil war followed by fierce repression and economic misery. Families were torn apart and social relations were disrupted by death, exile and defeat. Society became traumatized so deeply that people avoided...

Although the German Empire of 1871-1918 was basically an authoritarian regime, its national elections were held under a democratic franchise and characterized by vigorous election campaigning and high levels of voter turnout. In The Kaiser's Voters,...

In this interpretation of European family and society, Katherine Lynch examines the family at the centre of the life of 'civil society'. Using a variety of evidence from European towns and cities, she explores how women and men created voluntary...

In this interpretation of European family and society, Katherine Lynch examines the family at the centre of the life of 'civil society'. Using a variety of evidence from European towns and cities, she explores how women and men created voluntary...

The dominant and deceptively simple theme of this book is the relationship between the moral environment of the courtroom and that of the society in which the court is situated. Like other Past and Present conference proceedings, the volume ranges widely...

David Ringrose here re-examines the history of Spain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He challenges the pessimism of prevailing assumptions about Spanish history, and its conventional separation into pre- and post-Napoleonic eras. Spain,...

This is a general study of the development of higher education in Europe from antiquity until the end of the Middle Ages, set against a background of the social and political history of the period. It shows how the slender traditions of ancient learning,...

The focus of this comparative 1997 study is on political radicalism at its high point around the middle of the nineteenth century, but broad topics such as trade unionism, co-operation, socialism and religion are also examined in depth. The author argues...

The Croix de Feu and its successor the Parti Social Francais stood at the centre of political conflict in the turbulent final years of the French Third Republic. Membership peaked at 750,000 in 1937, and at the time the movement was widely regarded as...

This series of essays by one of today's most original and prolific scholars on German racial policy concerns three interrelated aspects of Nazi Germany: relations with 'the east', 'euthanasia' and extermination. They are linked closely by the sub-themes...

This book shows how England's conquest of Mediterranean trade proved to be the first step in building its future economic and commercial hegemony, and how Italy lay at the heart of that process. In the seventeenth century the Mediterranean was the...

Church and Culture in Seventeenth-Century France brings together the social, religious and intellectual history of the Grand Siecle and focuses on the involvement of the Church in a variety of cultural domains, including literature, art, censorship and...

This 1996 book, based upon a vast range of documentary and secondary sources, shatters the disproven but persistent myth of the closed immobile village in the early modern period. It demonstrates that even in traditionalist Castile, pre-industrial...

Between 1934 and 1941 Stalin unleashed what came to be known as the 'Great Terror' against millions of Soviet citizens. The same period also saw the 'Great Retreat', the repudiation of many of the aspirations of the Russian Revolution. The response of...

This is a social history of political polarisation as it evolved in one city over three and a half decades before the Spanish Civil War. As such it is a book about the long-term origins of the War as seen 'from below'. More broadly it is an analysis of...

The enthronement of Philip III of Spain (Philip II's son and heir) in 1598 also meant the rise to power of the duke of Lerma, the first of a series of European favourites/prime ministers who influenced greatly politics, government, court culture and the...

This important collection brings together both established figures and new researchers to offer fresh perspectives on the ever-controversial subject of the history of witchcraft. Using Keith Thomas's Religion and the Decline of Magic as a starting point,...

This volume examines political and cultural mobilisation in the face of industrialised mass death during the First World War. Comparing Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Austria-Hungary, it generates arguments on mobilisation and 'total war' which have...

The history of German lawyers in private practice from 1878 to 1933 helps answer questions about the inability of German liberalism to withstand National Socialism in 1933. Lawyers connect the procedural focus of legal thinking with procedural notions of...

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...

This book focuses on the behavior of the ruling families of Brescia, a rich and strategically vital city under Venetian rule, during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. The first part of the book conceptualizes the civic leadership of...

This book examines the life of Cardinal Francesco Soderini (1453-1524) from a variety of perspectives and using a range of techniques. It analyses the relationship between Machiavelli, Piero and Francesco Soderini, and reinstates the crucial role played...

This 1996 book, based upon a vast range of documentary and secondary sources, shatters the disproven but persistent myth of the closed immobile village in the early modern period. It demonstrates that even in traditionalist Castile, pre-industrial...

This book presents a balanced account not only of the theoretical framework and legal complexities of the law of treason in later medieval France, but also of the extent and political context of that law's enforcement. By shedding some light on a larger...

This collection of essays represents a departure from the traditional perspective, recently questioned by many scholars, from which Ottoman history is usually written. Central to the establishment of Western domination over the 'East' is the writing of...

For a generation, the history of the ancien regime has been written from the perspective of the Annales school, with its emphasis on the role of long-term economic and cultural factors in shaping the development of early modern France. In this detailed...

The Poor of Lyons, whom their detractors called 'Waldensians' - after the name of their founder Waldo (or Vaudes) - first emerged around 1170 and formed in common with other groups of the period a sect which embraced evangelism, prophecy and poverty. By...

Historians have long ignored the military aspect of the wars of religion which raged in France during the late sixteenth century, dismissing the conflicts as aimless or hopelessly confused. In contrast, this meticulously researched analysis of the royal...

Treasure of the Land of Darkness traces the traffic in fur from the lands of the north, through the major trade centres of medieval Russia to the consumer markets of the world, stretching from western Europe to China. Professor Martin reconstructs the...

This 1991 book describes the history of peasants in Catalonia, the wealthiest and politically dominant part of the medieval Kingdom of Aragon, between the ninth and fifteenth centuries. It focuses on the period from 1000 to 1300, when free peasants who...

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Clermont-de-Lodeve, a Languedocian cloth-making town, experienced two major cycles in its development. In the seventeenth century unprecedented prosperity was followed by deep and prolonged depression, and in...