General

Despite its position at the heart of Europe and its quintessentially European nature, Switzerland's history is often overlooked within the English-speaking world. This comprehensive and engaging history of Switzerland traces the historical and cultural...

While the impact of a colonising metropole on subjected territories has been widely scrutinized, the effect of empire on the colonising country has long been neglected. Recently, many studies have examined the repercussions of their respective empires on...

This history of German-speaking central Europe offers a very wide perspective, emphasizing a succession of many-layered communal identities. It highlights the interplay of individual, society, culture and political power, contrasting German with Western...

How should historians read sources which record inquisitorial trials in the Middle Ages? How can we understand the fears felt by those on trial? By analysing six volumes of depositions in the trial of Cathar and Waldensian heretics in Languedoc between...

While historians typically describe the state as emerging through a wide variety of processes and structures such as armies, bureaucracies, and administrative organizations, this book demonstrates that a crucial but unrecognized component of...

This is a major study of the ideas and practices involved in the making and breaking of peace treaties and truces from Classical Greece to the time of the Crusades. Leading specialists on war and peace in ancient and medieval history examine the creation...

Italy had long experienced literacy under Roman rule, but what happened to literacy in Italy under the rule of a barbarian people? This book examines the evidence for the use of literacy in Lombard Italy c. 568-774, a period usually considered as the...

This volume concentrates on the changes in religious thought and institutions in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and includes not only monks and nuns but also less organised types of life such as hermits, recluses, crusaders, and penitents. It is...

Fearing that the future of the nation was at stake following the First World War, German policymakers vastly expanded social welfare programs to shore up women and families. Just over a decade later, the Nazis seized control of the state and created a...

The Nazi war on European culture produced the greatest dislocation of art, archives, and libraries in the history of the world. In the ruins of the Reich, Allied occupiers found millions of paintings, books, manuscripts, and pieces of sculpture, from the...

The siege of Leningrad constituted one of the most dramatic episodes of World War II, one that individuals and the state began to commemorate almost immediately. Official representations of 'heroic Leningrad' omitted and distorted a great deal...

A new edition of James Collins's acclaimed synthesis that challenged longstanding views of the origins of modern states and absolute monarchy through an analysis of early modern Europe's most important continental state. Incorporating recent scholarship...

This is a comprehensive history of the German university system in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It examines the evolution of the universities from their moribund state in 1700 to their rise to the pinnacle of world prestige and scientific...

The imperial government over the central provinces of the Byzantine Empire c.950-1100 was both sovereign and apathetic, dealing effectively with a narrow set of objectives, chiefly collecting revenue and maintaining imperial sovereignty. Outside these...

This 2004 book is about politicisation and political choice in the aftermath of the February Revolution of 1848, and the emergence of democracy in France. The introduction of male suffrage both encouraged expectations of social transformation and aroused...

This is a collection of revisionist essays on the economic and social history of seventeenth-century Castile by Spanish historians. Since the 1970s an explosion of historical scholarship in Spain, employing new techniques, approached and sources, has...

Byzantine literature is often regarded as little more than an agglomeration of stereotyped forms and generic conventions which allows no scope for individual thought or expression. Accordingly, histories of Byzantine literature tend to focus on the...

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This book examines the obsession for new technology that swept through Britain and Germany between 1890 and 1945. Drawing on a wide range of popular contemporary writings and pictorial material, it explains how, despite frequently feeling overwhelmed by...

Coins are one of the most abundant sources for our study of the past, yet their value as historical evidence is relatively neglected because of a general lack of knowledge of numismatic techniques. This volume of essays, offered by a circle of friends,...

The family forms of historic Europe have been fascinating in their variety. Their importance for the historical development of our continent would be difficult to exaggerate; for our relationship with the peoples of the other continents of the world as...

This is the first major study of German attitudes towsrds England during the Great War, 1914-18, continuing the story of Anglo-German antagonism where previous studies have ended. In particular it focuses on the extremity of anti-English feeling in...

The Quest for Compromise is an interdisciplinary study of the imperial court in late sixteenth-century Vienna, and a detailed examination of a fascinating moment of religious moderation. Against a backdrop of rising religious and confessional dogmatism,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

This is a comprehensive study in English of political thought in Spain during the Renaissance. In the early sixteenth century Castile experienced two major constitutional crises caused by the accession of a Habsburg ruler (shortly to become Holy Roman...

This book is a study of convent theatre in Italy, an all-female tradition. Widespread in the early modern period, but virtually forgotten today, this activity produced a number of talented dramatists and works worthy of remembrance. Convent authors,...

Throughout the nineteenth century, international relations in Europe were dominated by five great powers - Britain, France, Russia, Austria and Prussia. The creation of this system has been located traditionally in the long struggle with revolutionary...

This 2001 book examines the diplomatic role of royal families in the era before the outbreak of the First World War. It argues that previous historians have neglected for political reasons the important political and diplomatic role of monarchs during...

In 1734 the kingdom of Naples became an independent monarchy, but in 1799 a Jacobin revolution transformed it briefly into a republic. In these few but intense decades of independence all the great problems of the age of the Enlightenment became...

This book stands at the intersection of recent work in historiography and the study of political culture in the early Middle Ages. It takes the autograph manuscript of a tenth-century monk, Richer, as a point of entry into the author's world, and asks...

An Economic and Social History of the Netherlands, 1800-1920 provides a comprehensive account of Dutch history from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, examining population and health, the economy, and socio-political history. The Dutch...

This is a revisionary study of Muslims living under Christian rule during the Spanish 'reconquest'. It looks beyond the obvious religious distinctions and delves into the subtleties of identity in the thirteenth-century Crown of Aragon, uncovering a...

This book follows the social, economic and demographic transformations of the Alpine area from the late Middle Ages. Its aim is to reassess the image of the upland community which emerges from the work of historians, geographers and social...

This collection of essays offers a novel approach to the cultural and social history of Europe after the Second World War. In a shift of perspective, it does not conceive of the impressive economic and political stability of the postwar era as a...

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...

Privilege and the Politics of Taxation in Eighteenth-Century France, first published in 2000, offers a lucid interpretation of the Ancien Regime and the origins of the French Revolution. It examines what was arguably the most ambitious project of the...