ALBERT

Description: This book reviews the course of NATO policy on German reunification from the perspective of West German preferences and Bonn's endeavors to have them respected in the diplomatic efforts of the major allies. With its accession to NATO, the West German government under Adenauer continued its policy of rehabilitating the German people in the eyes of the Western political community by playing a willing and sometimes leading role in joint ventures whose purpose was said to transcend the nation-state.

Description: Originally published in 1974. Focusing on a set of Jewish communities, Robert Chazan tells how, by the eleventh century, French Jews had created for themselves a role as local merchants and moneylenders in adapting to the political, economic, and social limits imposed on them. French society, striving to become more powerful and civilized, was willing to extend aid and protection to the Jews in return for general stimulation of trade and urban life and for the immediate profit realized from taxation. While the authorities were relatively successful in protecting the Jews from others, there was no power to impose itself between the Jews and their protectors. The political and social well-being of the Jews was, therefore, dependent on the will of the governing authorities who taxed their holdings and regulated their activities. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the position of the Jews was constantly under attack by reform elements in the church concerned with Jewish moneylending and blasphemous materials in Jewish books; these reformers were eventually devoted to a serious missionizing effort within the Jewish community. The Jews' situation was further complicated by deep popular animosity, expressing itself in a damaging set of slanders and occasionally in physical violence. Despite the impressive achievements of the Jews in medieval northern France, by the thirteenth century their community was increasingly constricted; and in 1306, they were expelled from royal France by Philip IV. Overcoming the handicap of a lack of copious source material, Chazan analyzes the Jews' political status, their relations with key elements of Christian society, their demographic development, their economic outlets, their internal organization, and their attitudes toward the Christian environment. As it highlights aspects of French society from an unusual perspective, Medieval Jewry in Northern France should be of special interest to the historian of medieval France as well as to the student of Jewish history. This story is also significant for all who are fascinated by the capacity of human groups to respond and adapt creatively to a hostile and limiting environment.

Description: The Eve of Spain demonstrates how the telling and retelling of one of Spain’s founding myths played a central role in the formation of that country’s national identity. King Roderigo, the last Visigoth king of Spain, rapes (or possibly seduces) La Cava, the daughter of his friend and counselor, Count Julian. In revenge, the count travels to North Africa and conspires with its Berber rulers to send an invading army into Spain. So begins the Muslim conquest and the end of Visigothic rule. A few years later, in Northern Spain, Pelayo initiates a Christian resistance and starts a new line of kings to which the present-day Spanish monarchy traces its roots.Patricia E. Grieve follows the evolution of this story from the Middle Ages into the modern era, as shifts in religious tolerance and cultural acceptance influenced its retelling. She explains how increasing anti-Semitism came to be woven into the tale during the Christian conquest of the peninsula—in the form of traitorous Jewish conspirators. In the sixteenth century, the tale was linked to the looming threat of the Ottoman Turks. The story continued to resonate through the Enlightenment and into modern historiography, revealing the complex interactions of racial and religious conflict and evolving ideas of women’s sexuality.In following the story of La Cava, Rodrigo, and Pelayo, Grieve explains how foundational myths and popular legends articulate struggles for national identity. She explores how myths are developed around few historical facts, how they come to be written into history, and how they are exploited politically, as in the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 followed by that of the Moriscos in 1609. Finally, Grieve focuses on the misogynistic elements of the story and asks why the fall of Spain is figured as a cautionary tale about a woman’s sexuality.

Description: Chivalry denotes the ideals and practices considered suitable for a noble. The word itself is reminiscent of the aristocratic society of medieval France dominated by mounted warriors. As early as the eleventh century, several different views of chivalric standards and behavior had appeared. During the next four hundred years, these conceptions of the ideal nobleman were developed by and for the feudal ruling class. Sidney Painter studies chivalry from the perspectives of both social history and the history of ideas. The first chapter provides readers unfamiliar with medieval history the background required for understanding the chapters on chivalry.

Description: Lacking the warlike bluntness of his predecessor, Richard the Lionheart, John came to the throne of England at a time when economic forces in the realm were threatening to undermine the very basis of feudal power. His attempts to adjust a political system to cope with this threat and at the same time to assert the hegemony of the monarchy over its chief rivals—the barons and the church—made his reign one of particular importance and significance in English history.

Description: How the maternal image of the empress Julia Domna helped the Roman empire rule.Ancient authors emphasize dramatic moments in the life of Julia Domna, wife of Roman emperor Septimius Severus (193–211). They accuse her of ambition unforgivable in a woman, of instigating civil war to place her sons on the throne, and of resorting to incest to maintain her hold on power. In imperial propaganda, however, Julia Domna was honored with unprecedented titles that celebrated her maternity, whether it was in the role of mother to her two sons (both future emperors) or as the metaphorical mother to the empire. Imperial propaganda even equated her to the great mother goddess, Cybele, endowing her with a public prominence well beyond that of earlier imperial women. Her visage could be found gracing everything from state-commissioned art to privately owned ivory dolls. In Maternal Megalomania, Julie Langford unmasks the maternal titles and honors of Julia Domna as a campaign on the part of the administration to garner support for Severus and his sons. Langford looks to numismatic, literary, and archaeological evidence to reconstruct the propaganda surrounding the empress. She explores how her image was tailored toward different populations, including the military, the Senate, and the people of Rome, and how these populations responded to propaganda about the empress. She employs Julia Domna as a case study to explore the creation of ideology between the emperor and its subjects.

Description: Painter's Scourge of the Clergy is a biography of Peter of Dreux, who was the Count of Dreux from 1298 to 1345. This book engages in a conversation with specialists of medieval France and Brittany, given that Peter's career gives historians insight into the quarrels between church and state, the crusades of St. Louis, the struggles between French kings and vassals, and the rivalry of the Capetian and Plantagenet monarchies.

Description: In the early development of the modern Italian state, individual orphanages were a reflection of the intertwining of politics and charity.Nearly half of the children who lived in the cities of the late Italian Renaissance were under fifteen years of age. Grinding poverty, unstable families, and the death of a parent could make caring for these young children a burden. Many were abandoned, others orphaned. At a time when political rulers fashioned themselves as the "fathers" of society, these cast-off children presented a very immediate challenge and opportunity.In Bologna and Florence, government and private institutions pioneered orphanages to care for the growing number of homeless children. Nicholas Terpstra discusses the founding and management of these institutions, the procedures for placing children into them, the children's daily routine and education, and finally their departure from these homes. He explores the role of the city-state and considers why Bologna and Florence took different paths in operating the orphanages. Terpstra finds that Bologna's orphanages were better run, looked after the children more effectively, and were more successful in returning their wards to society as productive members of the city's economy. Florence's orphanages were larger and harsher, and made little attempt to reintegrate children into society.Based on extensive archival research and individual stories, Abandoned Children of the Italian Renaissance demonstrates how gender and class shaped individual orphanages in each city's network and how politics, charity, and economics intertwined in the development of the early modern state.

Description: Originally published in 1933. As mediaeval society was dominated by the feudal caste, a biography that depicts the position, activities, manners, and thoughts of a member of that class might do much to elucidate the history of the period. This is what Sidney Painter had in mind when he wrote a William Marshal: Knight-Errant, Baron, and Regent of England. The subject has proved a peculiarly fortunate one. The fourth son of John fitz Gilbert, marshal of the king's court, William for the first forty years of his life was a landless knight who devoted most of his time and energy to tournaments. In the year 1189 by his marriage to the daughter and heiress of Earl Richard of Pembroke, William became a great feudal lord with fiefs in Normandy, England, Wales, and Ireland. Thus his biography depicts the two extremes of feudal society—the landless knight and the rich baron. Finally in 1216 he was chosen regent of England for the young king, Henry III, and his biography becomes for three years the history of England.

Description: The long awaited conclusion to the magisterial Money and Banking in Medieval and Renaissance Venice.Originally published in 1997. In 1985 Frederic C. Lane and Reinhold C. Mueller published the magisterial Money and Banking in Medieval and Renaissance Venice, volume 1: Coins and Moneys of Account. Now, after ten years of further research and writing, Reinhold Mueller completes the work that he and the late Frederic Lane began. The history of money and banking in Venice is crucial to an understanding of European economic history. Because of its strategic location between East and West, Venice rapidly rose to a position of preeminence in Mediterranean trade. To keep trade moving from London to Constantinople and beyond, Venetian merchants and bankers created specialized financial institutions to serve private entrepreneurs and public administrators: deposit banks, foreign exchange banks, a grain office, and a bureau of the public debt. This new book clarifies Venice's pivotal role in Italian and international banking and finance. It also sets banking—and panics—in the context of more generalized and recurrent crises involving territorial wars, competition for markets, and debates over interest rates and the question of usury.

Description: At a glance, high fashion and feminism seem unlikely partners. Between the First and Second World Wars, however, these forces combined femininity and modernity to create the new, modern French woman. In this engaging study, Mary Lynn Stewart reveals the fashion industry as an integral part of women's transition into modernity. Analyzing what female columnists in fashion magazines and popular women novelists wrote about the "new silhouette," Stewart shows how bourgeois women feminized the more severe, masculine images that elite designers promoted to create a hybrid form of modern that both emancipated women and celebrated their femininity. She delves into the intricacies of marketing the new clothes and the new image to middle-class women and examines the nuts and bolts of a changing industry—including textile production, relationships between suppliers and department stores, and privacy and intellectual property issues surrounding ready-to-wear couture designs. Dressing Modern Frenchwomen draws from thousands of magazine covers, advertisements, fashion columns, and features to uncover and untangle the fascinating relationships among the fashion industry, the development of modern marketing techniques, and the evolution of the modern woman as active, mobile, and liberated.

Description: Originally published in 1960. This is a regional study of the nobility of Toulouse in the eighteenth century. The complex notion of class and the peculiarities of each region in France during the Ancien Régime make it difficult for historians to render a general portrait of the provincial French aristocracy. This study describes the economic interests and investments of noblemen in Toulouse. Some of their activities follow the classic pattern of "seigniorial reaction" and thus illustrate ideas posed by Marc Bloch. Others suggest that the Toulousian gentlemen were conscientious landlords. The Toulousian noble was essentially a gentilhomme campagnard, a country gentleman, in regard to his source of revenue, his outlook, and his mode of living. This book should make clear the full meaning of this expression.

Description: Originally published in 1965. In A Baronial Family in Medieval England: The Clares, 1217–1314, Michael Altschul studies the Clare family during the thirteenth century. The Clares spearheaded the struggle to enforce Magna Carta in the Barons' War. Historians prior to Altschul tended to neglect the Clares' history given the scattered nature of the archives documenting their time as a politically influential and powerful family. This book unfolds chronologically, outlining the Clares' rise to preeminence and describing how they administered their estates and income.

Description: Originally published in 1978. Josef Konvitz provides a broad comparative study of European port cities since the Renaissance by examining how they were built and rebuilt in the context of urban industrialization. Konvitz argues that as seafaring became more critical to Western civilization, intellectuals and rulers placed more importance on urban planning. Planning looked different, of course, in various European cities. In Paris, riverside planning was patched into the existing frame of the city, whereas Scandinavian towns on the Baltic were over-designed to accommodate a degree of maritime trade unsustainable for cities writ large. In the eighteenth century, city planning fell out of vogue, and new solutions were introduced to help solve the problems created by urban development. With a series of helpful maps, Konvitz's book is an important source for urban historians of early modern Europe.

Description: In the 1990s, amid political upheaval and civil war, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia dissolved into five successor states. The subsequent independence of Montenegro and Kosovo brought the total number to seven. Balkan scholar and diplomat to the region Mieczysław P. Boduszyński examines four of those states—Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia, and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia—and traces their divergent paths toward democracy and Euro-Atlantic integration over the past two decades.Boduszyński argues that regime change in the Yugoslav successor states was powerfully shaped by both internal and external forces: the economic conditions on the eve of independence and transition and the incentives offered by the European Union and other Western actors to encourage economic and political liberalization. He shows how these factors contributed to differing formulations of democracy in each state.The author engages with the vexing problems of creating and sustaining democracy when circumstances are not entirely supportive of the effort. He employs innovative concepts to measure the quality of and prospects for democracy in the Balkan region, arguing that procedural indicators of democratization do not adequately describe the stability of liberalism in post-communist states. This unique perspective on developments in the region provides relevant lessons for regime change in the larger post-communist world. Scholars, practitioners, and policymakers will find the book to be a compelling contribution to the study of comparative politics, democratization, and European integration.

Description: Originally published in 1959. This book examines the French Enlightenment by analyzing critical thought in eighteenth-centruy France. It examines the philosophes' views on evil, free will and determinism, and human nature. This is an interesting group to look at, according to Crocker, because French Enlightenment thinkers straddled two vastly different time periods.

Description: Originally published in 1975. This book fills a gap in the historical knowledge of wartime Yugoslavia. Focusing on the Chetnik movement provides a better understanding of the various ways that important segments of the population, including members of the Yugoslav officer corps and Serb civilians, perceived and responded to the occupation. The partisans' ultimate success does not conceal the fact that during the greater part of the war, several armed groups, owing at least some sort of allegiance to Mihailovic, chose very different courses of resistance. The overriding question for Milazzo is how a movement whose leadership was in no sense pro-Axis found itself progressively drawn into a hopelessly compromising set of relationships with the occupation authorities and the Quisling regime. What was it about the situation in occupied Yugoslavia and the Serb officers' response to that state of affairs that prevented them from carrying out serious anti-Axis activity or engaging in effective collaboration? The author attends to the emergence, organization, and failure of the Chetniks, the regional particularities of the movement, and Mihailovic's efforts to establish his own authority over the widely scattered non-Communist armed formations. The author also discusses the domestic opposition to Tito and the complex reality of the national and political civil war in Yugoslavia.

Description: Originally published in 1962. This book is a study of relations between Britain and China. The first section surveys historical relations between the two nations and culminates with the Second World War. The second part examines British policy during the Chinese Civil War, the Korean War, and the Geneva Conference. The third part discusses what contemporary issues in British-Chinese relations were at the time the book was written.

Description: Originally published in 1987. Since Machiavelli, historians and political theorists have sought the sources of the stability that earned for Venice the appellation La Serenissima, the Most Serene Republic. In Patricians and Popolani, Dennis Romano looks to the private lives of early Renaissance Venetians for an explanation. Fourteenth-century Venice escaped the tumultuous upheavals of the other Italian city-republics, Romano contends, because the patricians and common people of the city did not divide sharply along class or factional lines in their personal associations. Rather, Venetians of the era moved in a variety of intersecting social networks that were shaped and influenced by an overriding sense of civic community. Drawing on the private archives of Venice—notarial registers, collections of testaments, and records of estates maintained by the procurators of San Marco—Romano analyzes the primary social bonds in the lives of the city's inhabitants. In separate chapters, Patricians and Popolani examines the forms of association in everyday Venetian life: marriage and family structure; artisan workshops and relations among tradesmen; the role of the parish clergy and the "sacred networks" that formed around convents, hospitals, and confraternities; and neighborhood and patron–client ties. By the beginning of the fifteenth century, Romano argues, all these networks of association had been transformed as a new hierarchical spirit took hold and overwhelmed the older, more freewheeling tendencies of Venetian society. The old sense of community yielded to a new and equally compelling sense of place, and La Serenissima remained stable throughout the later Renaissance.

Description: Originally published in 1968. In the pluralistic society of the medieval commune, informal and personal ties of obligation bound men together. In trecentro Florence this "gentle" communal structure gradually evolved into the stricter, more centralized organization characteristic of the modern state. A growing emphasis on law and order transformed the medieval commune of the early fourteenth century into the Renaissance territorial state of the latter half of the century. Professor Becker's subject is this metamorphosis. Following his study of the declining communal paideia in Volume One, the author examines in this second volume the growing vigor of public world, as well as the attendant depersonalization and repression. He is concerned primarily with two factors that he considers the major forces producing the Renaissance territorial state and encouraging the growth of imperial government and constitutionalism: the intrusion of new citizens (novi cives) into politics after 1343 and the skyrocketing of communal debt. Thus, the author disputes Burckhardt's idea of the state as a work of art, viewing it instead as a creation of socioeconomic mobility and deficit financing. Further, in examining art and literature as symptoms of developing public culture and reactions to it, Professor Becker interprets them as indications of increased public involvement of the Florentine citizens, thus providing a sharp refutation of Burkhardt's egoistic, violent Renaissance man. The author concludes his study with a detailed description of the territorial state itself, pointing out the new relationship between citizen and polis which emerged in the early fifteenth century. These two volumes provide a compelling and challenging interpretation of a crucial period in Western history.

Description: Originally published in 1987. The Origins of Agnosticism provides a reinterpretation of agnosticism and its relationship to science. Professor Lightman examines the epistemological basis of agnostics' learned ignorance, studying their core claim that "God is unknowable." To address this question, he reconstructs the theory of knowledge posited by Thomas Henry Huxley and his network of agnostics. In doing so, Lightman argues that agnosticism was constructed on an epistemological foundation laid by Christian thought. In addition to undermining the continuity in the intellectual history of religious thought, Lightman exposes the religious origins of agnosticism.

Description: Originally published in 1964. Jeffry Kaplow investigates the effects of the French Revolution on life in Elbeuf, a textile town in Normandy, through a social-historical lens. A careful study of local demographic, fiscal, and tax records allows him to reconstruct the social structure of Elbeuf's population on the eve of the French Revolution and to make claims about its economy, which was based on wool production. Somewhat unusually, there was no strong noble or clerical presence in Elbeuf, which was dominated by wool manufacturers. Despite the destabilizing effects of the Revolution, which included an economic downturn and an inflamed sense of grievance among less wealthy local constituencies, the bourgeoisie retained its grip on power in Elbeuf and its environs throughout this period. With the support of extensive archival evidence, Kaplow goes to great lengths to model the particular social and economic conditions that allowed this town to avoid succumbing to the tumult of the Revolution and to undergo, in fact, so little change compared with most municipalities of the country.

Description: Originally published in 1963. The English Landed Estate in the Nineteeth Century: Its Administration deals principally with the administration of large landed estates during the years from 1830 to 1870. The book also throws new light on the work of the Inclosure Commissioners, who, as a department of the central government, supervised agricultural improvements made by landowners who borrowed from the government and from land companies. Author David Spring argues that the British government intervened in agriculture much more than is commonly thought. In describing the hierarchy of estate management, Spring relies, wherever possible, on hitherto unused family papers and estate documents. Especially important is his material on the Dukes of Bedford and on the domestic economy and financial position of the Russell Family. The chapter titled "The Landowner," based on the seventh Duke of Bedford's correspondence with his agent, is a case study of a single estate and provides insight into the workings of a great landowner's mind. The remaining chapters, dealing with lawyers, land agents, and the Inclosure Commissioners, include other individual portraits. Among these are Christopher Haedy, the Duke of Bedford's chief agent; James Loch, king of estate agents in nineteenth-century England; Henry Morton, the Earl of Durham's land agent; and William Blamire and James Caird, two of the Inclosure Commissioners.

Description: Otiginally published in 1976. This investigation focuses on the ideology of the radical press during the French Revolution. Events, individuals, and institutions were important, but they were reported in such a manner as to make them subordinate to ideas. In their descriptions of the people and institutions of the Revolution, radicals drew heavily on the stereotypes provided by their ideology. The author analyzes the radicals of 1789 to 1791 with respect to collective interests and concerns. For these radicals, ideology governed from 1789 through 1791. And, insofar as events had any impact on the radicals, occurrences of 1790 were important because they coincided with radical shifts in opinion. Subsequent and more famous events came too late to have much impact on radical views. The author reveals that Jacobin thought of 1792 and 1793 had definite origins dating from 1789. The similarity between radical thought and the ideology of Robespierre proves that Jacobinism was not a hasty doctrine of the moment but the direct product of positions assumed since 1789.

Description: Sidney Painter explores the Angevin and Plantagenet baronage by surveying the methods that barons used to increase their prestige. His book challenges the traditional view of the Hundred Years' War as pivotal to the transition from twelfth-century lords and vassals to the nobility of the fifteenth century; from Painter's perspective, the feudal structure of the military had dissipated by the thirteenth century.

Description: Originally published in 1965. This book is about the association between Britain and Africa. The book begins with the British entry into Africa and the Indian Ocean and the establishment of the principal foci of power before 1914. The book next treats the quarter century from the First World War until the outbreak of the Second. The book then discusses the period of the Second World War, its aftermath, and the time period contemporaneous with the book's publication. The author's personal experiences and observations shortly before and during the Second World War in different parts of Africa convinced him at the time that the years 1939–1945 marked a decisive watershed. After the historical chapters, the author examines the three major zones of contemporary sub-Saharan Africa. The final chapter considers the major international associations of which Britain is a member and with which it operates in African affairs in the aftermath of colonialism.

Description: Originally published in 1966. The Individual and Society in the Middle Ages, based on three guest lectures given at Johns Hopkins University in 1965, explores the place of the individual in medieval European society. Looking at legal sources and political ideology of the era, Ullmann concludes that, for most of the Middle Ages, the individual was defined as a subject rather than a citizen, but the modern concept of citizenship gradually supplanted the subject model from the late Middle Ages onward. Ullmann lays out the theological basis of the political theory that cast the medieval individual as an inferior, abstract subject. The individual citizen who emerged during the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, by contrast, was an autonomous participant in affairs of state. Several intellectual trends made this humanistic conception of the individual possible, among them the rehabilitation of vernacular writing during the thirteenth century and the growing interest in nature, natural philosophy, and natural law. However, Ullmann points to feudalism as the single most important medieval institution that laid the groundwork for the emergence of the modern citizen.

Description: Originally published in 1977. Professor David Spring presents comparative histories of European landed elites in the nineteenth century, covering English, Prussian, Russian, Spanish, and French landed elites. European Landed Elites in the Nineteenth Century underscores the particularities of each case and underscores the differences between cases.

Description: Originally published in 1975. Following the vein of French historiography, many twentieth-century scholars of the French Revolution believed that the middle class of lawyers played a crucial role in the Revolution. In The Barristers of Toulouse, Lenard Berlanstein contends with that notion in a case study examining the response of the Toulousian legal community to the French Revolution. Using tax rolls, marriage contracts, and court records as primary sources, Professor Berlanstein argues that class interests—such as a desire to preserve their status in the cultured, conservative urban elite—led many Toulousian judges and lawyers to reject the Revolution and to remain loyal to the aristocratic Parlement. In other words, those in the legal community of Toulouse conducted themselves in ways that were consistent with other members of their social and economic class. To supplement his argument, Berlanstein's integrates methods from the New Social History movement.

Description: Originally published in 1966. This book collects papers and essays written by historian Frederic C. Lane, who specialized in medieval Venetian history.

Description: Originally published in 1975. The French Revolution generated a wave of popular piety and religious excitement in both France and England, where millenarians—prophets of the millennium—attempted to interpret the Revolution as the fulfillment of the predictions of Daniel and St. John the Divine. This study discusses the millenarian ideal in the context of the intellectual and religious attitudes of the time. Rejecting interpretations of millenarianism that chalk it up to class struggle or mass hysteria, Garrett stresses the interaction between politics and religion, viewing the phenomenon as the interpretation, by a varied assortment of individuals, of coincident political events in eschatological terms. Faced with a change as significant as the French Revolution, people found in the prophetic books of the Bible an understanding of what was happening to them. If the Revolution was God's will, if its development had been foretold, then surely the final outcome would be beneficial, at least for the faithful. Political events became eschatological events, and dangers and misfortunes became simply the chastisements that a fallen world must undergo before the Second Coming of Jesus Christ can redeem it. Although some of the beliefs may now seem bizarre, Garrett shows that, at the time, they attracted many followers for whom these ideas were both reasonable and respectable. Focusing on the careers of three millenarians—Suzette Labrousse, Catherine Théot, and Richard Brothers—Garrett tries to understand these prophets as persons rather than dismiss them as fanatics. Their prominence resulted from their success in transmitting a new political consciousness through familiar religious imagery. While the Revolution gave urgency and tangible reality to millenarian convictions, Labrousse, Théot, and others were convinced, well before the Revolution, that they were the bearers of divine revelations and thus welcomed the Revolution as confirmation of their own missions.

Description: Universities were driving forces of change in late Renaissance Italy. The Gonzaga, the ruling family of Mantua, had long supported scholarship and dreamed of founding an institution of higher learning within the city. In the early seventeenth century they joined forces with the Jesuits, a powerful intellectual and religious force, to found one of the most innovative universities of the time.Paul F. Grendler provides the first book in any language about the Peaceful University of Mantua, its official name. He traces the efforts of Duke Ferdinando Gonzaga, a prince savant who debated Galileo, as he made his family’s dream a reality. Ferdinando negotiated with the Jesuits, recruited professors, and financed the school. Grendler examines the motivations of the Gonzaga and the Jesuits in the establishment of a joint civic and Jesuit university.The University of Mantua lasted only six years, lost during the brutal sack of the city by German troops in 1630. Despite its short life, the university offered original scholarship and teaching. It had the first professorship of chemistry more than 100 years before any other Italian university. The leading professor of medicine identified the symptoms of angina pectoris 140 years before an English scholar named the disease. The star law professor advanced new legal theories while secretly spying for James I of England. The Jesuits taught humanities, philosophy, and theology in ways both similar to and different from lay professors.A superlative study of education, politics, and culture in seventeenth-century Italy, this book reconsiders a period in Italy’s history often characterized as one of feckless rulers and stagnant learning. Thanks to extensive archival research and a thorough examination of the published works of the university's professors, Grendler's history tells a new story.

Description: Originally published in 1971. In The House of Saulx-Tavanes: Versailles and Burgundy, 1700–1830, Professor Robert Forster examines the noble family of Saulx-Tavanes from the reign of Louis XIV to the Restoration. He provides readers with an account of a single aristocratic family's relationship to the changing political culture of the eighteenth century. Forster explores how an old aristocratic family promoted itself in the royal court, how the Saulx-Tavanes managed their estate remotely from Paris, and how the family's relationship to its creditors changed over time. Forster examines the ambiguities of one noble family's transition from provincial independence to courtly dependence and, eventually, to revolution. This book is an account of how the Saulx-Tavanes—a family of émigré nobles—preserved their life, revenue, reputation, esteem, and place in a French society transformed by political change and revolution.

Description: Grubb's comprehensive analysis of his subjects' compelling, if inconspicuous, lives investigates every significant aspect of private experience during the Renaissance: marriage, birth, death, household relations, work, land, social status, and spirituality. Winner of the Society for Italian Historical Studies's Howard R. Marraro PrizeOriginally published in 1996. Historical writing on the Renaissance has usually focused on the social extremes that co-existed in the great metropolitan centers—on either elites or the underclass. As a result, the world of the middling families and provincial societies remains largely unexplored. Daily experiences in the lesser cities are, however, no less rich and revealing than those of Florence, Venice, and Milan. In addition, writes historian James Grubb, these experiences offer new perspectives from which to reassess familiar assumptions about domestic life in the fifteenth century. Based on memoirs and other records left by thirteen merchant families from the Veneto cities of Verona and Vincenza, Provincial Families of the Renaissance is an engrossing study of daily lives that have until now been overlooked by scholars. Grubb examines the attitudes and experiences of families undistinguished in their modest means and local ambitions from the majority of their compatriots, uncovering a detailed historical landscape rich in social obligations, commercial activities, and religious beliefs.Grubb's comprehensive analysis of his subjects' compelling, if inconspicuous, lives investigates every significant aspect of private experience during the Renaissance: marriage, birth, death, household relations, work, land, social status, and spirituality. In reconstructing provincial life in the Veneto, Grubb discovers in his subjects an independence of mind that mediated their reception of metropolitan ideologies far more than the historiography of the Renaissance might suggest. These "unremarkable" provincials were agents of their own destiny, influenced in equal measures by prevailing attitudes, local customs, and personal convictions. "James Grubb is exploring new terrain in this book. Distinguished by its clarity and eloquence, this is a superior work of historical writing and analysis that merits comparison with the best monographs on the social history of Renaissance Italy."—Gene Brucker, University of California at Berkeley

Description: Originally published in 1967. With the waning of the Middle Ages, the life of the Italian polis underwent a gradual but unmistakable transformation. The leisurely decentralization of the medieval commune, which had its roots in feudalism, the code of chivalry, and religious faith, gave place to the tight despotism of the fourteenth century. This in turn yielded to democratized government and finally to a stricter legalistic and puritanical rule. Marvin Becker's two-volume study of Florence examines this metamorphosis and establishes its relationship to the emergence of the Renaissance state. Volume One traces the decline of the communal paideia in its political, social, and cultural aspects. Through an intensive examination of the fiscal and juridical records of the period and the documents of contemporary literature, Dr. Becker demonstrates the relationship between the death of communal ideals and the centralization of political power, and between the emergence of a strong middle class and a respect for public law. He shows the patricians discovering a community of interest with the burghers, and the vendetta being replaced by courts of law. Finally, he traces the growing ability of the Florentine citizenry to cope with crisis through the newly strengthened organs of the republic. Volume Two will discuss the establishment of Florence as a Renaissance city-state with particular emphasis on the continuum between the medieval commune of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries and the centralized city of the mid-fourteenth century. A unique contribution of this volume lies in the use made of painstaking and detailed investigation of the voluminous archival resources of the Archivio di Stato of Florence—some of which have since been destroyed by the 1966 flood. In pursuit of what actually took place during communal council meetings, what legislation was passed and what rejected, Dr. Becker scrutinized tens of thousands of documents in a variety of categories, obtaining first-hand knowledge of the careers of those in power, and gaining illuminating insights into motivations and actions. Political, social, and cultural historians will find Florence in Transition, Volume One, a helpful elucidation of the dynamics of historical change and the birth of a state.

Description: Selected by Choice Magazine as an Outstanding Academic TitleOriginally published in 1988. In the decades after 1404, traditionally maritime Venice extended its control over much of northern Italy. Citizens of Vicenza, the first city to come under Venetian rule, proclaimed their city "firstborn of Venice" and a model for the Venetian Republic's dominions on the terraferma. In Firstborn of Venice James Grubb tests commonplace attributes of the Renaissance state through a rich case study of society and politics in fifteenth-century Vicenza. Looking at relations between Venetian and local governments and at the location of power in Vicentine society, Grubb reveals the structural limitations of Venetian authority and the mechanisms by which local patricians deflected the claims of the capital. Firstborn of Venice explores issues that are political in the broadest sense: legal institutions and administrative practices, fiscal politics, the consolidation of elites, ecclesiastical management, and the contrasting governing ideologies of ruler and subjects.

Description: Originally published in 1984. In The Working People of Paris, 1871–1914, Lenard Berlanstein examines how technological advances, expanding industrialization, bureaucratization, and urban growth affected the lives of the working poor and near poor of one of the world's most influential cities during an era of intense social and cultural change. Berlanstein departs from other historians of the working classes in treating, in a parallel manner, not only craftsmen and factory laborers but also service workers and lower-level white-collar employees. Avoiding the fallacy of letting the city limits set the boundaries of an urban study, he deals also with the industrial suburbs, with their considerable concentration of workers, to examine the transformation of the work, leisure, and consumer experiences of the people who did not own property and who lived from one payday to the next during the Second Industrial Revolution.The Working People of Paris describes a cycle of adaptation and resistance to the forces of economic maturation. For several decades after 1871, Berlanstein argues, working people and employees preserved accommodations with management about reciprocal rights in the workplace. By the beginning of the twentieth century, however, these forms of adaptation had broken down under new economic pressures. The result was a crisis of discipline in the workplace, as wage earners and modest clerks began to challenge managerial authority.Berlanstein's study confronts the widely accepted view that, during this period, workers became better integrated into a society of improving standards of living and mass leisure. Instead, he documents uneven patterns of material progress and growing conflict over work roles among all sorts of laboring people.

Description: Originally published in 1963. Between 1945 and 1951, Belgium faced a crisis in political leadership when its ruling monarch, King Leopold III, was accused of violating the Belgian Constitution during World War II. The "question" at hand refers to the uncertainty over whether King Leopold III could return to Belgium as king. This book documents the history of this political crisis, culminating with the abdication of King Leopold and the assumption of the crown by Baudouin, Leopold's son.

Description: Originally published in 1987. Lady Rachel Russell (1637–1723) was regarded as "one of the best women" by many of the most powerful people of her time. Wife of Lord William Russell, the prominent Whig opponent of King Charles II who was executed for treason in 1683, Lady Russell emerged as a political figure in her own right during the Glorious Revolution and throughout her forty-year widowhood. Award-winning historian Lois G. Schwoerer has written a biography that illuminates both the political life and the lives of women in late Stuart England. Lady Russell's interest in politics and religion blossomed during her marriage to Lord Russell and after his death: "as William became a Whig martyr, Rachel became a Whig saint." Her wealth, contacts, and role as her husband's surrogate gave her considerable influence to intercede in high government appointments, lend support in elections, and exchange favors with her friend Mary of Orange. In her domestic life she similarly took steps usually reserved to men, managing large estates in London and Hampshire and negotiating favorable marriage contracts for each of her three children. Although Lady Russell was unusual for her time, she was by no means unique. Other notable women shared her concerns and traits, although to differing degrees and effects. Schwoerer suggests that the horizons of women's lives in the seventeenth century may have extended farther than is often supposed.

Description: Originally published in 1973. Ultraroyalism in Toulouse examines in detail the origins of ultraroyal hostility to the social and political changes rendered by the French Revolution. France has produced a variety of theories of decline, corresponding to the nation's changing political fortunes in Europe and the world. The Revolution represented another, at least temporary, victory of the state apparatus over local community and privilege, and it stimulated the longing, apparent in all parts of the country after the fall of Napoleon, for a return to older forms of society and government that were essentially provincial and rural. The stevedores of Marseille, the fisherman of Brittany, and the peasants of the Auvergne saw plainly enough that the Revolution had not solved the problems of poverty and economic distress. Like the nobles, the ex-parlementarians, and the descendants of local oligarchies, they were hostile to the ascendancy of Paris. On all levels of French society were those who selectively remembered the best of the Old Regime, dwelt on the most obvious failures of the Revolution's religious and welfare policies, and blamed facile utilitarians who did not understand tradition for the destruction of the pre-1789 institutions. This book examines in depth the form that ultraroyalism took in Toulouse.