Product Description: Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) was one of the most admired astronomers who ever lived and a key figure in the scientific revolution. A defender of Copernicus' s sun-centred universe, he famously discovered that planets move in ellipses, and defined the three laws of planetary motion...read more

Product Description: This captivating book reproduces arguably the most extraordinary primary source documents in fashion history. Providing a revealing window onto the Renaissance, they chronicle how style-conscious accountant Matthäus Schwarz and his son Veit Konrad experienced life through clothes, and climbed the social ladder through fastidious management of self-image...read more

Product Description: Why did parents prosecute their children as witches? Why did a sixteenth-century midwife entice a burgher woman to pretend she was giving birth to puppies? How did the life of a transsexual woman in early eighteenth-century Hamburg end? This volume presents a range of startling case-studies from German society between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Dressing Up shows why clothes made history and history can be about clothes. It imagines the Renaissance afresh by considering people's appearances: what they wore, how this made them move, what images they created, and how all this made people feel about themselves. Using an astonishing array of sources, Ulinka Rublack argues that an appreciation of people's relationship to appearances and images is essential to an understanding of what it meant to live at this time - and ever since. We read about the head accountant of a sixteenth-century merchant firm who commissioned 136 images of himself elaborately dressed across a lifetime; students arguing with their mother about which clothes they could have; or Nuremberg women wearing false braids dyed red or green. This brilliantly illustrated book draws on a range of insights across the disciplines and allows us to see an entire period in new ways. In integrating its findings into larger arguments about consumption, visual culture, the Reformation, German history, and the relationship of European and global history, it promises to re-shape the field.

How could the Protestant Reformation take off from a tiny town in the middle of Saxony, which contemporaries regarded as a mud hole? How could a man of humble origins who was deeply scared by the devil become a charismatic leader and convince others that the pope was the living Antichrist? Martin Luther founded a religion which up to this day determines many people's lives in intimate ways, as did Jean Calvin in Geneva one generation later. This is the first book which uses the approaches of new cultural history to describe how Reformation Europe came about and what it meant.

Product Description: This fascinating study is the first to investigate the crimes of women living in Germany during the time of the Reformation and the Thirty Years War. Ulinka Rublack draws on court records to examine the lives of shrewd cutpurses, quarreling artisan wives, and soldiers' concubines, and explores women's experiences of communities and courtship, marriage, the family, and the law...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)