Product Description: This book joins a growing trend toward transnational literary studies and revives a venerable tradition of Anglo-Italian scholarship centering on John Milton. Correcting misperceptions that have diminished the international dimensions of his life and work, it broadly surveys Milton’s Italianate studies, travels, poetics, politics, and religious convictions...read more

Product Description: John M. Collins presents the first comprehensive history of martial law in the early modern period. He argues that rather than being a state of exception from law, martial law was understood and practiced as one of the King's laws...read more

Product Description: Dress became a testing ground for masculine ideals in Renaissance Italy. With the establishment of the ducal regime in Florence in 1530, there was increasing debate about how to be a nobleman. Was fashionable clothing a sign of magnificence or a source of mockery? Was the graceful courtier virile or effeminate? How could a man dress for court without bankrupting himself? This book explores the whole story of clothing, from the tailor's workshop to spectacular court festivities, to show how the male nobility in one of Italy's main textile production centers used their appearances to project social, sexual, and professional identities...read more

Product Description: They built some of the first communal structures on the empire's frontiers. The empire's most powerful proconsuls sought entrance into their lodges. Their public rituals drew dense crowds from Montreal to Madras. The Ancient Free and Accepted Masons were quintessential builders of empire, argues Jessica Harland-Jacobs...read more

This book examines the daily details of slave work routines and plantation agriculture in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic, focusing on case studies of large plantations in Barbados, Jamaica, and Virginia. Work was the most important factor in the slaves' experience of the institution. Slaves' day-to-day work routines were shaped by plantation management strategies that drew on broader pan-Atlantic intellectual and cultural principles. Although scholars often associate the late eighteenth-century Enlightenment with the rise of notions of liberty and human rights and the dismantling of slavery, this book explores the dark side of the Enlightenment for plantation slaves. Many planters increased their slaves' workloads and employed supervisory technologies to increase labor discipline in ways that were consistent with the process of industrialization in Europe. British planters offered alternative visions of progress by embracing restrictions on freedom and seeing increasing labor discipline as central to the project of moral and economic improvement.

Product Description: Shakespeare’s Big Men examines five Shakespearean tragedies – Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and Coriolanus – through the lens of generative anthropology and the insights of its founder, Eric Gans. Generative anthropology’s theory of the origins of human society explains the social function of tragedy: to defer our resentment against the “big men” who dominate society by letting us first identify with the tragic protagonist and his resentment, then allowing us to repudiate the protagonist’s resentful rage and achieve theatrical catharsis...read more

Product Description: The Encyclopedia of Early Modern History offers 400 years of early modern history in one work. Experts from all over the world have joined in a presentation of the scholarship on the great era between the mid-15th to the mid-19th centuries...read more

Product Description: In The Epic of Juan Latino, Elizabeth R. Wright tells the story of Renaissance Europe’s first black poet and his epic poem on the naval battle of Lepanto, Austrias Carmen (The Song of John of Austria).Piecing together the surviving evidence, Wright traces Latino’s life in Granada, Iberia’s last Muslim metropolis, from his early clandestine education as a slave in a noble household to his distinguished career as a schoolmaster at the University of Granada...read more

The colorful story of the creation of the Globe Theatre―as a result of the dramatic confrontation between Lady Elizabeth Russell and William Shakespeare. In November 1596, a woman signed a document that would nearly destroy the career of William Shakespeare . . . Who was this woman who played such an instrumental, yet little known, role in Shakespeare's life? Never far from controversy when she was alive―she sparked numerous riots and indulged in acts of breaking-and-entering, bribery, blackmail, kidnapping and armed combat―Lady Elizabeth Russell, the self-styled Dowager Countess of Bedford, has been edited out of public memory, yet the chain of events she set in motion would make Shakespeare the legendary figure we all know today.Lady Elizabeth Russell’s extraordinary life made her one of the most formidable women of the Renaissance. The daughter of King Edward VI’s tutor, she blazed a trail across Elizabethan England as an intellectual and radical Protestant. And, in November 1596, she became the leader of a movement aimed at destroying William Shakespeare’s theatrical troupe―a plot that resulted in the closure of the Blackfriars Theatre but the construction, instead, of the Globe.Providing new pieces to this puzzle, Chris Laoutaris's rousing history reveals for the first time this startling battle against Shakespeare and the Lord Chamberlain's Men. 16 pages of color and B&W illustrations