1. Thinking about Animals in Thirteenth-Century Paris
Theologians on the Boundary Between Humans and Animals
Author: Ian P. Wei, University of Bristol
Published: August 2020
ISBN: 9781108830157
Exploring what theologians at the University of Paris in the thirteenth century understood about the boundary between humans and animals, this book demonstrates the great variety of ways in which they held similarity and difference in productive tension. Analysing key theological works, Ian P. Wei presents extended close readings of William of Auvergne, the Summa Halensis, Bonaventure, Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas. These scholars found it useful to consider animals and humans together, especially with regard to animal knowledge and behaviour, when discussing issues including creation, the fall, divine providence, the heavens, angels and demons, virtues and passions. While they frequently stressed that animals had been created for use by humans, and sometimes treated them as tools employed by God to shape human behaviour, animals were also analytical tools for the theologians themselves. This study thus reveals how animals became a crucial resource for generating knowledge of God and the whole of creation.
2. The Slaves of the Churches: A History
Author: Mary E. Sommar
Published : Oxford University Press, September, 2020.
ISBN : 978-0190073268
In recent years, stories of religious universities and institutions grappling with their slave-owning past have made headlines in the news. People find it shocking that the Church itself could have been involved in such a sordid business. This timely book, the result of many years of research, is a study of the origins of this problem.
Mary E. Sommar examines how the church sought to establish norms for slave ownership on the part of ecclesiastical institutions and personnel, and for others' behavior towards such slaves. The story begins in the New Testament era, when the earliest Christian norms were established, and continues up to thirteenth-century establishment of a body of canon law that would persist into the twentieth century. Along with her analysis of the various policies and statutes, Sommar draws on chronicles, letters, and other documents from each of the various historical periods to provide insight into the situations of unfree ecclesiastical dependents. She finds that unfree dependents of the Church actually had less chance of achieving freedom than did the slaves of other masters. The church authorities' duty to preserve the Church's patrimony for the needs of future generations led them to hold on tightly to their unfree human resources. This accessibly written book does not present an apology for the behavior of past Christian leaders, but attempts to learn what they did and to arrive at some understanding of why they made those choices.
3. Revolutions at Home: The Origin of Modern Childhood and the German Middle Class (Childhoods: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Children and Youth)
Author: Emily C. Bruce
Published: University of Massachusetts Press, July 2021.
ISBN-13: 978-1625345622
How did we come to imagine what "ideal childhood" requires? Beginning in the late eighteenth century, German child-rearing radically transformed, and as these innovations in ideology and educational practice spread from middle-class families across European society, childhood came to be seen as a life stage critical to self-formation. This new approach was in part a process that adults imposed on youth, one that hinged on motivating children's behavior through affection and cultivating internal discipline. But this is not just a story about parents' and pedagogues' efforts to shape childhood. Offering rare glimpses of young students' diaries, letters, and marginalia, Emily C. Bruce reveals how children themselves negotiated these changes.
Revolutions at Home analyzes a rich set of documents created for and by young Germans to show that children were central to reinventing their own education between 1770 and 1850. Through their reading and writing, they helped construct the modern child subject. The active child who emerged at this time was not simply a consequence of expanding literacy but, in fact, a key participant in defining modern life.
4. The Spirit of French Capitalism: Economic Theology in the Age of Enlightenment (Currencies: New Thinking for Financial Times)
Author: Charly Coleman
Published: Stanford University Press, March 2021.
ISBN-13 : 978-1503614826
How did the economy become bound up with faith in infinite wealth creation and obsessive consumption? Drawing on the economic writings of eighteenth-century French theologians, historian Charly Coleman uncovers the surprising influence of the Catholic Church on the development of capitalism. Even during the Enlightenment, a sense of the miraculous did not wither under the cold light of calculation. Scarcity, long regarded as the inescapable fate of a fallen world, gradually gave way to a new belief in heavenly as well as worldly affluence. Animating this spiritual imperative of the French economy was a distinctly Catholic ethic that—in contrast to Weber's famous "Protestant ethic"—privileged the marvelous over the mundane, consumption over production, and the pleasures of enjoyment over the rigors of delayed gratification. By viewing money, luxury, and debt through the lens of sacramental theory, Coleman demonstrates that the modern economy casts far beyond rational action and disenchanted designs, and in ways that we have yet to apprehend fully.
5. The Jewish Eighteenth Century: A European Biography, 1700–1750 (Olamot Series in Humanities and Social Sciences)
Shmuel Feiner (Author), Jeffrey M. Green (Translator)
Published: Indiana University Press, December 2020.
ISBN-13 : 978-0253026804
The eighteenth century was the Jews' first modern century. The deep changes that took place during its course shaped the following generations, and its most prominent voices still reverberate today. In this first volume of his magisterial work, Shmuel Feiner charts the twisting and fascinating world of the first half of the 18th century from the viewpoint of the Jews of Europe. Paying careful attention to life stories, to bright and dark experiences, to voices of protest, to aspirations of reform, and to strivings for personal and general happiness, Feiner identifies the tectonic changes that were taking place in Europe and their unprecedented effects on and among Jews. From the religious and cultural revolution of the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) to the question of whether Jews could be citizens of any nation, Feiner presents a broad view of how this century of upheaval altered the map of Europe and the Jews who called it home.
6. Englishmen at Sea: Labor and the Nation at the Dawn of Empire, 1570-1630
Author: Eleanor Hubbard
Published: Yale University Press, November 2021.
ISBN-13: 978-0300246124
Drawing on a wealth of understudied sources, historian Eleanor Hubbard explores the labor conflicts behind the rise of the English maritime empire. Freewheeling Elizabethan privateering attracted thousands of young men to the sea, where they acquired valuable skills and a reputation for ruthlessness. Peace in 1603 forced these predatory seamen to adapt to a radically changed world, one in which they were expected to risk their lives for merchants' gain, not plunder. Merchant trading companies expected sailors to relinquish their unruly ways and to help convince overseas rulers and trading partners that the English were a courteous and trustworthy "nation." Some sailors rebelled, becoming pirates and renegades; others demanded and often received concessions and shares in new trading opportunities. Treated gently by a state that was anxious to promote seafaring in order to man the navy, these determined sailors helped to keep the sea a viable and attractive trade for Englishmen.
7. Diet for a Large Planet: Industrial Britain, Food Systems, and World Ecology
Author: Chris Otter (Author)
Published: University of Chicago Press; First Edition, June 2023.
ISBN-13: 978-0226826530
We are facing a world food crisis of unparalleled proportions. Our reliance on unsustainable dietary choices and agricultural systems is causing problems both for human health and the health of our planet. Solutions from lab-grown food to vegan diets to strictly local food consumption are often discussed, but a central question remains: how did we get to this point?
In Diet for a Large Planet, Chris Otter goes back to the late eighteenth century in Britain, where the diet heavy in meat, wheat, and sugar was developing. As Britain underwent steady growth, urbanization, industrialization, and economic expansion, the nation altered its food choices, shifting away from locally produced plant-based nutrition. This new diet, rich in animal proteins and refined carbohydrates, made people taller and stronger, but it led to new types of health problems. Its production also relied on far greater acreage than Britain itself, forcing the nation to become more dependent on global resources. Otter shows how this issue expands beyond Britain, looking at the global effects of large agro-food systems that require more resources than our planet can sustain. This comprehensive history helps us understand how the British played a significant role in making red meat, white bread, and sugar the diet of choice—linked to wealth, luxury, and power—and shows how dietary choices connect to the pressing issues of climate change and food supply.
8. The Sword of Luchana: Baldomero Espartero and the Making of Modern Spain, 1793-1879 (Toronto Iberic)
Author: Adrian Shubert
Published: University of Toronto Press August 2021.
ISBN-13 : 978-1487508609
Born into obscurity in a rural backwater of central Spain in the waning years of the eighteenth century, Baldomero Espartero (1793–1879) led a life resembling that of a character created by Stendhal or Gabriel García Márquez. As a seventy-five-year-old man he was offered – and turned down – the throne of an industrializing nation. During his illustrious life, he fought against Napoleon, Simón Bolívar, and other Latin American independence leaders; won a seven-year civil war; served as regent for the child queen Isabella II; and spent years in exile in England. He governed as prime minister and also received multiple noble titles, including that of prince, which was normally reserved for members of the royal family. By his sixties, Espartero represented an almost mythical figure.
Based on comprehensive archival research in Spain, Argentina, and the United Kingdom, The Sword of Luchana explores the public and private lives of this archetypal nineteenth-century hero. Adrian Shubert gives voice to the mass of ordinary Spaniards who revered Espartero as the embodiment of liberty and freedom, and to Jacinta Martínez de Sicilia y Santa Cruz, his wife of more than fifty years who played a key role in his public career. Including unprecedented access to Espartero’s personal papers, and set against the background of wars and revolutions in Spain and its American empire, The Sword of Luchana is a compelling account of the history of a crucial period of war, revolution, and political and social change.
9. Archipelago of Justice: Law in France’s Early Modern Empire
Author: Laurie M. Wood
Published : Yale University Press, April 2020.
ISBN-13: 978-0300244007
This book is a groundbreaking evaluation of the interwoven trajectories of the people, such as itinerant ship-workers and colonial magistrates, who built France’s first empire between 1680 and 1780 in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. These imperial subjects sought political and legal influence via law courts, with strategies that reflected local and regional priorities, particularly regarding slavery, war, and trade. Through court records and legal documents, Wood reveals how courts became liaisons between France and new colonial possessions.
10. The Blacketts: A Northern Dynasty's Rise, Crisis and Redemption
Author: Greg Finch
Published: Tyne Bridge Publishing; First Edition, November 2021.
ISBN-13: 978-1838280956
'The depth and breadth of Greg Finch's scholarship is extraordinary: he finds, interprets and explains exactly what was going on in a dynasty of extraordinary entrepreneurs in North-east England on the brink of the industrial revolution. But this is no dry, scholarly tome: he tells the tale with the pen of a poet.' Matt Ridley
In 1636 15-year-old William Blackett crossed the River Tyne from his modest home to start his apprenticeship in Newcastle. A devastating plague had just taken hold of the town, and the storm clouds of civil war were gathering. Yet within forty years he was a knight, MP, civic leader and the city's wealthiest merchant.
Based on meticulous new research, Greg Finch's flowing account of Blackett's life and times charts his dramatic rise, the opening up of the North Pennines lead industry, the creation of a huge business based on coal and lead - and what the next three generations did with it. The bold ambition, brilliance, rivalry and incompetence of colourful personalities all played their part in the management of an important dynastic concern.
This is a compelling story of one of Britain's leading ports, its mining and farming hinterland, sea-faring economy, politics, commercial culture and influential place in the nation during a turbulent century of change.
2022 winner of the Business Archives Council's Wadsworth Prize for outstanding contribution to British business history.
11. British Imperialism and Globalization, c. 1650-1960: Essays in Honour of Patrick O'Brien
Editor: Professor Joseph E. Inikori
Published: Boydell Press, January 2022.
ISBN-13: 978-1783276462
Examining the domestic politics of imperial expansion these essays question the role of the Industrial Revolution and British imperial leadership beyond the issue of hierarchy and The Great Divergence.
This volume brings together leading global economic historians to honour Patrick O'Brien's contribution to the establishment of global economic history as a coherent and respected field in the academy. Inspired by O'Brien's seminal work on the British Industrial Revolution as a global phenomenon, these essays expand the role of the Industrial Revolution and British imperial leadership beyond the issue of hierarchy and The Great Divergence. The change from the protective Atlantic empire, 1650-1850, to the free trade empire of the last half of the long nineteenth century is elaborated as are the conscious efforts of the free trade empire to develop markets and market economies in Africa. British domestic politics associated with the change and the continuation to the recent politics of Brexit are fascinatingly narrated and documented, including the economic rationale for imperial expansion, in the first instance.
The narrative continues to the crises of globalization caused by the world wars and the Great Depression, which forced the free trade British Empire to change course. Further, the effects of the crises and the imperial reaction on the East African colonies and on New Zealand and Australia are examined. Given current concerns about the environmental impact of economic activities, it is noteworthy that this volume includes the environmental impact of globalization in India caused by the free trade policy of the British free trade empire.
12. Law as Performance: Theatricality, Spectatorship, and the Making of Law in Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern Europe (Law and Literature)
Author: Julie Stone Peters
Published: Oxford University Press October 2022.
ISBN-13 : 978-0192898494
Tirades against legal theatrics are nearly as old as law itself, and yet so is the age-old claim that law must not merely be done: it must be "seen to be done." Law as Performance traces the history of legal performance and spectatorship through the early modern period. Viewing law as the product not merely of edicts or doctrines but of expressive action, it investigates the performances that literally created law: in civic arenas, courtrooms, judges' chambers, marketplaces, scaffolds, and streets. It examines the legal codes, learned treatises, trial reports, lawyers' manuals, execution narratives, rhetoric books, images (and more) that confronted these performances, praising their virtues or denouncing their evils. In so doing, it recovers a long, rich, and largely overlooked tradition of jurisprudential thought about law as a performance practice. This tradition not only generated an elaborate poetics and politics of legal performance. It provided western jurisprudence with a set of constitutive norms that, in working to distinguish law from theatrics, defined the very nature of law. In the crucial opposition between law and theatre, law stood for cool deliberation, by-the-book rules, and sovereign discipline. Theatre stood for deceptive artifice, entertainment, histrionics, melodrama. And yet legal performance, even at its most theatrical, also appeared fundamental to law's realization: a central mechanism for shaping legal subjects, key to persuasion, essential to deterrence, indispensable to law's power, ―as it still does today.
13. The Doctor's Garden: Medicine, Science, and Horticulture in Britain
Author: Clare Hickman
Published : Yale University Press, October 2021.
ISBN-13 : 978-0274756827
As Britain grew into an ever-expanding empire during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, new and exotic botanical specimens began to arrive within the nation’s public and private spaces. Gardens became sites not just of leisure, sport, and aesthetic enjoyment, but also of scientific inquiry and knowledge dissemination. Medical practitioners used their botanical training to capitalize on the growing fashion for botanical collecting and agricultural experimentation in institutional, semipublic, and private gardens across Britain. This book highlights the role of these medical practitioners in the changing use of gardens in the late Georgian period, marked by a fluidity among the ideas of farm, laboratory, museum, and garden. Placing these activities within a wider framework of fashionable, scientific, and economic interests of the time, historian Clare Hickman argues that gardens shifted from predominately static places of enjoyment to key gathering places for improvement, knowledge sharing, and scientific exploration.
14. Knighthood and Society in the High Middle Ages (Mediaevalia Lovaniensia, 48)
Editor: David Crouch, Jeroen Deploige
Published: Leuven University Press, November 2020.
ISBN-13: 978-9462701700
In popular imagination few phenomena are as strongly associated with medieval society as knighthood and chivalry. At the same time, and due to a long tradition of differing national perspectives and ideological assumptions, few phenomena have continued to be the object of so much academic debate. In this volume leading scholars explore arious aspects of knightly identity, taking into account both commonalities and particularities across Western Europe. Knighthood and Society in the High Middle Ages addresses how, between the eleventh and the early thirteenth centuries, knighthood evolved from a set of skills and a lifestyle that was typical of an emerging elite habitus, into the basis of a consciously expressed and idealised chivalric code of conduct. Chivalry, then, appears in this volume as the result of a process of noble identity formation, in which some five key factors are distinguished: knightly practices, lineage, crusading memories, gender roles, and chivalric didactics.
This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer Review Content).
Contributors: Dominique Barthélemy (Sorbonne and EPHE, Paris), David Crouch (University of Hull), Jeroen Deploige (Ghent University), John D. Hosler (U.S. Army Command and General Staff College), Sara McDougall (City University of New York), Jean-François Nieus (University of Namur), Eljas Oksanen (Portable Antiquities Scheme, London), Nicholas Paul (Fordham University), Jörg Peltzer (Heidelberg University), Nicolas Ruffini-Ronzani (University of Namur), Louise Wilkinson (Canterbury Christ Church University), Claudia Wittig (Ghent University)
15. Providing for the Poor: The Old Poor Law, 1750–1834 (New Historical Perspectives)
Editor: Peter Collinge, Louise Falcini
Published: University of London Press, November 2022.
ISBN-13: 978-1914477102
The Old Poor Law, which was established in 1601 in England and Wales and was in force until 1834, was administered by the local parish and dispensed goods and services to paupers, providing a uniquely comprehensive, premodern system of support for the poor. Providing for the Poor brings together academics and practitioners from across disciplines to reexamine the micropolitics of poverty in the long eighteenth century through the eyes of the poor, their providers, and enablers. Covering such topics as the providence of the parochial sixpence, which was given in order to get a beggar to move along to another parish, to coercive marriages, plebeian clothing, and the much broader implications of vagrancy toward the end of the long eighteenth century, this volume aims to bridge the gaps in our understanding of the experiences of people across the social spectrum whose lives were touched by the Old Poor Law. It brings together some of the wider arguments concerning the nature of welfare during economically difficult times and documents the rising bureaucracy inherent in the system to produce a radical new history of the Old Poor Law in astonishing detail.
16. The Margins of Late Medieval London, 1430–1540 (New Historical Perspectives)
Author: Charlotte Berry
Published: University of London Press; New edition, April 2022.
ISBN-13 : 978-1914477027
The Margins of Late Medieval London seeks to unpack the complexity of urban life in the medieval age, offering a detailed and novel approach to understanding London beyond its grand institutions and social bodies. Using a combination of experimental digital, quantitative, and qualitative methodologies, the volume casts new light on urban life at the level of the neighborhood and considers the differences in economy, society, and sociability which existed in different areas of a vibrant premodern city. This book focuses on the dynamism and mobility that shaped city life, integrating the experiences of London’s poor and migrant communities and how they found their place within urban life. It describes how people found themselves marginalized in the city, and the strategies they would employ to mitigate that precarious position.
17. The London Jubilee Book, 1376-1387: An edition of Trinity College Cambridge MS O.3.11, folios 133-157 (London Record Society, 55)
Editor: Caroline M. Barron (Author, Editor), Laura Wright (Editor)
Published: London Record Society, October 2021.
ISBN-13: 978-0900952616
In the summer of 1376 a spirit of reform was abroad in the city of London. A number of measures were taken to make those who were elected to govern the city more responsible to its citizens as a whole. A committee was set up to examine the ordinances at the Guildhall and present to the Commonalty those that were "profitables" and those that were not. Two years later, the committee produced a volume known officially as the Liber de Ordinancionibus, but popularly as "The Jubilee book", because it had been initiated in the jubilee year of Edward III's reign. But the reforming measures introduced in the book caused so many controversies and disputes that eventually, in a bid to restore order in the city, in March 1387 the "Jubilee Book" was taken outside the Guildhall and publicly burnt.
Historians have long debated the possible contents of this contentious but hugely significant volume, widely believed to be lost. However, recently a fifteenth-century copy of the "Jubilee Book", possibly of an earlier draft put together in the course of the two years, but superseded by the final version, was discovered in a manuscript held at Trinity College Cambridge (Ms O.3.11).
18. Records of the Jesus Guild in St Paul's Cathedral, c.1450-1550: An Edition of Oxford, Bodleian MS Tanner 221, and Associated Material (London Record Society, 56)
Author: Dr. Elizabeth A. New
Published: London Record Society, March 2022.
ISBN-13 : 978-0900952623
Meeting in the crypt of Old St Paul's in the decades before the Reformation, the Jesus Guild, an expression of "cutting-edge" orthodox devotion, not only attracted members from the top ranks of London society but also derived support from men and women of all degrees across the whole country. As well as shedding welcome light on aspects of the devotional life shared by some of London's most influential citizens, its records illustrate many facets of the City's economy, of its citizens' inter-personal relationships and can, indeed, assist in determining linguistic developments at a critical juncture.
This volume reproduces for the first time all the extant records surviving for the Guild in the early sixteenth century, giving pride of place to the twenty consecutive years of its surviving accounts. Alongside the records for the guild, the volume presents the 1552 inventory of goods in St Faith's church and the expenses incurred by that parish when it moved into the space previously occupied by the Guild. These records reveal the influences of the religious changes of the 1550s on the crypt chapel and some of the Guild's possessions. The documents are edited with accompanying notes and glossary, complemented by an introduction that places them in a broad context and by biographies of the Guild wardens identified in the text.
19. The Guild Book of the Barbers and Surgeons of York (British Library, Egerton MS 2572)
Published: York Medieval Press in association with Boydell & Brewer, December 2021
ISBN: 9781800102729
Produced in 1486 and subsequently augmented, the Guild Book of the Barbers and Surgeons of York (British Library Egerton MS 2572) is a unique record of the knowledge, ambitions, activities and civic relationships maintained by the Barbers and Surgeons Guild over a period of 300 years. The manuscript's earliest folios contain images, astrological tracts, a plague treatise and a bloodletting poem. To these were added early modern ordinances and oaths, a series of royal portraits, and the names of the Guild's masters and apprentices. It is a rare survival of late medieval medical knowledge placed within a civic context.
20. Ingenious Trade: Women and Work in Seventeenth-Century
Author: Laura Gowing
Published: Cambridge University Press, March 2022.
ISBN-13 : 978-1108486385
Ingenious Trade recovers the intricate stories of the young women who came to London in the late seventeenth century to earn their own living, most often with the needle, and the mistresses who set up shops and supervised their apprenticeships. Tracking women through city archives, it reveals the extent and complexity of their contracts, training and skills, from adolescence to old age. In contrast to the informal, unstructured and marginalised aspects of women's work, this book uses legal records and guild archives to reconstruct women's negotiations with city regulations and bureaucracy. It shows single women, wives and widows establishing themselves in guilds both alongside and separate to men, in a network that extended from elites to paupers and around the country. Through an intensive and creative archival reconstruction, Laura Gowing recovers the significance of apprenticeship in the lives of girls and women, and puts women's work at the heart of the revolution in worldly goods.
21. The Oxford Handbook of Luxury Business (Oxford Handbooks)
Editor: Pierre-Yves Donzé (Editor), Véronique Pouillard (Editor), Joanne Roberts (Editor)
Published: Oxford University Press, January 2022.
ISBN-13 : 978-0190932220
This innovative volume brings together contributions from leading experts in the study of luxury to present the full range of perspectives on luxury business, from a variety of social science approaches. Topics include conceptual foundations and the evolution of the luxury industry; the production of luxury goods; luxury branding and marketing; distributing luxury; globalization and markets; and issues of morality, inequality, and environmental sustainability.
