The first treatise ever written on the sociology of cities, On the Causes of the Greatness and Magnificence of Cities (1588) marked a radical departure from previous literature on urban centres. It provided a revolutionary analysis of how cities function, and of the political, economic, demographic and geographic factors that cause their growth and decline. Noteworthy too is Botero’s strikingly original use of sources in his analysis: moving beyond familiar classical and biblical ...

The French navy that fought in the Nine Years War was essentially Colbert's creation. Earlier in the century Richelieu had given France the beginnings of a navy: ships, ports, a corps of officers and an administra tive structure. But most of his work was undone by neglect in the years after his death, and the task of making France a maritime power had to begin again under Louis XIV. Colbert's efforts to build a navy were distinguished by the same stubborn energy that he brought to all his ...

Fernand Braudel (1912-1985), was a leading French historian and author of, among other books, the groundbreaking The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1949). One of the founders of the Annales School in France, Braudel insisted on treating the Mediterranean region as a whole, irrespective of religious and national divides. Braudel's new historiography rejected political history as the dominant discipline and espoused a 'total history' or a 'history...

Exploring the fascinating cross-cultural influences between Jews and Christians in Italy from the Renaissance to the twentieth century, Acculturation and Its Discontents assembles essays by leading historians, literary scholars, and musicologists to present a well-rounded history of Italian Jewry.The contributors offer rich portraits of the many vibrant forms of cultural and artistic expression that Italian Jews contributed to, but this volume also pays close attention to ...

More than ever before, the Renaissance stands as one of the defining moments in world history. Between 1400 and 1600, European perceptions of society, culture, politics and even humanity itself emerged in ways that continue to affect not only Europe but the entire world. This wide-ranging exploration of the Renaissance sees the period as a time of unprecedented intellectual excitement and cultural experimentation and interaction on a global scale, alongside a darker side of religion, intol...

In 1482, the Florentine humanist and statesman Francesco Berlinghieri produced the Geographia, a book of over one hundred folio leaves describing the world in Italian verse, inspired by the ancient Greek geography of Ptolemy. The poem, divided into seven books (one for each day of the week the author “travels” the known world), is interleaved with lavishly engraved maps to accompany readers on this journey.Sean Roberts demonstrates that the Geographia represents t...

The aim of this book is both to illustrate and to discuss some of the main varieties of cultural history which have emerged since the questioning of what might be called its "classic" form, exemplified in the work of Jacob Burckhardt and Johan Huizinga. Among the themes of individual chapters are the history of popular culture, the history of Carnival, the history of mentalities, the history of gestures, the history of jokes, and even the history of dreams.The emphasis of both the ...

Europe (in Theory) is an innovative analysis of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ideas about Europe that continue to inform thinking about culture, politics, and identity today. Drawing on insights from subaltern and postcolonial studies, Roberto M. Dainotto deconstructs imperialism not from the so-called periphery but from within Europe itself. He proposes a genealogy of Eurocentrism that accounts for the way modern theories of Europe have marginalized the continent’s own south...

Each of the essays in this volume, originally published in 1970, touches upon a historical theme which Herbert Butterfield illuminated. It covers a wide range of topics from music and relgion in modern European history to the scientific revolution of the 17th century.

**Soon to be a major motion picture from Steven Spielberg.A National Book Award Finalist**The extraordinary story of how the vatican's imprisonment of a six-year-old Jewish boy in 1858 helped to bring about the collapse of the popes' worldly power in Italy.Bologna: nightfall, June 1858. A knock sounds at the door of the Jewish merchant Momolo Mortara. Two officers of the Inquisition bust inside and seize Mortara's six-year-old son, Edgardo. As the boy is wr...

There are dreadful -- perhaps scurrilous -- rumors about the Borgias of renaissance Italy, and here Dumas, author of such classics as THE THREE MUSKETEERS, in his Celebrated Crimes series, dishes up the dirt in all its ugly glory. This book was not written for children. Dumas has minced no words in describing the violent scenes of a violent time. In some instances facts appear distorted out of their true perspective, and in others the author makes unwarranted charges. The careful, mature r...

The Enlightenment shaped modernity. Western values of representative democracy and basic human rights, gender and racial equality, individual liberty, and freedom of expression and the press, form an interlocking system that derives directly from the Enlightenment's philosophical revolution. This fact is uncontested - yet remarkably few historians or philosophers have attempted to trace the process of ideas from the political and social turmoil of the late eighteenth century to the present...