In Celebrated Naval and Military Trials, Peter Burke assembles and interprets notable court-martial proceedings and related cases from Britain's naval and military history, revealing how law, discipline, honor, and political power converged in moments of crisis. The volume belongs to the nineteenth-century documentary tradition of historical compilation, combining narrative commentary with legal and military detail. Its style is sober, exacting, and evidentiary, yet often dramatic, since t...

In 1846, linguistics professor Fabrice Cleriquot is despatched from Lyon to the Swan River Colony, sent away with a box full of silkworms to stop him from bringing more disgrace upon the family. Accompanying him on board the Elizabeth are twenty-eight mismatched and misguided Catholic missionaries including Dom Salvado, who seeks to create a Spanish Benedictine monastery deep in the bush, and the Irish Sisters of Mercy, who are fleeing a dreadful famine. Given the job of distribut...

From Leonardo Da Vinci to Oliver Sacks: the first history of the western polymath, from the Renaissance to the present"An absorbing group portrait and intellectual history."— Kirkus Reviews"An admirable mixture of industry and erudition."—Robert Wilson, Wall Street JournalFrom Leonardo Da Vinci to John Dee and Comenius, from George Eliot to Oliver Sacks and Susan Sontag, polymaths hav...

"Celebrated Naval and Military Trials" by Peter Burke offers a riveting examination of historical legal cases from the British Navy and Army, capturing the intricate dynamics of law, leadership, and loyalty during challenging times. This compelling work takes readers through notable trials involving figures such as the infamous Captain Kidd, whose journey from a humble Scottish seaman to a notorious pirate encapsulates the tension between duty and ambition. Originally commissioned to comba...

The connoisseur has been an influential, if somewhat mysterious, figure in the history of art, responsible for making or breaking high-profile collections and reputations and influencing taste, the art market and the field of art history with their pronouncements. But what did it take to become a connoisseur, and how reliable were the great connoisseurs of previous centuries? With the advent of scientific techniques and artificial intelligence, what future is there for expertise based on t...

Cultural history has in the last few decades come to the fore of historical research into early modern Europe. Due in no small part to Peter Burke’s pioneering work, the tools of the cultural historian are now routinely applied to every aspect of history, transforming our understanding of the past.First published in 1978, this study examines the broad sweep of pre-industrial Europe's popular culture. From the world of the professional entertainer to the songs, stories, rituals and ...

In this brilliant and widely acclaimed work, Peter Burke presents a social and cultural history of the Italian Renaissance. He discusses the social and political institutions which existed in Italy during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and analyses the ways of thinking and seeing which characterized this period of extraordinary artistic creativity. Developing a distinctive sociological approach, Peter Burke is concerned with not only the finished works of Michelangelo, Raphael, Leon...

Sociologists and historians are not always the best of neighbours, each group tending to perceive the other in terms of the crudest of stereotypes. However, the two approaches are obviously complementary – change is structured, and structures change. Each discipline can free the other from its own kind of parochialism and the aim of this book is to bridge the gap between these tow subcultures, to give historians a more acute sense of structure and sociologists a more acute sense of change....

Sifting the available evidence, Carlo Ginzburg builds up a vivid portrait of Piero della Francesca's patrons and convincingly explains the contemporary intrigues resonant in his painting. This new edition, extensively illustrated, includes additional material by Ginzburg dealing with the work of Roberto Longhi, the dating of the Arezzo Cycle, and the rediscovery of della Francesca in the twentieth century.

From comic verse to practical jokes, pornography to satire, acting to acrobatics, the Renaissance witnessed the flowering of play in all its forms. In the first wide-ranging and accessible introduction to play in Renaissance Italy, Peter Burke, celebrated historian of the Italian Renaissance, synthesizes over forty years’ research, explores the various forms of play in this period, and offers an overview that reveals the many connections between its different domains. While play could be r...

With its innovative format, Debating New Approaches to History addresses issues currently at the top of the discipline's theoretical and methodological agenda. In its chapters, leading historians of both older and younger generations from across the Western world and beyond discuss and debate the main problems and challenges that historians are facing today. Each chapter is followed by a critical commentary from another key scholar in the field and the author's response.Th...

In 1929 two French historians, Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, founded Annales, a historical journal which rapidly became one of the most influential in the world. They believed that economic history, social history and the history of ideas were as important as political history, and that historians should not be narrow specialists but should learn from their colleagues in the social sciences.Two of the most distinguished French members of the Annales school are rep...