Early Modern German Literature

Early Modern German Literature provides an overview of major literary figures and works, socio-historical contexts, philosophical backgrounds, and cultural trends during the 350 years between the first flowering of northern humanism around 1350 and the rise of a distinctly middle-class, anti-classical aesthetics around 1700.

Sacred History and National Identity - Comparisons Between Early Modern Wales and Brittany

The sixteenth century saw a redrawing of the borders of north-west Europe. Wales and Brittany entered into unions with neighbouring countries England and France. Nice uses Brittany and Wales’s responses to unification to write a comparative history of national identity during the early modern period.

The Intellectual Origins of the European Reformation, 2nd ed.

It is widely recognized that the sixteenth-century Reformation remains one of the most fascinating and exciting areas of scholarship. A central and important question, raised by intensive modern research on the Renaissance and late medieval scholasticism, concerns the intellectual origins of the Reformation.

Family Business - Litigation and the Political Economies of Daily Life in Early Modern France

In seventeenth-century France, families were essential as both agents and objects in the shaping of capitalism and growth of powerful states -- phenomena that were critical to the making of the modern world. For household members, neighbors, and authorities, the family business of the management of a broad range of tangible and intangible resources -- law, borrowing, violence, and marital status among them -- was central to political stability, economic productivity and cultural morality.

The Undevelopment of Capitalism - Sectors and Markets in Fifteenth-Century Tuscany

In The Undevelopment of Capitalism, Emigh argues that the expansion of the Florentine economic market in the fifteenth century helped to undo the development of markets of other economies-especially the rural economy of Tuscany. As this highly developed urban market penetrated rural regions, it actually erased rural market institutions that rural inhabitants had used to organize agricultural production and family life. Thus, an advanced economy at the time of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance "undeveloped" over time.