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Keeping the Peace in the Village describes the nature of conflicts among rural people in the period after the Thirty Years' War. These included property disputes, conflicts between employers and their workers, disputes over marriage promises, and, most often, honor disputes.
These twenty-six essays examine urban, rural, national, and imperial histories in Early Modern Europe and abroad, and politics in Reformation Switzerland, Burgundy, Germany, and the Netherlands.
A cultural and literary history of mountains in classical antiquity The mountainous character of the Mediterranean was a crucial factor in the history of the ancient Greek and Roman world. The Folds of Olympus is a cultural and literary history that explores the important role mountains played in Greek and Roman religious, military, and economic life, as well as in the identity of communities over a millennium—from Homer to the early Christian saints. Aimed at readers of ancient history and literature as well as those interested in mountains and the environment, the book offers a powerful account of the landscape at the heart of much Greek and Roman culture. Jason König charts the importa...
An innovative global history of science, empire and geography explaining how the Himalaya became the highest mountains in the world.
This groundbreaking book examines the complex relationships between individuals and communities in the profound transitions of the early modern period. Taking a global and comparative approach to historical issues, the distinguished contributors show that individual and community created and recreated one another in the major structures, interactions, and transitions of early modern times. Offering an important contribution to our understanding both of the early modern period and of its historiography, this volume will be an invaluable resource for scholars working in the fields of medieval, early modern, and modern history, and on the Renaissance and Reformation.
Three basic forces dominated sixteenth-century religious life. Two polarized groups, Protestant and Catholic reformers, were shaped by theological debates, over the nature of the church, salvation, prayer, and other issues. These debates articulated critical, group-defining oppositions. Bystanders to the Catholic-Protestant competition were a third force. Their reactions to reformers were violent, opportunistic, hesitant, ambiguous, or serendipitous, much the way social historians have described common people in the Reformation for the last fifty years. But in an ecology of three forces, hesitations and compromises were natural, not just among ordinary people, but also, if more subtly, among reformers and theologians. In this volume, Christopher Ocker offers a constructive and nuanced alternative to the received understanding of the Reformation. Combining the methods of intellectual, cultural, and social history, his book demonstrates how the Reformation became a hybrid movement produced by a binary of Catholic and Protestant self-definitions, by bystanders to religious debate, and by the hesitations and compromises made by all three groups during the religious controversy.
The Tibetan Gesar epic has known countless retellings, translations, and academic studies. The Many Faces of Ling Gesar, presents its historical, cultural, and literary aspects for the first time in a single volume for both general readers and specialists.
Peasants, Lords, and State: Comparing Peasant Conditions in Scandinavia and the Eastern Alpine Region, 1000-1750 compares peasant self-determination in relation to manorial and territorial power structures in Scandinavia and the eastern Alpine region between 1000 and 1750.
Hundreds of rural communities tasted political freedom in the Holy Roman Empire. For shorter or longer periods, villagers managed local affairs without subjection to territorial overlords. In this first book-length study, Beat Kümin focuses on the five case studies of Gochsheim and Sennfeld (in present-day Bavaria), Sulzbach and Soden (Hesse) and Gersau (Switzerland). Adopting a comparative perspective across the late medieval and early modern periods, the analysis of multiple sources reveals distinct extents of rural self-government, the forging of communalized confessions and an enduring attachment to the empire. Negotiating inner tensions as well as mounting centralization pressures, Reichsdörfer provide privileged insights into rural micro-political cultures while their stories resonate with resurgent desires for greater local autonomy in Europe today.