Ashgate Publishing

List of publications for
2006 | 2005 | 2004

Earlier publications can be accessed by using the History On-Line Search Page

'Soldiers of God' French Ursulines and English Ladies
Pioneering Women in Seventeenth Century Catholicism
Laurence Lux–Sterritt

In the last thirty years, many studies have explored female involvement in religious movements. However, the debate on post-Reformation feminine piety has become polarised, with one school depicting the Catholic Church as a force of oppression keeping the women in its midst in subjection, whilst the other underlines conventual piety as a privileged path towards spiritual perfection. Such a debate has therefore led to a restrictive and fruitless dichotomy and opens opportunities for a third approach: when they founded new congregations with active vocations, did women do so to manifest their rejection of the conventual model?

This book explores such issues through the comparative analysis of two female congregations which became, in seventeenth-century France and England, the embodiment of new feminine efforts to become actively involved in the Catholic Reformation that was thus far essentially masculine. Despite the differences in their national political and religious backgrounds, both the French Ursulines and the Institute of English Ladies shared the same aim to revitalise the links between the Catholic faith and the people, reaching out of the cloister and into the world by educating girls who would later become wives and mothers.

The work demonstrates that these pioneering Catholic women, though in breach of Tridentine decrees, did not turn their backs on contemplative piety: although both the French Ursulines and the English Ladies undertook works that had hitherto been the preserve religious men, they were motivated by their desire to help the Church rather than by a wish to liberate women from what modern interpretation have perceived as the shackles of conventual obedience.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754637166 - c. £47.45 - January 2006 - pp. c. 200

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

A History of the Two Indies
A Translated Selection of Writings from Raynal's Histoire philosophique et politique des etablisments des Europeans dans les des Deux Indes
Edited by Peter Jimack

First published in 1770 and running to over one million words, Raynal's Histoire des Deux Indes was an immediate bestseller that was to go through numerous editions in various languages. Much of the Histoire's success, and subsequent reputation, was based on its attacks on tyranny, slavery and colonial exploitation. In this current edition, Peter Jimack has chosen a representative selection of passages from all books of the Histoire that shows the breadth and scope of the work.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754640434 - £60.00 - May 2006 - pp. 318

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Adaptations of Calvinism in Reformation Europe
Essays in Honour of Brian G. Armstrong
Edited by Mack Holt

Traditional historiography has always viewed Calvin's Geneva as the benchmark against which all other Reformed communities must inevitably be measured, judging those communities who did not follow Geneva's institutional and doctrinal example as somehow inferior and incomplete versions of the original. Adaptations of Calvinism in Reformation Europe builds upon recent scholarship that challenges this concept of the 'fragmentation' of Calvinism, and instead offers a more positive view of Reformed communities beyond Geneva.

The essays in this volume highlight the different paths that Calvinism followed as it took root in Western Europe and which allowed it to develop within fifty years into the dominant Protestant confession. Each chapter reinforces the notion that whilst many reformers did try to duplicate the kind of community that Calvin had established, most had to compromise by adapting to the particular political and cultural landscapes in which they lived. The result was a situation in which reformed churches across Europe differed markedly from Calvin's Geneva in explicit ways. Sumarizing recent research in the field through selected French, Dutch, German, English and Scottish case studies, this collection adds to the emerging picture of a flexible Calvinism that could adapt to meet specific local conditions and needs in order to allow the Reformed tradition to thrive and prosper.

The volume is dedicated to Brian G. Armstrong, whose own scholarship demonstrated how far Calvinism in France had strayed from some of Calvin's original ideas and doctrines, especially predestination, by the seventeenth century.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754651495 - c. £49.50 - March 2006 - pp. c. 250

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Alfred Herbert Ltd and the Machine Tool Industry, 1880-1980
Roger Lloyd-Jones, M.J. Lewis

At the beginning of the twentieth century Britain was amongst the world leaders in the production of machine tools, the number of firms in the industry more than doubling between 1870 and 1900. For the next six decades of the twentieth century the economic and business history of the industry was one of growth and consolidation, and by the 1950s the industry's dominant firm, Alfred Herbert, could claim to be the largest machine tool group in the world. In 1950 the three largest machine producers were the USA, Germany and Britain, just as they had been in 1900, but over the next 25 years the competitive advantage of the British machine tool industry was undermined to the extent that, by the last quarter of the century, it seemed to be terminal decline. This book explores the economic and business history of the British machine tool industry through the rise and fall of its leading player, Alfred Herbert Ltd, providing a valuable insight into a key British manufacturing industry, and contributing to the debate over Britain's alleged decline as a manufacturing nation.

Hardback - ISBN: 075460523X - c. £45.00 - January 2006 - pp. c. 220

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

An Islamic State on Europe's Danube Frontier
The Khanate of Nogay, 1265–1300
Edited by Colin Heywood

Hardback - ISBN: 075460361X - c. £45.00 - September 2006 - pp. c. 224

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Athanasius
Thomas G. Weinandy

As a bishop of Alexandria in the critical 4th century, Athanasius' significance was without doubt profound both as a pastor and theologian. His powerful personality made him a controversial man to be reckoned with. As a theologian he was not only loyal to the Christian tradition, but also the foremost resourceful and innovative theologian of his day. His Christology provided significant clarifications and developments that would become decisive for Cyril of Alexandria and the Councils of Ephesus, and he was one of the first to articulate a systematic notion of 'divinization' which would become the hallmark of Eastern Soteriology and the theology of grace. Because Athanasius was primarily a scriptual theologian, his exegesis, in the midst of doctrinal controversy, is noteworthy within the history of biblical interpretation, and he was also a master of the spiritual life and, through his Life of Anthony, is responsible for promoting the monastic life throughout the East and West. Anthanasius' theology is still of immense importance today.

This book offers the first scholarly introduction to the theology of Athanasius. Placing Athanasius' theology within its various historical and other contexts, Weinandy explores key controversies, questions and themes including: Creation and the Fall; The Nicene Crisis; The Incarnation; The Holy Spirit; The Church and Sacrament; The Christian Life and Monasticism; Eschatology; Revelation, Scripture and Tradition.

Hardback - ISBN: 075461719X - c. £50.00 - October 2006 - pp. c. 224 - Paperback - ISBN: 0754617203 - c. £16.99

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Authority, State and National Character
The Civilizing Process in Austria and England, 1700-1900
Helmut Kuzmics, Roland Axtmann

This book presents a cross-disciplinary and methodologically innovative study, combining historical macro-sociology and a sociology of emotions with historical anthropology and cultural studies. Drawing on the concepts and theories of Norbert Elias on the civilizing process, it sets out to pin down and compare qualities that are simultaneously instantly recognisable and highly elusive, that is a kind of typical "Englishness" and of "Austrianness" that developed contemporaneously in the period up to the First World War.

The authors chart the development of political authority structures in their varied historical manifestations, as well as their affective sedimentation as collective habitus ('national character'), comparing England and Austria from 1700 to 1900 as a case study. Their argument is based on an analysis of literary sources, mainly novels and plays, applying a 'sociology of literature' approach.

Axtmann and Kuzmic argue that the very different national characters formed in England and Austria during this time are related to differences in the affective experience of power and powerlessness, in short, of authority. They show that the formation of national character is determined partly by the different mixture of authoritative external constraints and milder self-restraint, and partly by the affective experience of human beings in uneven power balances. Specifically, they show how the formation of the bureaucratic state with strong patrimonial features in Austria, and of a self-organizing civil society with strong 'bourgeois'-liberal features in England resulted both in different institutional structures of authority, and in different modes of the affective experience of this authority.

Employing empirical detail of individual cases and texts to analyse and illuminate broad processes, the authors reach a clearer and deeper understanding of seemingly intangible and irrational aspects of national identity.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754635600 - c. £50.00 - October 2006 - pp. c.350

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Backwardness and Modernization: Poland and Eastern Europe in the 16th-20th Centuries
Jacek Kochanowicz

The subject of this book is the economic backwardness of Poland and Eastern Europe in the modern era. The studies in the first part analyse various aspects of the region's economic and social history in the period from the 16th to the 20th centuries; those in the second part deal with the change following the fall of state socialism. Professor Kochanowicz here argues that, for understanding the present, it is necessary to take into consideration historical legacies.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754659054 - £62.50 - April 2006 - pp. 336

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Brazil
2 Volume Set
Edited by Stuart B. Schwartz

Hardback - ISBN: 0754601846 - c. £59.50 - July 2006 - pp. c. 368

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

British University Observatories, c.1820-1939
Roger Hutchins

University astronomy is the tap-root of the discipline from which the community of professional astronomers and its organizing talent emerged. Yet the academic sector has been neglected by historians because effective scientific roles for its observatories were very slow to evolve. On the one hand, governments considered the public needs of navigation, geodesy and time to be the business of observatories founded as national institutions. On the other hand, since 1579 university statutes establishing chairs of astronomy usually imposed upon incumbents the primary duty to teach. Nevertheless, by 1840 Oxford, Trinity College Dublin, Cambridge, Durham and Glasgow acquiesced to founding observatories which would research, but provided extremely limited additional resources for staff or research expenses. Hence in practice there was a mismatch between founding aspirations encompassing public utility and teaching, and the provision of adequate resources for research.

This book provides: first, an explanatory history of the institutional development of each of the five observatories of the university group; second, analysis of the ability of academic astronomers to contribute both to national astronomy and to advance science within their universities, and thus an explanation of the long-term significance of the sector between c.1820 and 1939.

The relative importance of each observatory emerges in this comparative history, whilst also answering fundamental questions about how and why astronomy came into the universities, and how research was reconciled with teaching, as well as addressing how each institution responded to the challenge of astrophysics and the role of astronomers in the professionalization of the discipline.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754632504 - c. £50.00 - January 2006 - pp. c. 280

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Byzantine Hagiography
A Handbook
Edited by Stephanos Efthymiades

Hardback - ISBN: 0754650332 - c. £50.00 - July 2006 - pp. c. 350

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Byzantine Orthodoxies
Edited by Andrew Louth, Augustine Casiday

Papers from the Thirty-sixth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, University of Durham, 23-25 March 2002

Hardback - ISBN: 0754654966 - £45.00 - May 2006 - pp. 250

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Cabinets for the Curious
Looking Back at Early English Museums
Ken Arnold

This book uses the study of early museums to cast light on modern museum philosophies. At a time when many contemporary institutions are suffering from a sense of cultural irrelevance and are increasingly looking to computer technology to attract a younger audience, Arnold argues that a return to the sense of wonder that inspired the first collections is the best way to reinvigorate today's museums. Through its analysis of both historical and contemporary museum philosophies, this book will appeal to students of collecting, as well as anyone with an interest in the presentation of historical artifacts to a modern audience.

Hardback - ISBN: 075460506X - £47.50 - January 2006 - pp. 310

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Catholic Activism in South-West France, 1540-1570
Kevin Gould

Examining Catholic activism in the south-west of France during the middle decades of the sixteenth century, this book argues-contrary to prevailing views-that the phenomenon was both widespread and militant even before the formation of the Catholic League in 1576. By comparing and contrasting the successes and failures of activists in three key Catholic strongholds - Bordeaux, Toulouse and Agen - it is possible to come to a much fuller understanding of the means, methods and social make-up of organizations that attempted to rouse Catholic sentiment against the growing influence and power of the Huguenots.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754652262 - £50.00 - April 2006 - pp. 204

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Christian IV’s 1606 State Visit to England
Edited by H. Neville Davies

In 1606, Christian IV, King of Denmark and Norway and brother-in-law to James I, made a four-week state visit to England. This volume collects together materials which document the range of festivities devised for Christian’s visit - a series of events which made this the most considerable of all renaissance festivals in Britain. Using diaries, letters, prose pamphlets, financial records, poems, songs, orations, sermons and entertainments, the book introduces and presents these primary sources in a manner that enables the full story of the visit and its cultural richness to emerge for the first time.

James drew on the skills, talents and resources of his new English kingdom to celebrate Christian’s visit, and both kings used the occasion to display and promote strongly developed notions of kingship. This volume is published to coincide with the 400th anniversary of the royal visit.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754609278 - c. £45.00 - April 2006 - pp. c.280

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Classical Archaeology and Museum Constructions of the Past
Maria Mouliou

Hardback - ISBN: 0754601196 - c. £55.00 - January 2006 - pp. c. 290

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Coins and History in Muslim Central Asia
E.A. Davidovich

Hardback - ISBN: 0860788539 - c. £55.00 - March 2006 - pp. c. 320

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Cripps versus Clayton
Power, Personality and Ideology in the Origins of the Modern World Trading System
Richard Toye, James N. Miller

Today, the World Trade Organization (WTO) is often in the headlines, as anti-capitalist demonstrators battle against its free trade values. The clash of ideologies was hardly less strong when the WTO's predecessor organization, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), was created in the late 1940s, against the backdrop of the developing Cold War. This book examines the diplomatic and ideological tussles that lay behind the GATT's birth, through the eyes of two key players - William L. Clayton, the American government's most committed free trader, and the British socialist minister Sir Stafford Cripps. The book provides an arresting, accessible and authoritative account of these dramatic and still-controversial events, aimed at both specialists and general readers on both sides of the Atlantic.

The men's personalities reflected broader tensions in Anglo-US relations, and provide a key to understanding the emergence of the modern world trading system. Will Clayton's sunny, laid-back Texan disposition and dominating physical presence created a marked contrast to the ascetic habits and patrician manner of the dedicatedly religious Stafford Cripps. Clayton, representing the world's dominant economic power, could afford grand gestures, but wanted concessions in return; Cripps, with Britain's economy in crisis, could never reciprocate, and tried to squeeze every last trade advantage from the Americans. The result was mutual frustration, with Clayton loathing Cripps's 'lectures' on Britain's dire problems, and Cripps hating Clayton's 'preaching' of a free trade agenda that he found irrelevant to modern conditions. Nevertheless, as this book clearly shows, not only was the American's vision ultimately crucial to the success of GATT, but the pragmatic compromises forced by the Briton also helped it to endure.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754637522 - c. £45.00 - March 2006 - pp. c.230

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Crusader Piety and Hospitaller Propaganda
Caoursin and the Ottoman Siege of Rhodes in 1480
Theresa M. Vann, Donald J. Kagay

The Obsidionis Rhodiae urbis description (Description of the Siege of Rhodes) is the official record of the Ottoman siege of the Knights of the Hospital in Rhodes in 1480. Written to be published as a printed book by Guilelmus Caoursin, the Vice-chancellor of the Order, the Description fed Western Europe's hunger for news about an important Christian victory in the ongoing war with the Turks. The Knights of Rhodes had spread news of their battles with the Muslims before, aiming to raise money and to gain support for their mission. The publication of the Description, however, marked a new departure, reaching a wider audience than earlier reports in manuscript form. Caoursin wrote the book in a humanistic style, but within a few years his Latin text became the basis for several vernacular versions, accredited to other authors. These editions circulated widely within a space of ten years, indicating the influence of the new technology of printing.

Modern English-speaking scholars best know Caoursin's Description from the 1485 English translation, done by John Kay, though this is not faithful to the original text. The present book is the first publication of Caoursin's Latin text since 1493, combined with a modern English translation, plus new editions of other rare contemporary Latin and vernacular accounts of the siege. The introduction places the siege in the context of 15th–century Hospitaller history, and shows how the Knights of Rhodes used the printing press to make their medieval mission relevant in the changing world of early modern Europe.

Of interest to students of the Order of the Hospital, of the crusades, of the history of warfare, and of book publishing.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754637417 - c. £49.50 - May 2006 - pp. c. 350

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Crusades
Volume 4
Edited by Benjamin Z. Kedar, Jonathan Riley-Smith, Michael Evans, Jonathan Phillips

Crusades covers seven hundred years from the First Crusade (1095-1102) to the fall of Malta (1798) and draws together scholars working on theatres of war, their home fronts and settlements from the Baltic to Africa and from Spain to the Near East and on theology, law, literature, art, numismatics and economic, social, political and military history. Ashgate publishes this journal for The Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East. Because the greatest need appears to be for more historical sources - narrative, homiletic and documentary - to be made available in trustworthy editions, editorial preference is given here to the publication of texts in both European and oriental languages, although interpretative material is welcomed too. Crusades also incorporates the Society's Bulletin.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754653021 - £65.00 - 1 January 2006 - pp. 264

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Crusading in the Age of Joinville
Caroline Smith

Crusading in the Age of Joinville provides a detailed examination of the ideas and experiences of those who promoted and participated in the crusades of Louis IX of France in the mid-thirteenth century. It assesses the possibilities and problems associated with the source material, highlighting the unique value of John of Joinville's Life of Saint Louis. Two distinct approaches are taken to the analysis of these sources. The first is thematic, to reveal contrasts between the idealised images of crusading depicted by its promoters and the experiences of those who responded. Secondly, the careers of Joinville and his close contemporary Oliver of Termes provide extended case studies demonstrating that involvement with crusading could have very different origins and expressions.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754653633 - £47.50 - 1 February 2006 - pp. 228

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Dances and Dancing in Europe, 1000–1600
Walter Salmen

Hardback - ISBN: 1840146214 - c. £49.50 - July 2006 - pp. c. 300

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

David and the Davidians
Simon Lee

The book provides a study in the teaching and studio organisation of Jacques-Louis David (last great studio head in the post-renaissance tradition) and considers productions of his pupils (100s of pupils all over Europe). Evidence suggests at certain times he used them to advance his own career. His most gifted pupils tried to win the Academy's premier student prize, the Prix de Rome and he almost certainly gave such pupils material help in their quest for the prize. Covers David's own student days through to his legacy to further generations of artists.

Hardback - ISBN: 0859679284 - c. £49.95 - January 2006 - pp. c. 250

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

David D'Angers
Sculpture, Literature and Politics
Alan Windsor

Hardback - ISBN: 0859678016 - c. £55.00 - January 2006 - pp. c. 222

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Defining the Holy
Sacred Space in Medieval and Early Modern Europe
Edited by Andrew Spicer, Sarah Hamilton

Holy sites - churches, monasteries, shrines - defined religious experience and were fundamental to the geography and social history of medieval and early modern Europe. How were these sacred spaces defined? How were they created, used, recognized and transformed? And to what extent did these definitions change over the course of time and in particular as a result of the changes wrought in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? Taking a strongly interdisciplinary approach, this volume tackles these questions, by considering the fundamental interaction between the sacred and the profane.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754651940 - £55.00 - 1 March 2006 - pp. 364

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Early Modern Confraternities in Europe and the Americas
International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives
Edited by Christopher Black, Pamela Gravestock

Scholars have long recognized the significant role that confraternities, or lay brotherhoods, played in the religious life of medieval and early modern Catholicism. Taking a broad chronological and geographical approach, this collection of essays addresses the varied and fluid nature of confraternities and their relationship to wider society.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754651746 - £50.00 - May 2006 - pp. 302

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Elizabeth Tyrwhit's Morning and Evening Prayers
Edited by Susan M. Felch

In 1574, Christopher Barker published a volume of prayers and poems collected and composed by Elizabeth Tyrwhit, an intimate member of Katherine Parr's circle, governess to the princess Elizabeth, wife of a Tudor court functinary, and a wealthy widow. Later, Tyrwhit's Morning and Evening Prayers was selected by Thomas Bentley to be republished in his 1582 compilation of devotional works, The Monument of Matrones.

This volume presents critical, old-spelling editions of both versions of Morning and Evening Prayers. Placing them side by side, Susan Felch discloses that the second version contains nearly a quarter more material that the first, and is organized quite differently. Felch convincingly argues that the additional material and revised arrangement of the longer version are likely copied direct from another, no longer extant authorial version, either printed or manuscript.

In the volume's introduction, Felch provides background on Tyrwhit's life and family, including new information unearthed in her research; and sets Tyrwhit's work within the context of sixteenth-century English prayerbooks. Felch here posits that Tyrwhit's reorganization and framing of traditional material to produce two unique prayerbooks indicates her own considerable creativity. The Explanatory Notes gloss archaic and obsolete words, explain unusual constructions, and identify the source texts from which Tyrwhit derives her prayers and poems.

The edition is completed by four additional texts: an autobiographical note by Tyrwhit, her extensive last will and testament, here fully transcribed and annotated; John Field's dedication to her in a translation of Jean de L'Espine's An excellent treatise of Christian righteousnes (1577); and several English versions of the rhymed Hours of the Cross as background to Tyrwhit's rendition entitled, "An Hymne of the Passion of Christ."

Hardback - ISBN: 0754606619 - c. £45.00 - February 2006

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Enforcing Reformation in Ireland and Scotland, 1550-1700
Edited by Elizabethanne Boran, Crawford Gribben

Adopting an international perspective, the essays in this volume look at the motives, methods and impact of enforcing the Protestant Reformation in Ireland and Scotland. The volume offers a fascinating insight into how the political authorities in Scotland and Ireland attempted, with varying degrees of success, to impose Protestantism on their countries. By comparing the two situations and placing them in the wider international picture, our understanding of European confessionalization is further enhanced.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754655822 - £55.00 - May 2006 - pp. 272

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Estates, Enterprise and Investment at the Dawn of the Industrial Revolution
Estate Management and Accounting in the North-East of England, c.1700-1780
David Oldroyd

At the beginning of the eighteenth century the landed estate represented perhaps the largest and most clearly defined type of business organisation in existence in pre-industrial England. Given the need for capital, space and a ready supply of coal and iron it is perhaps unsurprising that most historians tend to place Britain's formative industrial development on such estates where all these elements were available. Yet despite this consensus, surprisingly little attention has been played to the management and accountancy practices of these estates, which have the potential to reveal much about the development of the industrial revolution.

In this study the management practice on estates in the north-east of England (c.1700-1780) is examined through the lens of the accounts and supporting documentation. Accounts encompassed every aspect of estate operations from the housekeeper's groceries to the lead and coal mines, and thus provide direct evidence of the underlying management systems over a diverse range of activities. The information flows on estates serve as an excellent medium for testing hypotheses concerning the management of estates and the attitudes of their owners and stewards.

Focusing on the surviving accounts of three leading gentry families, Bowes, Ridley and Cotesworth, two main issues are addressed. The first concerns the productivity of estates. Were estates managed efficiently as productive investments, and more specifically, to what extent can the landowners and their stewards legitimately be described as capitalists? The second, related, question asks in what ways did accounting aid managerial activity at this early stage of industrial development? These are the central questions this book addresses through examination of the nature and function of accounts within the organisation. By looking in detail at records from this crucial region during a period of transition from an agricultural to an industrial society, the historian can observe the development of modern industrial society at the margin

Hardback - ISBN: 0754634558 - £50.00 - September 2006 - pp. c.220

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Ethics, Politics and Society in the Philosophy of the Roman Empire
Michael Trapp

In the world of the Roman Empire philosophy presented itself as nothing less than the 'art of living' - the indispensable guide for everyone individually, from slave to Emperor, and for all social units from the household to the Empire; a unique civilizing force both in history and in the contemporary world. It claimed to legislate with exclusive authority not only for the individual, in both his private and public capacities, but also for the organization of political structures and the conduct of government. Yet at the same time, philosophers also conceived and presented themselves as the practitioners of an austere and demanding discipline, in which only a tiny minority could ever hope to succeed, and which was permanently at odds with the values of the wider world. Recent scholarly work, while recognizing the interest and importance of the period, has concentrated on individual texts, authors and schools of thought, and has done little to integrate approaches to philosophical thinking with approaches to Imperial period society and values more generally. This book presents a ground-breaking study providing a broader and more integrated view than other publications in this field.

This book presents a ground-breaking study of the central features of the society and values of the Roman Empire. Providing a broad and integrated approach to philosophical thinking and Imperial society and values, this book examines how philosophers' claims were presented in both the technical and the popularizing philosophical literature of the Imperial period in Greek and Latin, how they were received by their intended audience(s), how philosophical values may have collaborated and conflicted with other contemporary schemes of value, and what inner tensions and contradictions they may implicitly or explicitly have been liable to. Michael Trapp brings his wealth of research and knowledge of this Imperial period to bear through his explanation and re-examination of such central questions for the period as the capacity of philosophical values to operate both in support of and in resistance to formal political authority, variations in tradition and outlook between different parts of the Empire (particularly its Latin- and Greek-speaking halves), changing personal values and ideas of the self, and the interaction between Greco-Roman philosophical teaching and that of the alien traditions of Judaism and Christianity.

Presenting a comprehensive examination of ethics, politics, and society in the philosophy of the Roman Empire, and fresh insights from the author, this book also offers a distinctive synthesis of recent research in both ancient philosophy and the study of ancient society, and presents important new readings of texts central to the Classical tradition including: such lastingly-influential classics as the Epistles and Essays of Seneca, Plutarch's Moral Essays, the Diatribes of Epictetus, Lucian's Dialogues and the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754616185 - c. £45.00 - August 2006 - pp. c. 208 - Paperback - ISBN: 0754616193 - c. £17.99

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Europe's Third World
The European Periphery in the Interwar Years
Derek Aldcroft

Economic historians have perennially addressed the intriguing question of comparative development, asking why some countries develop much faster and further than others. Focusing primarily on Europe between 1914 and 1939, this volume explores the development of thirteen countries that could be considered 'economically backwards' during this period: Albania, Bulgaria, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Turkey and Yugoslavia. This volume explores economic modernization, seeking to explain how the countries adapted to the major shocks of the period, namely war and depression.

Hardback - ISBN: 075460599X - £50.00 - June 2006 - pp. 232

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Evagrius and Gregory
Views of Soul in Late Antiquity
Kevin Corrigan, Greogory Yuri Glazov

Evagrius of Pontus and Gregory of Nyssa have either been overlooked by philosophers and theologians in modern times, or overshadowed by their prominent friend and brother (respectively), Basil the Great. Yet they are major figures in the development of Christian thoughts in late antiquity and their works express a unique combination of desert and urban spiritualities in the lived and somewhat turbulent experience of an entire age. They provide a significant link between the great ancient thinkers of the past - Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Clement and others - and the birth and transmission of the early Medieval period - associated with Boethius, Cassian and Augustine.

This book makes accessible, to a wide audience, the thought of Evagrius and Gregory on the soul, in the context of ancient philosophy/theology and the Cappadocians generally. Corrigan argues that in these two figures we witness the birth of new forms of thought and of empirical science in a new key. Evagrius and Gregory are no mere receivers of a monolithic pagan and Christian tradition, but innovative, critical interpreters on the range and limits of cognitive psychology, the soul-body relation, reflexive self-knowledge, personal and human identity and the soul's practical relation to goodness in the context of human experience and divine self-disclosure. This book provides a critical evaluation of their thought on these major issues and argues that in Evagrius and Gregory we see the important integration of many different concerns that later Christian thought was not always able to balance including: mysticism, asceticism, cognitive science, philosophy, and theology.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754616851 - c. £45.00 - September 2006 - pp. c. 208

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Feminism, The Politics of Gender and Social Reform in India, 1850-1920
Padma Anagol

Beyond the Courtyard is a pioneering study of women in India at the height of colonial rule. Previous studies have marginalized the role of Indian women in processes of historical change; women have often been portrayed as the passive recipients of either male social reformers or the interventions of a benevolent Raj. Recent approaches, which employ discursive analysis in the attempt to uncover patriarchical structures, have merely served to reinforce this picture of passivity.

In contrast, Anagol places women at the centre of her analysis and traces the ways in which they engaged with the power structures-both colonialist and patriarchical-which sought to define the Indian woman. The author's innovative study of women and crime challenges the notion of passivity by uncovering instances of individual resistance in the domestic sphere. Acknowledging the significance of such acts to the women themselves, Anagol argues that they were essentially reactive and did not amount to an overturning of existing power structures. Her analysis of women in the public sphere-in campaigns for the spread of female education and for social legislation affecting women, in their rejection or adaptation of tradition and religion, and in the growth of women's organisations-unearths the nature and extent of collective assertion by Indian women during this time period. In a similar vein, Anagol's investigation of the growth of the women's press and writings highlights the relationship between these private and public spheres, between symbolic or 'hidden' resistance and open assertion by women.

This book illustrates the ways in which such movements were based upon a consciousness of the inequalities in gender relations, and highlights the determination of an emerging female intelligentsia to remedy it. In the process, the author demonstrates the case for the existence of an indigenous feminism, which, though informed by the work of women in Europe, had strong Indian roots. Through her analysis of Indian male reactions to movements of assertion by women, Anagol shows that the development of feminist consciousness in India from the late nineteenth century to the coming of Gandhi was not one of uninterrupted unilinear progression.

Beyond the Courtyard will be an essential text for undergraduate and postgraduate students of modern Indian history. It will also prove valuable to scholars studying gender and imperialism, post-colonial studies, women's history, history of law, and the political history of India.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754634116 - c. £45.00 - January 2006 - pp. c. 250

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

From Constantine to Charlemagne
An Archaeology of Italy AD 300-800
Edited by Neil Christie

This book seeks to offer an overview of the archaeological and structural evidence for one of the most vital periods of Italian history, spanning the late Roman and early medieval periods. The chronological scope covers the adoption of Christianity and the emergence of Rome as the seat of Western Christendom, the break-up of the Roman west, and the impact of Germanic and Byzantine rule on Italy. Too long neglected as a 'Dark Age', Dr Christie's work helps to further illuminate this fascinating and dynamic period of European history.

Hardback - ISBN: 1859284213 - £55 - April 2006 - pp. 604

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

From Physick to Pharmacology
Five Centuries of Drug Retailing
Edited by Louise Curth

From Physick to Pharmacology: five centuries of drug retailing will address the important, albeit neglected history of the distribution and sale of medicinal drugs in England. The social history of early medicine and the evolution of British retailing are two areas that have attracted considerable attention from academics in recent years. That said, little work has been done either by medical or business historians on the actual retailing of drugs. This book merges the two themes by examining the growth in the retailing of medicinal drugs from the sixteenth into the twenty-first centuries. The six academics who will be contributing essays range include both medical and business historians.

After the initial introduction, the first essay by Andrew Spicer begins with sixteenth and seventeenth century Huguenot apothecaries, and the individually prepared medicines that they sold. The next essay, by Louise Curth, will look at the way the distribution network expanded to encompass a range of other retail outlets to sell new, branded, pre-packaged proprietary drugs. Steve King will examine various other ways in which medicines were sold in the eighteenth century, with a focus on itinerant traders. This will be followed by pieces by Hilary Marland on the rise of chemists and druggists in the nineteenth-century and Stuart Anderson on twentieth century community pharmacists. The final essay, by Judy Slinn, will look at the marketing and consumption of prescription drugs from the middle of that century, until the present day.

Hardback - ISBN: 075463597X - c. £45.00 - February 2006 - pp. 250

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Gregor Reisch, The Philosophic Pearl (1503), and Natural Philosophy in the Age of Modern Devotion
Andrew Cunningham, Sachiko Kusukawa

Gregor Reisch's The Philosophic Pearl (Margarita Philosophica), first published in 1503 and republished 11 times in the sixteenth century, was the first complete course-book written specially for use in the new German universities of the late 15th and early 16th centuries. Presented as a dialogue between master and pupil, covering the seven liberal arts, natural philosophy and moral philosophy, and with illustrations throughout, it dealt with every subject to be studied by a student in the arts faculty. It is well known to historians for its many woodcuts, but it has received remarkably little attention in its own right as a work of education which helped shape the world view of sixteenth-century educated men. In every respect it is a new treatment of the subjects of the traditional curriculum, and it was produced to meet the new educational needs of the 'modern world'. Natural philosophy - the predecessor of modern science - receives an unusually extensive treatment by Reisch (4 out of 12 books), and the natural philosophy he presents is as Augustinian as it is Aristotelian, which is remarkable.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754606120 - c. £50.00 - March 2006 - pp. c. 400

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Handbook of World Exchange Rates, 1590–1914
Jürgen Schneider, Markus A. Denzel

As a world economy emerged from the 16th-17th centuries onwards, a global cashless payment system arose. This had its base in Europe, in the rising regions of the north-west, with Amsterdam and then London as the central financial market. The mutual quotation of exchange rates, which provide the data tabulated and analysed here, mark the integration into a global network of all areas with significant economic potential.

The primary aim of this book is to provide a compact account of the exchange rates in all these financial markets, from the late 16th century up to the First World War. This makes possible an instant conversion between the major world currencies at nearly any date within that period. The present handbook therefore serves as an invaluable resource for those concerned with all aspects of commercial and financial history.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754603563 - c. £60.00 - August 2006 - pp. c. 400

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Henrietta Maria and the English Civil Wars
Michelle A. White

As a woman, a foreigner and a Catholic, with influence over her husband, King Charles I, Henrietta Maria was viewed with deep suspicion by many of her subjects. In this book, Michelle White directly tackles issues of Henrietta’s actual and perceived influence, and how it was portrayed in popular print by those sympathetic and hostile to her cause. Addressing key themes of patriarchy and sectarianism, she explores the reasons why Henrietta aroused such passions, and whether concerns about her role were justified. In so doing, she presents a vivid portrait of a strong willed woman who had a profound influence on the course of English history.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754639428 - £50 - April 2006 - pp. 230

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Historicism and the Sacred Imaginary
Painting Religion in the Age of Romanticism
Cordula A. Grewe

In 1841 the young Hegelian art critic Friedrich Theodor Vischer condemned the making of religious art as an attempt to revive a historical corpse. He claimed religious art, like religion itself, was outmoded and retrograde in character, and should thus be abandoned. This judgement was an early expression of what became an orthodoxy identifying modernity exclusively with secularization. In the last two decades a revionist historiography has considered the religious revival movements of the nineteenth century as a genuinely modern phenomenon.

The examination of a variety of artistic movements – ranging from the German Nazarenes and the Dusseldorf School of Painting to the Ecole de Lyon and the British Pre-Raphaelites challenges the appropriateness of a model based on a unidimensional picture of modernity as an exclusively secular enterprise. It challenges an art historical paradigm that silences those groups that remained faithful, erases the alterity of transcendental meaning, and trivialises the problem of representing belief in a secularizing age.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754606457 - c. £49.95 - March 2006 - pp. c. 232

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Histories of the Latin Empire of Constantinople
Henri de Valenciennes and Sanudo the Elder
Translated by Peter Lock

Hardback - ISBN: 0754630595 - c. £40.00 - March 2006 - pp. c.250

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Hospital Care and the British Standing Army, 1660-1714
Eric Gruber von Arni

Taking a broadly chronological approach, this book explores the nature and the quality of medical, nursing and welfare facilities provided in hospitals for soldiers during the formative years of the British standing army between 1660 and 1714. It shows how over the course of the late seventeenth century, the British army adapted and developed its facilities in line with new advances in science, medicine and military theory, as well as showing how contact with European armies provided inspiration.

Hardback - ISBN: 075465463X - £50.00 - 1 January 2006 - pp. 248

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Hospitaller Women in the Middle Ages
Edited by Anthony Luttrell, Helen Nicholson

This volume brings together recent and new research, with several items specially translated into English, on the sisters of the largest and most long-lived of the military religious orders, the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem. In recent years there has been increasing scholarly interest in women's religious houses during the Middle Ages, with particular focus on the problems which they faced and the social needs which they performed. The military religious orders have been largely excluded from this interest, partly because it has been assumed that women played little role in religious orders with a predominantly military purpose. Recent research has shown this to be a misconception.

Study of the women members of these Orders enables scholars to gain a deeper appreciation of the nature of religious hospitaller and military Orders and of the role of women in religious life in general. The papers in this volume explore the roles which the Hospitaller sisters performed within their Order, examine the problems of having men and women living within the same or adjoining houses; study relations between the Order and the patrons of its women's houses; and examine the careers of certain prominent women within the Order during the Middle Ages.

This volume will be of interest not only to scholars of the military religious Orders and of the Hospital of St John in particular, but also to scholars of monastic history and to those with an interest in women's history during the middle ages.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754606465 - c. £40.00 - January 2006 - pp. c. 200

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Ibn Sina and his Influence on the Arabic and Latin World
Jules Janssens

This volume focuses on Ibn Sina - the Avicenna of the Latin West - and the enormous impact of his philosophy in both the Islamic and Christian worlds. Jules Janssens opens with a new introductory article, surveying the position of work in the field. The next studies look at Ibn Sina's work and thought, inspired by Alexandrian Neoplatonism on the one hand, and the Qur'an on the other, notably his views on the relationship between God and the world, within the context of Islam. There follow explorations of Ibn Sina's influence on later philosophers, first within the Islamic world and with particular reference to al-Ghazzali, but also, once translated into Latin, in the scholastic world of the West, on figures such as Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, and above all Henry of Ghent.

Hardback - ISBN: 086078987X - £60.00 - 1 March 2006 - pp. 320

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

India
2 Volume Set
Edited by Teotónio R. de Souza

Hardback - ISBN: 0754601870 - c. £59.50 - January 2006 - pp. c. 368

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

International Birth Control
The South Indian Experience 1921–1951
Sarah E. Hodges

Birth control holds a slightly unusual place in the history of medicine. This is because birth control histories, by and large, are not filled with doctors or hospitals, and only relatively recently have included tales of laboratory-based therapeutic innovation. Instead birth control histories elucidate the peculiar slippages between individual body and body politic occasioned by the promotion of techniques to manipulate human reproduction. The history of birth control in India brings these as well as additional complications to the field.

Contrary to popular belief, India has one of the most long-lasting, institutionalized, far-reaching, state sponsored family planning programs in the world. During the inter-war period the country witnessed the formation of groups dedicated to promoting the cause of birth control, and the press was full of stories of the newly-inter-linked terms of birth control, eugenics, maternal and infant welfare and national progress.

This book outlines the early history of birth control in India, particularly the Tamil south, and illuminates India's role in a global birth control network. Across Europe, birth control movements gained prominence largely by attempting to assuage their nations' relational population anxieties with pro-natalist policies and eugenic language. From these movements' very inception, an internationalist impulse spread from countries like Britain and the United States through the work of birth control advocates like Margaret Sanger and Marie Stopes. For Sanger, Stopes and others, the object of birth control was never solely the poor at home, but also embraced the poor across the globe.

Hardback - ISBN: 075463809X - c. £47.50 - April 2006 - pp. c. 200

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

International Scientific Series
Michael Collie, Leslie Howsam

This work will be a significant contribution to the history of publishing as well as a bibliographical tool.

Hardback - ISBN: 0859679462 - c. £47.50 - January 2006 - pp. c. 100

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Islamic Art and Beyond
Constructing the Study of Islamic Art, Volume III
Oleg Grabar

The articles selected for Islamic Art and Beyond, the third in the set of four selections of articles by Oleg Grabar, illustrate how the author's study of Islamic art led him in two directions for a further understanding of the arts. One is how to define Islamic art and what impulses provided it with its own peculiar forms and dynamics of growth. The other issue is that of the meanings to be given to forms like domes, so characteristic of Islamic art, or to terms like symbol, signs, or aesthetic values in the arts, especially when one considers the contemporary world.

Hardback - ISBN: 0860789268 - £70.00 - April 2006 - pp. 488

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Islamic Visual Culture, 1100-1800
Constructing the Study of Islamic Art, Volume II
Oleg Grabar

Islamic Visual Culture, 1100-1800 is the second in a set of four selections of studies by Oleg Grabar. Its focus is on the key centuries - the eleventh through fourteenth - during which the main directions of traditional Islamic art were created and developed and for which classical approaches of the History of Art were adopted. Manuscript illustrations and the arts of objects dominate the selection of articles, but there are also forays into later times like Mughal India and into definitions of area and period styles, as with the Mamluks in Egypt and the Ottomans, or into parallels between Islamic and Christian medieval arts.

Hardback - ISBN: 0860789225 - £80.00 - April 2006 - pp. 478

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Jane Lead
Visionary England in the Seventeenth Century
Julie Hirst

Jane Lead (1624-1704) is probably the most prolific woman writer and most important female religious leader in late seventeenth-century England, yet, she still remains relatively unknown. By exploring her life and works as a prophetess and mystic, this books opens a fascinating window into the world of a remarkable woman living in a remarkable age.

Born in Norfolk into a gentry family, Jane Lead enjoyed a comfortable childhood, married a distant cousin, who was a merchant, and had four children. However, she found herself totally destitute in London when he died, his fortune having been lost abroad. As a widow, she proclaimed herself to be a `Bride of Christ', and eventually became a prolific author and a respected blind, elderly leader of a religious group of well-educated men and women, known as the Philadelphian Society.

The structure of this book is informed by the chronological events that happened during her life and is complemented by examining some of the material she published, including her visions of the Virgin Wisdom, or Sophia. She started writing in 1670, but published prolifically in the 1680s and 1690s, and this material offers a fascinating glimpse into the mind of an extraordinary woman. Believing herself to be living in the `End Times' she expected Sophia would return with the second coming of Christ. The Philadelphian Society grew under her charge, until they were buffeted by mobs in London. Jane Lead died in her eighty-first year and is buried in the non-conformist cemetery, Bunhill Fields, in London.

By contextualising her and drawing out the nature of her devotions this new book draws attention to her as a figure in her own right. Previous studies have tended to reduce her to one example within a certain tradition, but as this work clearly demonstrates she was in fact a much more complicated character who did not conform to any one particular tradition.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754651274 - c. £45.00 - January 2006 - pp. c. 180

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Japan and the Pacific, 1540-1920
Threat and Opportunity
Edited by Mark Caprio, Koichiro Matsuda

This volume seeks to capture the rich array of images and association that define Japan's encounters with the Pacific Ocean. The studies selected for inclusion, along with the introduction, explain how the Pacific Ocean nurtured images of both threat and opportunity to the island nation that it surrounds.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754636836 - £80.00 - May 2006 - pp. 462

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

John Jewel and the English National Church
The Dilemmas of an Erastian Reformer
Gary W. Jenkins

John Jewel (1522-1571) has long been regarded as one of the key figures in the shaping of the Anglican Church. The most recent monographs on Jewel, now over forty years old, focus largely on his theology, casting him as deft scholar, adept humanist, precursor to Hooker, arbiter of Anglican identity and seminal mind in the formation of Anglicanism. In this work, Gary Jenkins takes a more critical approach, arguing that, far from serving as the constructor of a positive Anglican identity, Jewel's real contribution pertains to the genesis the divided and schizophrenic nature of the Church of England. Far from intending to create a coherent theological system, Jewel was more interested in clearing the decks of all rival theological contenders, in order to establish a new ecclesio-political regime.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754635856 - £55.00 - March 2006 - pp. 308

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

John Owen
Carl R. Trueman

John Owen is considered one of the sharpest theological minds of the seventeenth century and a significant theologian in his own right, particularly in terms of his contributions to pneumatology, christology, and ecclesiology.

Carl Trueman presents the first comprehensive study of John Owen, his writings and his theology. Presenting his theology in its historical context, Trueman explores the significance of Owen and his work in ongoing debates on seventeenth century theology, and examines the contexts within which Owen's theology was formulated and the shape of Owen's mind in relation to the intellectual culture of his day - particularly in contemporary philosophy, literature and theology. Examining Owen's theology from pneumatological, political and eschatological perspectives, Trueman highlights the trinitarian structure of his theology and how his theological work informed his understanding of practical Christianity.

With the current resurgence of interest in seventeenth century Reformed theology amongst intellectual historians, and the burgeoning research in systematic theology, this book presents an invaluable study, for historians and theologians, of a leading mind in the Reformation and the historical underpinnings for new systematic theology.

Carl R. Trueman is Lecturer in Church History at the University of Aberdeen, UK

Hardback - ISBN: 0754614697 - c. £50.00 - June 2006 - pp. c. 240 - Paperback - ISBN: 0754614700 - c. £18.99

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Juan de Mariana and Early Modern Spanish Political Thought
Harald E. Braun

The case of the Jesuit political thinker Juan de Mariana (1535-1624) constitutes one of the most striking misconceptions in modern historical scholarship. While Mariana's importance has never been denied, historians have tended to see him as one of the most radical early modern theorists of resistance, considering his treatise On the King and the Education of the King (1599)] to be a stepping stone toward modern pluralist and democratic thought. Nothing could be further from the truth. This 'Whig interpretation' in fact originated from the distorted reading of a few selected passages of the first book of the treatise by commentators who were writing against the background of the assassination of Henry IV of France in 1610. Whereas such a reading of his text discredited Mariana outside Spain and was an embarrassment to the Society of Jesus, it did exactly the opposite for later generations. English and Spanish historians in particular, who still parade him today as a proto-democrat.

This study offers a radical departure from the old view of Mariana, arguing instead that he is anything but the early modern constitutionalist and regicidal thinker which he has been portrayed. Rather it shows Mariana to be a renowned - if controversial - champion of Christian moral and theocratic reform in Spanish political and social life. A shrewd ideologue who continually engaged with public debate during his long lifetime, he persuaded various, often apparently, contradictory policies aimed at protecting the church against the incursions of both crown and Castilian estates, and demanding that the powers of the Spanish Inquisition and of the papacy be curtailed.

Complementing recent work on the role of the peninsular estates and the royal favourite, this book offers, through the locus of Mariana, the first study to offer a complete and holistic picture of early modern Spanish political culture.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754639622 - c. £47.50 - January 2006 - pp. c. 185

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Law, Theology and 'Forgery' Around the Year 1000
The Decretum of Burchard of Worms
Greta Austin

This study of Burchard's 'Decretum', a popular book of Catholic canon law compiled just after the year 1000, sheds new light on the development of law and theology long before the Gregorian Reform, normally considered as a watershed in the history of the Latin Church. Practical episcopal concerns and an appreciation of new scholarly methods led Burchard to be dissatisfied with the quality of contemporary jurisprudence and particularly with the teaching texts available to local bishops. Drawing upon new manuscript discoveries, the author shows how Burchard tried to create a new text that would address these problems. He carefully selected and compiled canons from earlier collections and then went on to tamper systematically with the texts he had chosen. By doing so, he created a book of church law that appeared to be based on indisputable authority, that was internally consistent and that was easy to apply through logical extrapolation to new cases. The present study thus provides a window into the development of legal and theological reasoning in the medieval West, and suggests that, thanks to the work of ambitious bishops, the flowering of law and theology began far earlier, and for different reasons, than scholars have heretofore supposed.

Hardback - ISBN: 075465091X - c. £45.00 - January 2006 - pp. c. 200

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Literary Sociability and Literary Property in France, 1775-1793
Beaumarchais, the Society of Auteurs Dramatique and the Comédie Français
Gregory S. Brown

The first full-length, scholarly study of the Société des auteurs dramatiques (SAD), this book focuses on the first professional association for creative writers in European history. Brown traces how Beaumarchais led this group's fight for literary property legislation and worked to raise the status of men of letters. This study focuses on the form and meaning of eighteenth-century literary sociability, at the intersection of political reform, commercial theater, and writers' anxieties about their public identities.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754603865 - £47.50 - May 2006 - pp. 196

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Lives of Spirit
An Edition of English Carmelite Auto/Biographies of the Early Modern Period
Edited by Nicky Hallett

This volume is an edition of religious women's Lives, based, for the most part, on previously unpublished manuscripts from archives that yield a wealth of material concerning the lives of nuns in enclosed convents from the later 16th through the 18th century. Nicky Hallett's edited version of the lives presents the voices in unmediated form, direct in all their vibrancy, with a critical commentary and contextual discussion introduced via notes and explanatory glosses; an introduction provides an historical and cultural context for the Lives, as well as details of the manuscripts, their sources and authorship.

Exploring for the first time material by and for religious women who wrote in English in 17th-century communities, this book shows how these women formulated a sense of self in relation to traditions of female life-writing, from Catherine of Siena to Teresa of Avila. The newness of the material allows a radical reappraisal of the (self)representation of religious women and of paradigms of life-writing in, and beyond, the early modern period.

Lives of Spirit draws upon several remarkable sets of papers and volumes of Lives by English women who lived in convents in northern continental Europe (from 1619 through to the French Revolution). The papers establish and develop auto/biographical practice within a dynamic spiritual and political context, and represent an unparalleled set of documents attesting to conditions shaping the lives of around sixty nuns. The narratives were written by the religious for themselves, as devotional aids, and for, and about, their sister-religious. The edition presents a critical context for this anthology of spiritual self-writing by women, for and about women. The Lives challenge, as well as affirm in some aspects, conceptions of gender and representation, of (self)construction, and of devotion.

This book is of significant interest to scholars concerned with early modern women and spirituality, and with auto/biography more widely as a genre.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754606759 - c. £45.00 - January 2006 - pp. c. 200

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Local Politics in the French Wars of Religion
The Towns of Champagne, the Duc de Guise, and the Catholic League, 1560-95
Mark W. Konnert

Drawing on the municipal archives of eleven French provincial towns as well as other related sources, this book explores the links between local and national politics during the Wars of Religion of the later sixteenth century. In particular the study focuses on the efforts of the Duc de Guise to control the governments of these towns, in the interests of his family, and later, of the Catholic League, of which he was the head.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754655938 - £57.50 - April 2006 - pp. 316

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Medicine, Charity and Mutual Aid
The Consumption of Health and Welfare in Britian, c.1550–1950
Edited by Anne Borsay, Peter Shapely

The history of the voluntary sector in British towns and cities has received increasing scholarly attention in recent years. However, whilst there have been a number of valuable contributions looking at a issues such as charity as a key welfare provider, charity and medicine, and charity and power in the community, there has been no book length exploration of the role and position of the recipient.

By focusing on the recipients of charity, rather than the donors or institutions, this volume tackles searching questions of social control and cohesion, and the relationship between providers and recipients in a new and revealing manner. It is shown how these issues changed over the course of the nineteenth century, as the frontier between state and the voluntary sector shifted away from charity towards greater reliance on public finance, workers' contributions, and mutual aid. In turn, these new sources of assistance enriched civil society, encouraging democratization, empowerment and social inclusion for previous marginalized members of the community.

Beginning with a substantial introduction that locates medicine, charity and mutual aid within their broad historiographical and urban contexts, the volume then presents thirteen archive-based, inter-related case studies. The main chronological focus of the volume is the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which witnessed such momentous changes in the attitudes to, and allocation of, charity and poor relief. However, individual chapters on the early modern period, the eighteenth century and the aftermath of the Second World War provide illuminating context and help ensure that the volume provides a systematic overview of the subject that will be of interest to social, urban, and medical historians.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754651487 - c. £45.00 - January 2006 - pp. c. 240

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Menswear and Manliness, 1880-1939
Buying and Selling Men's Clothes
Laura Ugolini

Despite increasing academic interest in both the study of masculinity and the history of consumption, there are still few published studies that bring together both concerns. By investigating the changing nature of the retailing of menswear, this book illuminates wider aspects of masculine identity as well as patterns of male consumption between the years 1880 and 1939.

While previous historical studies of masculinity have focused overwhelmingly on the moral, spiritual and physical characteristics associated with notions of 'manliness', this book considers the relationship between men and activities which were widely considered to be at least potentially 'unmanly' - selling, as well as buying clothes - thus shedding new light on men's lives and identities in this period.

L Ugolini

Hardback - ISBN: 0754603849 - c. £40.00 - May 2006 - pp. c. 180

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Mercatores Florentini and the Apostolic Chamber in Paul III Farnese's Rome (1534-1549)
Francesco Guidi Bruscoli

Benvenuto Olivieri was a Florentine banker active in Rome during the first half of the sixteenth century. A self made man without any great family patrimony, he rose to prominence during the pontificate of Pope Paul III, becoming involved with a variety of papal enterprises which allowed him to get to the heart of the mechanisms governing the papal finances. Amassing a considerable fortune along the way, Olivieri soon built himself a role as co-ordinator of the appalti (revenue farms) and became one of the most powerful players in the complex network that connected bankers and the papal revenue. This book, explores the indissoluble link that had developed between the papacy and bankers, illuminating how the Apostolic Chamber, increasingly in need of money, could not meet its debts, without farming out the rights to future income.

Utilising documents from a rich corpus of unpublished private sources in Florence and Rome, Bruscoli unravels the web of financial connections that bound together Florentine and Genoese bankers with the papacy, and looks at how money was raised and the appalti managed.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754607321 - c. £49.95 - March 2006 - pp. c. 270

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Military Orders in the Early Modern Portuguese World
The Orders of Christ, Santiago and Avis
Francis A. Dutra

This volume brings together a selection of Francis A. Dutra's pioneering essays on the Portuguese military orders of Christ, Santiago and Avis. Based extensively on archival research, they reflect his special interest in social mobility and use of the knighthoods for patronage, while particular sections focus on the role of the orders in the Portuguese maritime expansion and in India and Brazil, and on the medical profession. The collection includes English translations of four studies that originally appeared in Portuguese and a detailed index.

Hardback - ISBN: 0860789985 - £62.50 - 1 March 2006 - pp. 400

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Miners' Lung
A History of Dust Disease in British Coal Mining
Edited by Arthur McIvor, Ronald Johnston

Arthur McIvor and Ronald Johnston explore the experience of coal miners' lung diseases and the attempts at voluntary and legal control of dusty conditions in British mining from the late nineteenth century to the present. In this way, the book addresses the important issues of occupational health and safety within the mining industry; issues that have been severely neglected in studies of health and safety in general.

The authors examine the prevalent diseases, notably pneumoconiosis, emphysema and bronchitis, and evaluate the roles of key players such as the doctors, management and employers, the state and the trade unions. Throughout the book, the integration of oral testimony helps to elucidate the attitudes of workers and victims of disease, their 'machismo' work culture and socialisation to very high levels of risk on the job, as well as how and why ideas and health mentalities changed over time. This research, taken together with extensive archive material, provides a unique perspective on the nature of work, industrial relations, the meaning of masculinity in the workplace and the wider social impact of industrial disease, disability and death. The effects of contracting dust disease are shown to result invariably in seriously prescribed lifestyles and encroaching isolation. The book will appeal to those working on the history of medicine, industrial relations, social history and business history as well as labour history.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754636739 - c. £45.00 - January 2006 - pp. c. 300

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Monasticism in Northern Italy, 569–1002
Edited by Ross Balzaretti

Hardback - ISBN: 1859280382 - c. £45.00 - January 2006 - pp. c. 256

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Monasticism in Post-Carolingian Europe
France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands 900-1100
Edited by Anne-Marie Helvetius, Marco Mostert

This book is the first in English to attempt to tackle all aspects of the development of monasticism during the 10th and 11th centuries in the area covered by the present-day countries of France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, Luxembourg and The Netherlands. Certain themes in monastic history (eg the various reform movements) have been studied intensively in the past; nor is there a scarcity of local and regional studies. However, the evidence tends to be scattered in more or less obscure scholarly publications written in half a dozen languages, and therefore is not readily available to all students. The authors provide a synthesis in which the results of recent research are taken into account, and they supplement them, where necessary, with original research carried out by themselves. Thus the book will prove helpful not only as an introduction for students, but also as an incentive to scholars to carry our further research. The book is not restricted to ecclesiastical, institutional, cultural or spiritual aspects of monastic history; while paying ample attention to them, much also is said about anthropological issues (religious anthropology, the history of mentalities) and the complex interaction of monks and abbots with representatives of other political and social groups (the aristocracy, kings and emperors, but also peasants and town dwellers). Many of these aspects have been dealt with separately in the past; no attempt has been made so far to deal with their complex totality in one single textbook.

Hardback - ISBN: 1859281877 - c. £45.00 - October 2006 - pp. c. 300

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Music and the Noble Household during the Reign of James I and Charles I
Lynn Hulse

Hardback - ISBN: 0754603393 - c. £45.00 - May 2006 - pp. c. 280

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Music, Medicine and Melancholy from Renaissance to Enlightenment
Penelope Gouk

Why does music affect people? How can it alter their mental and bodily states? What scientific explanations can doctors offer, and can this knowledge be applied therapeutically? Drawing the normally separate domains of music and medicine, this book explores the fertile interaction between ideas about music, melancholy and the body during a period of profound cultural and intellectual change in Western Europe.

Early modern medical practitioners and the educated lay public had very clear ideas about the relationship between music and sickness. Literature of the period often portrays the power of music to effect illness and convalescence, particularly with regard to diseases associated with the passions of the mind. Furthermore music was seen as a model for occult (ie, hidden) phenomena, a means of understanding the relationship between body, mind and soul. By the eighteenth century, however, natural magic was no longer fashionable among the academic medical elite, whose preferred discourse was drawn from the fields of mechanics, hydraulics and chemistry which were at the heart of the new experimental philosophy taught at Leiden and Edinburgh.

This book shows how new musical practices and acoustic techniques transformed early modern notions of the body and psyche. Enlightenment doctors heard more, and differently, than their Renaissance predecessors, now having access to musical, acoustic and instrumental resources that simply had not existed two hundred years previously. By selecting some important doctors who reflected on melancholy and music's effects, this work shows how their discourses and practices were rooted in scientific 'soundscapes' within early modern Europe. In so doing it adds a new dimension to our understanding of early modern (medical) culture by demonstrating the importance of music in the everyday lives of doctors and patients, as well as its influence on medical thinking.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754639606 - c. £47.50 - January 2006 - pp. c. 280

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Myths, Charters and Warfare in Anglo-Saxon England
Edited by Julia Barrow, Andrew Wareham

This volume brings together a number of essays written by leading scholars in the field of early medieval English history. Focusing on three specific themes, myths, charters and warfare, each contribution presents a balance of both sources and interpretations. Furthermore they also link up with each other, since warfare was the predominant theme in Anglo-Saxon myth, while charters are an important source for military organisation and can also, for example through the information they supply on place names, shed light on belief and cult. Several of the contributions take a wider perspective, looking at later interpretations of the Anglo-Saxon past, both in the Anglo-Norman and more modern periods.

In all, the volume makes a significant addition to the study of Anglo-Saxon England, showing how seemingly unrelated topics can be used to shed light on other areas.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754651207 - c. £55.00 - March 2006 - pp. c. 260

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Neville Chamberlain
A Biography
Robert Self

Neville Chamberlain was a truly pivotal figure in British and International politics, with a long and distinguished career in government. Yet despite this record, he generally is only remembered for his trip to Munich in 1938 and the appeasement of Hitler. In this biography the whole of Chamberlain's political career is examined and put into its national and international context to provide a much fuller and fairer account of his life and career than has hitherto been available.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754656152 - £35.00 - May 2006 - pp. 606

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Nineteenth-Century Markets
Martin Phillips

British markets and marketplaces in the 19th century are widely acknowledged to be the birthplace of the ‘culture of the market’. In part the lack of historical attention that has been paid to them is a result of the dissociation between cultural and economic history - a separation this book seeks to overcome by exploring the perceptions of markets and their economic functioning.

The book argues that 19th-century markets were, contrary to the opinions of some contemporary and many current commentators, continuingly significant sites for retailing and wholesaling. The view that more modern institutions like fixed retail shops surpassed them in importance is shown to be wrong. However, the study is not merely concerned with correcting a false impression; it also explores the processes by which this image of decline was created during the 19th century and shows how interpretations of the marketplace were bound up with its material constitution. It demonstrates that the way people thought and felt about marketplaces influenced how they acted within and towards them. In this way it brings to the historical study of an economic institution many of the concerns of present-day cultural, economic and social theorists.

Hardback - ISBN: 1859280587 - c. £40.00 - October 2006 - pp. c. 256

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Paris-Edinburgh
Cultural Connections in the Belle Epoque
Siân Reynolds

By the end of the nineteenth century Paris was widely acknowledged as the cultural capital of the world, the home of avant-garde music and art, symbolist literature and bohemian culture. Edinburgh by contrast may still be thought of as a rather staid city of lawyers and presbyterian ministers, academics and doctors. Whilst its great days as a centre for the European Enlightenment may have been behind it, however, late Victorian Edinburgh was becoming the location for a new set of cultural institutions, with its own avant-garde, that corresponded with a renewed Scottish national consciousness.

Whilst Morningside was never going to be Montparnasse, the period known as the Belle Epoque was a time in both French and Scottish society when there were stirrings of non-conformity, which often clashed with a still powerful establishment. And in this respect, French bourgeois society could be as resistant to change as the suburbs of Edinburgh. With travel and communication becoming ever easier, a growing numbers of international contacts developed that allowed such new and radical cultural ideas to flourish.

In a series of linked essays, based on research into contemporary archives, documents and publications in both countries, as well as on new developments in cultural research, this book explores an unexpected dimension of Scottish history, while also revealing the Scottish contribution to French history. In a broader sense, and particularly as regards gender, it considers what is meant by 'modern' or 'radical' in this period, without imposing any single model. In so doing, it seeks not to treat Paris-Edinburgh links in isolation, or to exaggerate them, but to use them to provide a fresh perspective on the internationalism of the Belle Epoque.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754634647 - c. £47.50 - March 2006 - pp. c. 220

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Plenitude of Power
The Doctrines and Exercise of Authority in the Middle Ages: Essays in Memory of Robert Louis Benson
Edited by Robert C. Figueira

'I study power' - so Robert Louis Benson described his work as a scholar of medieval history. This volume unites papers by a number of his students dealing with matters central to Benson's historical interests - ecclesiastical institutions and administration, emperorship and papacy, canon law, and political ideology. Ranging from Late Antiquity to the end of the Middle Ages, the contributors discuss the political uses of hagiography, the suppression of heresy, the juridical authority to bind and loose, church administration of the ordering of society, the territorial limits of jurisdiction, charity and power, natural law theory, and the historiography of political theology. A final chapter presents a reflection on Benson's skills as a historian.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754631737 - £47.50 - May 2006 - pp. 216

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Preaching Holy War
Crusade and Jihad, 1095-1105
Niall Christie, Deborah Gerish

At the Council of Clermont in 1095, Pope Urban II (d. 1099) launched the endeavor that became known as the First Crusade. Roman Catholics from Europe joined this campaign and set up European-style states in the Levant by 1099. These events marked the first large-scale encounter between European Christians and Muslims-an encounter that extended over several hundred years as both parties struggled to gain or regain control over the region.

About ten years after Urban first proclaimed the crusade, a jurisprudent from Damascus named 'Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami (d. 1106) dictated a call to the jihad (holy war) against the European invaders. The themes and oratory techniques used in al-Sulami's preaching show remarkable similarities to those employed by Urban, despite the fact that each preacher came from a separate preaching tradition.

In this groundbreaking book Niall Christie and Deborah Gerish explore the similarities between the messages of Urban and al-Sulami, examining how far medieval understandings of holy war might have spanned these radically different cultures.

To date, only a very small part of al-Sulami's dictation, Kitab al-Jihad (the Book of the Holy War), has been edited and translated. This book includes a full text, translation and study of the work, making the entire treatise available to modern readers for the first

Hardback - ISBN: 0754637298 - c. £45.00 - November 2006 - pp. c.200

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Private Banking in Europe
Philip Cottrell, Youssef Cassis

This is a full and authoritative account of the history of private banking, beginning with its development in conjunction with the world markets served by and centred on a few European cities, notably Amsterdam and London.

These banks were usually partnerships, a form of organisation which persisted as the role of private banking changed in response to the political and economic transformations of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It was in this period, and the succeeding Golden Age of private banking from 1815 to the 1870s, that many of the great names this book treats rose to fame: Baring, Rothschild, Mallet and Hottinger became synonymous with wealth and economic power, as German, French and the remarkably long-lasting Geneva banks flourished and expanded.

The last parts of this study detail the way in which private banking adapted to the age of the corporate economy from the 1870s to the 1930s, the decline during and after the Great Depression and the post-war renaissance. It concludes with an appraisal of the causes and consequences of the modern expansion of private banking: no longer the exclusive preserve of partnerships, the management of investment portfolios of wealthy individuals and institutions is now a major concern of international joint-stock banks.

Hardback - ISBN: 1859284329 - c. £45.00 - January 2006 - pp. c. 300

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Pseudo-Dionysius and the Athenian School of Neoplatonism
John Dillon, Sarah Klitenic

Pseudo-Dionysius manipulates a Platonic metaphysics to describe a hierarchical universe. As with the Hellenic Platonists, he arranges the celestial and material cosmos into a series of triadic strata. These strata emanate from one unified being (a divine principle known as "the One" for the Hellenes) and contain beings that range from superior to inferior, depending on their proximity to God. Although some beings are inferior in that they are unable to contemplate God fully for the purpose of deification, even the most inferior being fully participates in God. Moreover, not only do all things in the hierarchy participate in God, but also all things are inter-connected, so that the lower hierarchies fully participate in the higher ones. This metaphysics lends itself to a sacramental system similar to that of the Hellenic ritual, theurgy. Theurgy allows humans to reach the divine by examining the divine as it exists in creation. With this inter-relation between hierarchies, matter becomes a symbol of the divine that can be tapped. Although Pseudo-Dionysius' metaphysics and religion are similar to that of Iamblichus and Proclus in many ways, Pseudo-Dionysius differs fundamentally in his use of an ecclesiastical cosmos, rather than that of the Platonic Timaen cosmos of the Hellenes. Since Koch's landmark work on Pseudo-Dionysius' use of Proclus, there has not been an extensive work of scholarship that places Pseudo-Dionysius in the Platonic tradition.

This book discusses the Christian Platonist's adaptation of Hellenic metaphysics, language, and religious ritual. While Pseudo-Dionysius clearly works within the Hellenic tradition, he innovates to integrate Hellenic and Christian thought and possibly to prevent charges against over-Hellenizing. The chapter on sacramental theology as a form of theurgy is especially timely in light of the vast recent scholarship on non-Christian theurgy and magico-mystical practices.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754603857 - c. £40.00 - January 2006 - pp. c. 240

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Re-Thinking Kinship and Feudalism in Early Medieval Europe
Stephen D. White

This is the second collection of studies by Stephen D. White to be published by Variorum, the first being Feuding and Peace-Making in Eleventh-Century France. The essays in this volume look principally at France and England from Merovingian and Anglo-Saxon times up to the 12th century. They call into question the conventional practice of studying kinship and feudalism as independent systems of legal institutions and propose new strategies for examining them.

Hardback - ISBN: 0860789608 - £57.50 - January 2006 - pp. 280

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Religious Identities in Henry VIII's England
Peter Marshall

In this volume Peter Marshall explores a wide range of evidence that underlines the complex web of overlapping and competing religious identities that Henry VIII's subjects were forced to assume as he sought to take control of the English church. Investigating broad issues of conversion, polemic and propaganda, scripture, exile, forgery and miracles, as well as looking at specific cases of individuals and events, a rich picture is built up of the ambiguities and paradoxes of the early reformation process in England. This book includes three entirely new chapters, and eight previously published but updated essays.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754653900 - £60.00 - 1 January 2006 - pp. 312

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Religious Patronage, Lordship and Society in Southern England, 1066–1154
Emma Cownie

Hardback - ISBN: 1840142979 - c. £45.00 - January 2006 - pp. c. 256

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Renaissance Education Between Religion and Politics
Paul F. Grendler

This third volume of articles by Paul F. Grendler explores the connections between education, religion, and politics. It combines detailed research, such as on Erasmus's doctorate and the new schools of the Jesuits and Piarists, with broad overviews of European and especially Italian education. Two of the studies appear here for the first time in English.

Hardback - ISBN: 0860789896 - £60.00 - April 2006 - pp. 340

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Resisting Napoleon
The British Response to the Threat of Invasion, 1797-1815
Edited by Mark Philp

The long war with Revolutionary France had a fundamental impact on British political culture. The most dramatic example of this is the mass mobilization of the British people in response to French invasion threats, particularly in the period 1803-5 when Napoleon began massing an invasion fleet. Focusing on this crucial two-year period, this volume examines events and puts them into the context of the wider war (1798-1815).

Hardback - ISBN: 0754653137 - £55.00 - May 2006 - pp. 282

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Revealing the Early Modern Landscape of England
Earls Colne
Dolly MacKinnon

The Essex village of Earl's Colne boasts one of the most comprehensive collections of historical documents in Britain, and has been the subject of an intensive and ongoing research project to collate and computerize the serving records. As such, Earls Cone is undoubtedly one of the most studied parishes in England. Yet whilst much is now known about the village and its inhabitants, little work has been done on the social relationships that bound the community together within its mental and physical landscape. As such, scholars will welcome Dr MacKinnon's investigation into the social, political and cultural world of early modern England as represented by Earls Colne.

The book provides a fresh approach to the study of the landscape of a seventeenth century village by focussing on the relationships between political power and cultural artefacts. It examines how private, public and communal spaces within society were generated, gendered and governed, and how this was recorded and perpetuated in the records, names, monuments of the parish and surrounding landscape. Yet whilst the 'elites' tried to represent a select social landscape through their control of the local records and documents, these attempts were always counterbalanced by the less powerful members of the community who occupied and contested these spaces.

By reconstructing the dynamics of Earls Colne through a careful reading and cross-referencing of the surviving documents, buildings and place names, this book offers a fascinating insight into how the sights and sounds of early modern society were imbued with the social relations of parish politics. As well as deepening our understanding of Earls Colne itself, the book offers historians the potential to revisit other local studies from a fresh perspective.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754639649 - c. £47.50 - December 2006 - pp. c. 220

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Rich Apparel
Dress in Henry VIII's England
Maria Haywood

English dress in the second half of the sixteenth century has been studied in depth, yet remarkable little has been written on the earlier years, or indeed on male clothing for the whole century. The few studies that do cover these neglected areas have tended to be quite general, focusing upon garments rather than the wearers. As such this present volume will fill an important gap by providing a detailed analysis of not only what people wore in Henry's reign, but why.

The book describes and analyses dress in England through a variety of documents, including warrants and accounts form Henry's Great Wardrobe and the royal household, contemporary narrative sources, legislation enacted by Parliament, guild regulations, inventories and wills, supported with evidence and observations derived from visual sources and surviving garments. Whilst all these sources are utilised, the main focus of the study is built around the sumptuary legislation, or the four 'Acts of Apparel' passed by Henry between 1509 and 1547. English sumptuary legislation was concerned primarily with male dress and starting at the top of society, with the king and his immediate family, it worked its way down through the social hierarchy, but stopped short of the poor who did not have sufficient disposable income to afford the items under consideration. Certain groups - such as women and the clergy - who were specifically excluded from the legislation, receive consideration in the second half of the book.

Combing the consideration of such primary sources with modern scholarly analysis, this book will prove invaluable for anyone with an interest in the history of fashion, clothing, consumption in Tudor society.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754640965 - c. £45.00 - June 2006 - pp. c. 260

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Rituals and Theologies of Christian Baptism
Beyond the Jordan
Bryan D. Spinks

Baptismal Liturgy & Theology presents both a comprehensive history of the liturgies of baptism, and an ecumenically and geographically wide-ranging survey and discussion of contemporary baptismal rites, practice and reflection, and sacramental theology.

The book is presented in a clear chronological framework. Summarizing the understandings of baptism in the New Testament, Spinks then examines earlier development of baptismal reflection and liturgical rites throughout Syrian, Egyptian, Roman and African regions, focusing particularly on the Homilies of Chrysostom, Cyril of Jerusalem, Theodore and Ambrose. The post-nicene rites and commentaries are discussed and the impact of medieval theologies of baptism and Augustinian theology with reference to Western understanding. Having traced the distinctive teaching of Reformation traditions, including the Radical Reformation, and disputes and reformulations of the liturgy in 18th and 19th centuries, Spinks turns to focus on the important developments of 20th Century sacramental debate and practice.

Presenting a comprehensive survey of the historical underpinnings of baptismal liturgies and theologies, Baptismal Liturgy & Theology presents important new ecumenical perspectives on developments of 20th Century sacramental discussion, placed alongside present practices of Southern Baptists, Amish, Pentecostal and Assemblies of God, as well as Methodist, Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed and Anglican denominations.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754614271 - c. £45.00 - January 2006 - pp. c. 280 - Paperback - ISBN: 075461428X - c. £16.99

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Robert Hooke
Tercentennial Studies
Edited by Michael Cooper, Michael Hunter

This volume represents a benchmark in the study of Robert Hooke (1635-1703), a genius whose wide-ranging achievements are at last receiving the recognition that they deserve. It brings together a comprehensive set of studies of different aspects of his life, thought and artistry, with sections on Hooke's life and reputation; his contributions to celestial mechanics and astronomy, and to speculative natural philosophy; the instruments that he designed; and his work in architecture and construction. The introduction places the studies in the context of our current understanding of Hooke and his milieu, while the book also contains a comprehensive bibliography.

Hardback - ISBN: 075465365X - £50.00 - 1 March 2006 - pp. 358

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Sanctity in Early Medieval Northern Italy
Gender, Episcopal Memory and the Figure of the Martyr
Clare Pilsworth

Hardback - ISBN: 075460117X - c. £49.50 - January 2006 - pp. c. 256

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Science, Religion and Society, 1500-1700
From Paracelsus to Newton
P.M. Rattansi

Hardback - ISBN: 0860789020 - c. £55.00 - July 2006 - pp. c. 330

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Scripture and Scholarship in Early Modern England
Edited by Ariel Hessayon, Nicolas Keene

The Bible is the single most influential text in Western culture, yet the history of biblical scholarship in early modern England has yet to be written. There have been many publications in the last quarter of a century on heterodoxy, particularly concentrating on the emergence of new sects in the mid-seventeenth century and the perceived onslaught on the clerical establishment by freethinkers and deists in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. However, the study of orthodoxy has languished far behind.

This volume of complementary essays will be the first to embrace orthodox and heterodox treatments of scripture, and in the process to question, challenge and redefine what historians mean when they use these terms. The collection will dispel the myth that a critical engagement with sacred texts was the preserve of radical figures - anti-scripturists and Quakers, Deists and freethinkers. For while the work of these people was significant it formed only part of a far broader debate incorporating figures from across the theological spectrum engaging in a shared discourse.

To explore this discourse, scholars have been drawn together from across the fields of history, theology and literary criticism. Areas of investigation include the inspiration, textual integrity and historicity of scriptural texts, the relative authority of canon and apocrypha, prophecy, the comparative merits of texts in different ancient languages, developing tools of critical scholarship, utopian and moral interpretations of scripture and how scholars read the Bible. Through a study of the interrelated themes of orthodoxy and heterodoxy, print culture and the public sphere, and the theory and practice of textual interpretation, our understanding of the histories of religion, theology, scholarship, and reading in seventeenth century England will be enhanced.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754638936 - c. £45.00 - January 2006 - pp. c. 300

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Shakespeare and the Matter of Britain
Five Shakespeare Plays in Their Jacobean Context
Christopher Wortham

Shakespeare and the Matter of Britain shows how political and social change early in the reign of James I affected Shakespeare's career and work. Although there has been much critical discussion of individual plays written during this transitional period, little attention has been given to viewing these plays sequentially as a record of Shakespeare's progressive adaption to new times and a new audience. This study discusses five plays written between 1603 and 1607: Othello; Measure for Measure; King Lear; Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra. The author examines what these plays meant to their first audiences in the public theatre and at Court. His approach is to reconsider the texts in the context of the mental worlds inhabited by those who first saw the plays performed. He argues for a sharper focus on mental constructs, or ideologies, as a way to fresh and sometimes surprising insights.

Hardback - ISBN: 1859283926 - c. £35.00 - January 2006 - pp. c. 256

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Socrates from Antiquity to the Enlightenment
Edited by M.B. Trapp

Socrates, son of Sophroniscus, of Alopece is arguably the most richly and diversely commemorated - and appropriated - of all ancient thinkers. Divergent ancient depictions, in philosophy, literature and the visual arts - themselves the product of vigorous controversy over his worth and what he stood for - made him available in turn to the medieval, renaissance and modern worlds in a provocative variety of roles: as paradigmatic philosopher and representative (for good or ill) of ancient philosophical culture in general; as practitioner of a distinctive philosophical method, and a distinctive philosophical lifestyle; as mouthpiece and thus ostensible originator of startling doctrines about politics and sex; as martyr (and the victim of the most extreme of all miscarriages of justice); as possessor of an extraordinary, and extraordinarily significant physical appearance; and as the archetype of the hen-pecked intellectual. To this day, he continues to be the most readily recognized of ancient philosophers, as much in popular as in academic culture.

This volume, along with its companion, Socrates in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, aims to do full justice to the range of source material (philosophical, literary, artistic, political), and to the range of interpretative issues it raises. It opens with an Introduction surveying ancient accounts of Socrates (the basic raw material for all subsequent interpretation and use), and discussing the origins and current state of the 'Socratic question' (the issue of which, if any, of the ancient sources can be relied on as historical). This is followed by three sections, covering the Socrates of antiquity, with perspectives forward to later developments (especially in drama and the visual arts), Socrates from Late Antiquity to medieval times, and Socrates in the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Particular features include the attention to Socrates in medieval Arabic and Jewish thought, and his role in the Enlightenment as emblem of moral courage and as the clinching proof of the follies of democracy.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754641244 - c. £47.50 - November 2006 - pp. c. 280

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Socrates in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
Edited by M.B. Trapp

Socrates, son of Sophroniscus, of Alopece is arguably the most richly and diversely commemorated - and appropriated - of all ancient thinkers. Divergent ancient depictions, in philosophy, literature and the visual arts - themselves the product of vigorous controversy over his worth and what he stood for - made him available in turn to the medieval, renaissance and modern worlds in a provocative variety of roles: as paradigmatic philosopher and representative (for good or ill) of ancient philosophical culture in general; as practitioner of a distinctive philosophical method, and a distinctive philosophical lifestyle; as mouthpiece and thus ostensible originator of startling doctrines about politics and sex; as martyr (and the victim of the most extreme of all miscarriages of justice); as possessor of an extraordinary, and extraordinarily significant physical appearance; and as the archetype of the hen-pecked intellectual. To this day, he continues to be the most readily recognized of ancient philosophers, as much in popular as in academic culture.

This volume, along with its companion, Socrates from Antiquity to the Enlightenment, aims to do full justice to the range of source material (philosophical, literary, artistic, political), and to the range of interpretative issues it raises. It opens with an Introduction summarizing the reception of Socrates up to 1800, and describing the scholarly study since then. This is followed by sections on the Socrateses of Hegel, Kirkegaard and Nietzsche, on issues concerning Socrates, Alcibiades and the topic of eros, and on the political manipulations of Socratic material, especially in the 20th century. A distinctive feature is the inclusion of Cold War Socrateses, both capitalist and communist.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754641236 - c. £47.50 - November 2006 - pp. c. 250

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Southeast Asia
Edited by John Villiers

Hardback - ISBN: 0754601897 - c. £59.50 - January 2006 - pp. c. 368

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Studies in the Ecclesiastical and Social History of Toulouse in the Age of the Cathars
John Hine Mundy

Studies in the Social and Ecclesiastical History of Toulouse in the Age of the Cathars is John H. Mundy's last major book concerning social and religious life in the city of Toulouse. It covers the period 1150-1250 AD, a time when the alternate religion of Catharism, together with other divergent beliefs, rose to its height and, soon under intense repression, began to die out. The studies included, entirely reworked for this publication, and prefaced with an account of Mundy's early research in the Toulouse archives in 1946-47, document his understanding that religious divergence flourished when the town's well-to-do were building a semi-popular oligarchy at the expense of local princely power. The book reveals how the religious orders managed an extensive insurance network providing pensions, old age care and burial for lay society, while the chapters on hospitals and leprosaries, charities, entertainers, judges, heretics and usurers illustrate the daily life of this period.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754653161 - £52.50 - 1 February 2006 - pp. 258

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Studies on Ancient Christianity
Henry Chadwick

This third collection of articles by Henry Chadwick brings together a series of studies on Augustine, written in light of the new texts now available, and on other individual Christian authors of antiquity, in other words of the age when Christianity was acquiring its now familiar shape. A number of papers published here appear in print for the first time, or make accessible to English readers studies which first saw the light in German. These include a substantial discussion of the idea of conscience, important in the highly ethical context of early Christianity, and a study of ancient anthologies, and are complemented by other essays on general themes in the history of the early Church.

Hardback - ISBN: 0860789764 - £62.50 - April 2006 - pp. 408

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Sunday Matins in the Byzantine Cathedral Rite
Music and Liturgy
Alexander Lingas

This is an interdisciplinary examination of the office of Sunday Matins as celebrated in the Byzantine cathedral Rite of the Great Church from its origins in the popular psalmodic assemblies of the fourth century to its comprehensive reform by Archbishop Symeon of Thessalonica (†1429), Byzantium's last and most prolific liturgical commentator. Specifically, it studies the influence of developments in liturgical music and piety-notable among which were the advent of monastic hymnody and virtuosic styles of chanting-on the order of service at the Constantinopolitan and Thessalonian cathedrals of Hagia Sophia. This is accomplished through reconstructions of the service of Sunday matins as celebrated in the two churches from musical manuscripts, books of rubrics ('typika'), and liturgical commentaries. The act of giving musical flesh to these ceremonies allows the author to address questions of interest not only to musicologists, but also to students of Byzantine liturgy, art and intellectual history.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754650472 - c. £49.50 - March 2006 - pp. c. 300

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Taste, Trade and Technology
The Development of the International Meat Industry since 1840
Richard Perren

Focusing on the interactions of producers, sellers and consumers of meat across the world, from the nineteenth century onwards, Richard Perren provides a comprehensive analysis of how an efficient meat exporting industry was built. The study utilises the government reports and papers issued by all countries involved in the meat trade, including North and South America, Australia, New Zealand and Britain.

- £55.00 - May 2006 - pp. 302

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

The Amsterdam International
The World of the International Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU), 1913-1945
Geert Van Goethem

This book charts the turbulent history of the International Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU) from its foundation in 1913, to its dissolution in 1945. Although no formal IFTU archive survives, Geert Van Goethem has drawn on a wealth of documentary sources in France, Germany, Britain, North America and Scandinavia to reconstruct a convincing and lively account of the IFTU, which is intrinsically bound up with the history of the inter-war period.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754652548 - £50.00 - 1 January 2006 - pp. 328

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

The Art of Navigation in Medieval Europe
D.W. Waters, Gerald Grainge

Hardback - ISBN: 1840146982 - c. £40.00 - January 2006 - pp. c. 256

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

The British Footwear Industry
Peter R. Mounfield

Hardback - ISBN: 1859284469 - c. £40.00 - January 2006 - pp. c. 256

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

The Built Form of European Colonial Cities
Manuel Teixeira

Hardback - ISBN: 1859282660 - c. £40.00 - January 2006 - pp. c. 256

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

The Chronicle of Ibn al-Athir for the Crusading Period from al-Kamil fi'l-Ta'rikh. Part 2
The Years 541–589/1146–1193: The Age of Nur al-Din and Saladin
Translated by D.S. Richards

The Chronicle of Ibn al-Athir (1160-1233AD), entitled 'al-Kamil fi'l-Ta'rikh', is one of the outstanding sources for the history of the medieval world. It covers the whole sweep of Islamic history almost up to the death of its author and, with the sources available to him, he attempted to cover the widest geographical spread - events in Iraq, Iran and further East run in counterpoint with those involving North Africa and Spain. But from the time of the arrival of the Crusaders in the Levant, their activities and the Muslim response becomes the focus of the work.

While continuing with the aim of comprehensive coverage, the years in this part are dominated by the careers of Nur al-Din and Saladin, the champions of the Jihad, sometimes called the 'counter-crusade'. Of special interest is the historian's partiality for the House of the former, and his perceived hostility to Saladin.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754640787 - c. £42.50 - August 2006 - pp. c. 390

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

The Chronicle of the Morea
A New Translation, from the Old French Version
Kristian Molin

Numerous Byzantine and Western sources which describe the events of the Fourth Crusade have now been translated into English and are widely read. However, the same is not true for material on Frankish Greece in the period after 1204, despite the importance of this region to late medieval crusading. The ‘Chronicle of the Morea’ is the key source for the history of the Frankish states established in Greece after the conquest of Constantinople in 1204, notably the principality of Achaia, and their relations with the reviving Byzantine empire during the 13th century. It is also an important source for the growth of the Venetian maritime empire. No versions of the Chronicle are currently in print, and the Old French version has never yet been translated into English. In addition, the Chronicle stands as a rish source on many aspects of the religious, economic and cultural history of the Middle Ages, such as chivalry, justice, and the conduct of warfare, and is full of anecdotes giving insight into daily life in the medieval Mediterranean.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754631524 - c. £42.50 - December 2006 - pp. c280

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

The Correspondence of Joseph Black
Edited by Jean Jones, Robert Anderson

Joseph Black (1728–99) was one of the central figures of the Scottish enlightenment and a friend of Adam Smith and David Hume. Internationally celebrated for the discovery of carbon dioxide and latent and specific heat, he was professor first at Glasgow and then Edinburgh, his legendary excellence as a teacher drawing students from as far away as Russia and America. Over eight hundred items of his correspondence survive, A-L Lavoisier, Adam Smith, James Watt, and Benjamin Rush (a signatory to the American Declaration of Independence) being among his numerous correspondents. This correspondence shows him not only in his scientific milieu but as a physician, as a friend and as the financial mainstay of his numerous brothers. Most important of all it discloses his close links with industry and his analytical work for the new science-based manufacture of glass, tar and iron. Of the viability of such ventures he was, according to a contemporary, “the best judge, perhaps, in Europe”.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754601315 - c. £100.00 - September 2006 - pp. c. 1200

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

The Correspondence of Reginald Pole
Volume 4. A Biographical Companion: Britain
Thomas F. Mayer

Reginald Pole (1500-1558), cardinal and archbishop of Canterbury, was at the centre of reform controversies in the mid 16th century - antagonist of Henry VIII, a leader of the reform group in the Roman Church, and nearly elected pope (Julius III was elected in his stead). His voluminous correspondence - more than 2500 items, including letters to him - forms a major source for historians not only of England, but of Catholic Europe and the early Reformation as a whole. In addition to the insight they provide on political history, both secular and ecclesiastical, and on the spiritual motives of reform, they also constitute a great resource for our understanding of humanist learning and cultural patronage in the Renaissance.

Hitherto there has been no comprehensive, let alone modern or accurate listing and analysis of this correspondence, in large part due to the complexity of the manuscript traditions and the difficulties of legibility. The present work makes this vast body of material accessible to the researcher, summarising each letter (and printing key texts usually in critical editions), together with necessary identification and comment. The first three volumes in this set will contain the correspondence; the fourth and fifth will provide a biographical companion to all persons mentioned, and will together constitute a major research tool in their own right.

The entries in these two volumes identify all the persons mentioned in any significant way in the previous three volumes of correspondence. Much of the material is archival and new, and focussing on less well-known figures will provide opportunities for further research. The introduction to the present volume emphasizes Pole's role in the reconstruction of the Marian church in England. It analyses the clergy who approached him, addressing questions of what kind of men did so, what they hoped to gain thereby, and the implications of this for a successful restoration of a Catholic establishment. Their educational, literary, and religious activities are considered, as also questions of patronage with discussion of the degree to which a committed group of laity contributed to restoring the old order, while simultaneously hampering it in economic terms, by refusing to make any substantial restitution of ex-monastic property.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754603296 - c. £60.00 - September 2006 - pp. c. 600

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

The Crusade of Varna, 1443–45
Colin Imber

The Crusade of Varna of 1443–45 was one of the decisive events of the late Middle Ages. Following the temporary Union of the Greek and Latin Churches in 1439, Pope Eugenius IV created an alliance which aimed to 'liberate' Byzantium and the Balkan Peninsula from the domination of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Sultan, Murad II, held the Crusaders during the winter war of 1443, finally securing victory at Varna in November, 1444. The Crusade petered out in 1445 with the expedition of the Burgundian fleet on the Danube. More than any other single event, it was Murad's victory at Varna that secured Ottoman domination of the Balkan Peninsula, with consequences which are still apparent today. Three important works, hitherto largely unnoticed in western historiography, provide eyewitness accounts of the dramtic events of 1443–45 from the Christian and the Muslim side, and are presented here for the first time in English translation. These are supplemented by a series of shorter contemporary texts relating to the events of the crusade.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754601447 - c. £40.00 - April 2006 - pp. c. 256

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

The Cultivation of Monarchy in Brandenburg-Prussia and the Rise of Berlin, 1700-1701
Edited by Karin Friedrich, Sara Smark

The start of the eighteenth century witnessed the emergence of Brandenburg-Prussia as a monarchy and acknowledged power within the Empire. In tandem with this, Berlin came to the fore as the capital city of Brandenburg, with the establishment there of the royal court.

This volume makes available for the first time a selection of the diverse printed, manuscript and visual materials relating to these events. In their introduction to these documents, the editors explore the historical and political context of the rise of the Hohenzollern dynasty and the significance of the 1701 coronation of Friedrich III as King of Prussia. The festivities surrounding Friedrich’s coronation and those that accompanied the marriage of his daughter the previous year were recorded by Friedrich’s court poet, Johann von Besser. This volume features both the original texts by Besser and English translations of them, together with some of the engravings of the coronation, and reports from diplomats who attended the daughter’s wedding.

This collection of materials acts a commentary of Renaissance kingship, revealing the manner in which the early eighteenth-century monarch wished to present himself to the outside world and enhance his legitimacy among his courtiers. It also offers valuable insights into a key stage in the political and cultural history of Brandenburg-Prussia, the consequences of which exercised a crucial impact on the development of Germany and the history of Europe.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754609979 - c. £45.00 - January 2006 - pp. c.280

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

The Cultures of Selling
Perspectives on Consumption and Society since 1700
Edited by John Benson, Laura Ugolini

This volume explores the cultural and social values attached to retail selling in various historical contexts and locations. The articles shed light on different aspects of an activity that is both 'mundane' and almost universal: that of selling commodities for a profit. This is a field of study that is of growing interest to scholars from a variety of disciplines, but on which relatively little has yet been published.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754650464 - £45.00 - May 2006 - pp. 312

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

The Cunningham Papers Volume II
The Triumph of Allied Sea Power 1942-1946
Michael Simpson

This second volume of Cunningham's papers covers the period from his brief term in 1942 as head of the British Admiralty Delegation in Washington and his subsequent appointment as Allied Naval Commander of the Expeditionary Force, through his time as First Sea Lord from October 1943 to his retirement from active service in June 1946. The collection includes official documents but also many letters to his family and brother officers that exhibit his feelings, as well as his illuminating diary entries from April 1944 onwards.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754655989 - £85.00 - 1 February 2006 - pp. 472

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

The Development of Mathematics in Medieval Europe
The Arabs, Euclid, Regiomontanus
Menso Folkerts

This volume complements the previous collection of articles by Menso Folkerts, Essays on Early Medieval Mathematics. It deals with the development of mathematics in Europe from the 12th century to about 1500.

Hardback - ISBN: 0860789578 - £62.50 - 1 February 2006 - pp. 354

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

The Drawings of Joshua Reynolds
Martin Postle

The Drawings of Sir Joshua Reynolds is the first book to be devoted exclusively to the artists activities as a draftsman and collector of drawings. It draws upon a wealth of unpublished material in the form of sketchbooks, albums, isolated sheets of drawings and oil sketches - much of which will be unfamiliar even to those acquainted with Reynolds’s career. In addition to examining Reynolds’s drawings in their own right, the book takes into account the environment in which Reynolds worked and the circumstances of artistic production in eighteenth-century England. Reynolds’s early drawings are, for example, related to contemporary attitudes towards the role of drawing in education, while later drawings are evaluated within the context of the professional and financial pressures attendant on portrait production. Ultimately, the book dispels the common misapprehension that drawing was of marginal importance to Reynolds, and reveals their integral role in the artist’s creative process.

Hardback - ISBN: 1859283659 - c. £30.00 - January 2006 - pp. c. 96

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

The Enraged Musician
Hogarth's Musical Imagery
Jeremy Barlow

More than 70 works of Hogarth include musical references, and Jeremy Barlow's book is the first full-length work devoted to this aspect of his imagery. The first two chapters examine the evidence for Hogarth's interest in music and the problems of assessing accuracy, realism and symbolic meaning in his musical representations. Subsequent chapters show how musical details in his works may often be interpreted as part of his satirical weaponry; the starting point seems to have been his illustrations of the clamorous 'rough music' protest in Samuel Butler's immensely popular poem Hudibras. Hogarth's use of music for satirical purposes also has connections with a particular type of burlesque music in 18th-century England. It may be seen too in the roles played by his humiliated fiddlers or abject ballad singers. Each of the final two chapters focuses on a particular Hogarth subject: his paintings of a scene from a theatrical satire of music and society, The Beggar's Opera, and the print The Enraged Musician itself. The latter work draws together uses of musical imagery discussed previously and the book concludes with an analysis of its internal relations from a musical perspective.

The book is lavishly illustrated with Hogarth's drawings, prints and paintings. Many other images are reproduced to provide contextual background. Several indices and appendices enhance the book's value as a reference tool: these include an annotated index of Hogarth's instruments, with photographs or other representations of the instruments he depicts; a detailed index of Hogarth's works with musical imagery; the texts and music for broadside ballads and single sheet songs related to Hogarth's titles; 18th-century texts and street cries related to Hogarth's The Enraged Musician, and other musical examples indicated in the text. Also included is a facsimile of Bonnell Thornton's Burlesque Ode on St Cæcilia's Day.

Hardback - ISBN: 184014615X - c. £55.00 - January 2006 - pp. c. 300

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

The European City and Green Space
London, Stockholm, Helsinki and St Petersburg, 1850-2000
Edited by Peter Clark

This book explores the multiplicity of green space developments in the modern city and the many influences shaping their evolution. Focusing on four northern European metropoles: London, Stockholm, Helsinki and St Petersburg, it examines how each has responded to the challenges and problems presented by green space, and what lessons can be drawn from the differing approaches taken.

Hardback - ISBN: 075465429X - £50.00 - 1 January 2006 - pp. 380

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

The Finance of English Manufacturing Industry in the mid-Nineteenth Century
Lucy Newton

English industrialists in the period 1850–1885 had to cope with rapid changes in technology as well as national and international economic fluctuations, especially the boom of the early 1870s and the depression of 1874–9. This is a study of the ways in which cyclical expansion, survival during a slump and the adoption of new techniques were financed.

Lucy Newton begins by appraising the scale of manufacturing and the way it changed between 1850 and 1885. She goes on to examine the supply side, both limited liability as a method of financing and the role of provincial banks. She reveals a continuing interrelated pattern of very localised manufacturing, banks and systems of finance in England, and she shows that the financial system mirrored the productive structure of the English provinces. This regional financial network was able to provide manufacturing with adequate funds in normal circumstances, but came under strain when challenged by the needs of very large manufacturers or during the slump of 1874–9.

Throughout the book the author compares the English experience with that of other European countries, resulting in an unusually wide-ranging analysis of finance and organisation of manufacturing industry in a period of transition from workshop to factory.

Hardback - ISBN: 1859283934 - c. £45.00 - April 2006 - pp. c. 256

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

The Impact of War and Revolution
European Labour 1914–1924
Chris Wrigley

The First World War and the Russian Revolutions of 1917 had massive impacts on the individual labour and socialist movements of Europe and, more widely, on the Second International.

European Labour was boosted in strength, by war, economic change and the events in Russia. Yet, paradoxically, these events seriously weakened Labour in much of Europe, deepening ideological divisions among socialists and often uniting anti-Communist and anti-socialist forces across Europe.

The period studies goes up to the 1923-4 period in order to discuss such matters as the later post-war communist insurrections in Germany, the ending of war communism and the beginning of the New Economic Policy in Russia, the probems of Labour in office in Germany and Britain, and the rise of the Nationalist Right in Italy, Germany, Hungary and elsewhere.

Hardback - ISBN: 1859282407 - c. £45.00 - June 2006 - pp. c. 240

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

The Life and After-Life of St John of Beverley
The Evolution of the Cult of an Anglo-Saxon Saint
Susan E. Wilson

This represents the first study devoted to the life and after-life of St John of Beverley. The hagiographic works on John extend over nearly six hundred years from the 8th to the 15th centuries. Wilson uses these sources as a unique opportunity to examine the ways in which an Anglo-Saxon saint was promoted over a long period of time and was continually re-created in the image which the hagiographers or community required, depending on their current needs and perceptions. The volume also includes the first English translations of the Life and the miracle stories.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754653269 - £50.00 - 1 January 2006 - pp. 260

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

The Medieval Hospital and Medical Practice
Edited by Barbara S. Bowers

Using an innovative approach to evidence for the medieval hospital and medical practice, this collection of essays presents recent research by leading international scholars in creating a holistic look at hospital as environment within a social and intellectual context. Research presented in this set of complementary essays creates insights into practice, medicines, administration, foundation, regulation, patronage, theory, and spirituality. As a group, these essays generate a reinterpretation of hospital and practice through presenting new evidence viewed creatively. Looking at differing models of hospital administration between 13th century France and Spain, social context is explored. Seen from the perspective of the history of Knights of the Order of Saint Lazarus, and Order of the Temple, hospital and practice have a different emphasis. Extant medieval hospitals at Tonnerre and Winchester become the basis for exploring form and function in relation to health theory (spiritual and non-spiritual) as well as the influence of patronage and social context. In the case of the Ospedale Maggiore in Milan, this line of argument is taken further to demonstrate aspects of the building based on a concept of epidemiology. Evidence for the practice of medicine presented in these essays comes from a variety of sources and approaches such as; remedy books, medical texts, recorded practice, and by making parallels with folk medicine. Archaeological evidence indicates both religious and non religious medical intervention while skeletal remains reveal both pathology and evidence of treatment.

Hardback - ISBN: 075465110X - c. £42.50 - January 2006 - pp. c. 200

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

The Nag Hammadi Gnostic Studies Reader
Edited by Mark Julian Edwards

It has been recognised throughout the twentieth century that the thinkers whom we call Gnostic are of great importance to the study of Christian origins, the early Church, and later Greek philosophy. While scholars have long been aware that Christianity in its first two centuries was a very diverse movement, it was only with the discovery of a hoard of papyri in Egypt in 1945 - the Nag Hammadi Codices - that it was possible to gain first-hand information about the movements which were later labeled heterodox or heretical. Whilst these substantiated much of the information given by early Christian and pagan writers, they also suggested new readings of Gnostic thought and confirmed the importance of Jewish sources in Gnostic writings. Yet much of this information has still failed to find its way into standard histories of the early Church, and students who wish to know about it are often daunted by the difficulty of mastering all the scholarly controversies that surround the date and provenance of the texts.

This accessible Reader brings together over twenty seminal articles by the most eminent scholars in the field, offering for the first time in a single volume authoritative discussions of such topics as: the meaning of the term "Gnostic"; the relations between Judaism and early Christian heterodoxy; the relation between the Nag Hammadi writings and the new Testament; and the organization of non-catholic Churches. There are also articles devoted individually to a number of the most important texts.

Including a comprehensive bibliography and an introductory chapter, as well as introductions to each section and to each article outlining its context and author's contribution to the subject, Mark Edwards provides an unparalleled resource serving as an accessible introduction to the subject for students and providing, for a wider range of researchers, handy access to scholarly materials otherwise scattered throughout a large number of journals.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754603989 - c. £45.00 - April 2006 - pp. c. 496

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

The Patronage and Collecting of James Brydges, First Duke of Chandos (1674–1744)

Once described as "England's Apollo" James Brydges, first Duke of Chandos (1674-1744) was an outstanding patron of the arts during the first half of the eighteenth century. Having acquired great wealth and influence as Paymaster-General of Queen Anne's forces abroad, Chandos commissioned work from leading artists, architects, poets and composers including Geoffrey Kneller, William Talman, Sir John Vanbrugh, Sir James Thornhill, John Gay and George Frederick Handel. Despite his associations with such renowned figures, Chandos soon gained a reputation for tasteless extravagance. This reputation was not helped by the publication in 1731 of Alexander Pope's poem "Of Taste" which was widely regarded as a satire upon Chandos and Canons, the enormous new house he was building at Whitchurch. The poem destroyed Chandos's reputation as a patron of the arts and ensured that was remembered as a man lacking in taste.

Yet, as this book shows, such a judgement is plainly unfair when the Duke's patronage is considered in more depth and measured against the artistic context of his age. By examining the patronage and collections of the Duke, together with documentary sources and contemporary accounts, it is possible to paint a very different picture of the man. Rather than the epitome of bad taste described by his enemies, it is clear that Chandos was an enlightened patron who embraced new ideas, and strove to establish a taste for the Palladian in England, which was to define the Georgian era.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754641562 - c. £45.00 - June 2006 - pp. c. 230

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

The Politics of Poor Visibility
David Cantor

Hardback - ISBN: 0754651096 - c. £42.50 - January 2006 - pp. c. 166

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

The Popularization of Malthus in Early Nineteenth-Century England
Martineau, Cobbett and the Pauper Press
James P. Huzel

The political economist Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834) first rose to prominence in 1798 with the publication of his Essay on the Principle of Population, in which he blamed rising levels of poverty on the inability of Britain's resources to support its growing population. Dealing with issues of social, economic and political history this work offers a fresh and insightful investigation into one of the most influential, though misunderstood, thinkers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754654273 - £55.00 - 1 March 2006 - pp. 282

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

The Portfolio of Villard de Honnecourt Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Fr 19093
A New Critical Edition and Color Facsimile
Carl F. Barnes

This new facsimile edition of the Portfolio of the 13th-century Picard artist Villard de Honnecourt is the first printed facsimile in eighteen years and the first ever in color. The thirty-three leaves are reproduced at actual size from color transparencies the same size as the leaves themselves to insure the best possible color reproduction of the drawings. For the first time one can see variations in inks and quill strokes, traces of preliminary drawings, and corrections made by the artist.

This study is also the first to give a thorough description of the condition of the leaves, analysis of each drawing in the portfolio individually, and new transcriptions and literal and free translations of the inscriptions. The first chapter covers the history and physical condition of the portfolio, including reassigning "hands" to text found on the leaves. The author analyses the tools and inks used, Villard's drawing technique and style, and evaluates Villard as an artist-draftsman. Chapter II is devoted to detailed analyses of the leaves, one by one, and their drawings and inscriptions. These analyses are of interest to those concerned with medieval technology and theology as well as to those interested in medieval art and architecture.

Chapter III is a new biography of Villard that challenges the many wild speculations of the last century and a half about Villard, separating obvious fiction from possible fact. Barnes analyzes in detail Villard's drawings of different Gothic buildings and makes a case for Villard having been a lay representative of the cathedral chapter at Cambrai, one of the buildings Villard drew.

An up-to-date bibliography of Villard studies and a glossary of Villard's technical and artistic terms completes this important new study.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754651029 - c. £75.00 - March 2006 - pp. c. 304

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

The Regulation of Medicine in the States of Italy
The Protomedicato Tribunals, 1400-1800
David Gentilcore

During the course of the sixteenth century Italian states allowed the medical elites to oversee and regulate all types of medical practitioners, their relations with patients, and issues of public health. In many states this resulted in the creation of special tribunals, the Protomedicato.

This work explores the origins and development of the Protomedicato tribunals and Colleges of Physicians from the late medieval period to their suppression under the Napoleonic regimes at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It discusses the role of the Protomedicato in various cities and their often sweeping powers to regulate the 'healing arts' and to prosecute those who broke its rules or acted without its consent.

As well as studying how the Protomedicato acted in specific locations, the book also addresses the wider broader issues of why the Italian medical elites felt the need for such control and how this power was exercised, in circumstances that were different both geographically and chronologically.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754608387 - c. £45.00 - July 2006 - pp. c. 200

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

The Sidneys of Penshurst and the Monarchy, 1500–1700
Michael G. Brennan

In the fields of politics, culture and literature the Sidney family was undoubtedly one of the major players in early modern England. This study provides the first book-length examination of their importance to political and court life, both in supporting the monarchy and parliament and in exploring alternative modes of government. Drawing upon both historical and literary sources it offers an absorbing insight into the self-perceptions of a leading renaissance family and how they adapted to the vicissitudes of the sixteenth and seventeenth century world.

Hardback - ISBN: 075465060X - £45.00 - July 2006 - pp. 202

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

The Spanish Match
Prince Charles's Journey to Madrid, 1623
Edited by Alexander Samson

In 1623, the young heir to the English and Scottish thrones Prince Charles, donning a false wig and beard and assuming the name John Smith, slipped out of England and headed off to Madrid in an effort to secure the hand of the King of Spain's daughter. Although King James had been hoping for a Spanish marriage since 1604, the policy was deeply divisive and much opposed by those who thought England should be opposing the forces of Catholicism rather than allying with them. Thus when James's cautious approaches to Philip IV seemed to be getting nowhere, the impetuous Charles took matters into his own hands and in the guise of Mr Smith departed to the continent determined to win with his heart what his father could not achieve with diplomacy.

That his journey to Madrid was to eventually end in failure and public humiliation, has often been cited as a major influence on the development of the young prince and his subsequent policies as king. Yet until now, there has been little attempt to systematically explore the ramifications of the failure of the Spanish match from different historical perspectives. In this volume leading scholars from a variety of disciplines analyse the reactions and results of Charles romantic escapade and offer their insights in to the affair. In so doing many traditional assumptions about the trip are overturned, and the inadequacy of assessing it from a single discipline is revealed. By taking into account the political, social, religious and international dimensions to the event, as revealed by the historical, literary and artistic evidence, this volume paints a convincing account of one of the most remarkable episodes of the Jacobean age.

- c. £45.00 - February 2006 - pp. c. 260

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

The Theology and Spirituality of Mary Tudor's Church
William Wizeman

Few areas of early modern English history have roused such passions and interpretations as the rule of Mary Tudor and her efforts to return the country to Catholicism following the reigns of her father and brother. In this book, Dr Wizeman explores Catholic theology, spirituality and the strategies for the reform of the Church as presented in the numerous books printed between 1553 and 1558. This material is then compared to the currents of Catholic reform in the rest of Europe, as well as the preceding years of Reformation in England. In so doing, a number of surprising and controversial conclusions are reached.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754653609 - £50.00 - May 2006 - pp. 302

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Thomas Hardy's Novel Universe
Astronomy and the Cosmic Heroines of his Minor and Major Novels
Pamela S. Gossin

Bringing methods of analysis and values of historical inquiry from the history of science to literature, Pamela Gossin - for the first time - focuses critical attention on astronomy in the writings of Thomas Hardy, which themselves display the deep integration of historical, scientific and literary materials and concerns.

Gossin first situates Hardy's personal synthesis of astronomy and cosmology within a survey of the tradition of astronomy in literary history from the ancient world through the Victorian era. She then provides an overview of Victorian observational and theoretical astronomy, cosmology and early astrophysics, including a discussion of how and what Hardy knew of these developments and discoveries. She goes on to give new close readings of both major and minor novels against the background of Hardy's knowledge and use of popular contemporary astronomy and astrophysics, looking at these seven works: A Pair of Blue Eyes, Far from the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native, Two on a Tower, The Woodlanders, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure.

Paying special attention to narrative structure, scene setting, plot devices and characterization (including gender issues), Gossin analyzes the multiple levels of astronomical allusions that Hardy incorporates into each text. In unexpected and sophisticated ways, reading Hardy's astronomy enriches Darwinian and feminist perspectives, extends formalist evaluations of Hardy's achievement as a writer, and provides fresh or alternative interpretations of enigmatic passages and scenes.

Finally, Gossin takes a new look at female characters who are primary bearers of the astronomical and cosmological message of Hardy's fiction, and suggests broader social and cultural context for how Hardy interrelates issues of gender and astronomy in his writing.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754603369 - c. £45.00 - July 2006 - pp. c. 228

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Towns and Local Communities in Medieval and Early Modern England
David M. Palliser

David Palliser focuses here on towns in England in the centuries between the Norman Conquest and the Tudor period, on which he is an acknowledged authority. Urban topography, archaeology, economy, society and politics are all reviewed, and particular attention is given to relationships between towns and the Crown, to the evidence for migration into towns, and to the vexed question of urban fortunes in the 15th and 16th centuries. The collection includes two hitherto unpublished studies and is introduced and put in context by a new survey of English towns from the 7th to the 16th centuries.

Hardback - ISBN: 0860789748 - £57.50 - 1 February 2006 - pp. 280

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Triumph of the South
Regional Development in the Twentieth Century
Peter Scott

This book provides a scholarly but accessible account of British regional development during the 20th century, focusing on the emergence and development of the ‘North-South’ divide. Beginning with regional imbalance in the Victorian and Edwardian economies, the book goes on to discuss the effects on the First World War and its aftermath, which created a discernable split between the depressed North and West, and the relatively prosperous South. Attention is also paid to the impact of government policy on regional development after the Second World War and beyond, and factors affecting industrial location in this period.

Hardback - ISBN: 1840146133 - c. £49.50 - August 2006 - pp. c. 320

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Vasco da Gama and the Illustrious Enterprise
John Villiers

In 1497–8, the Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama sailed round the Cape of Good Hope and across the Indian Ocean to Calicut on the West Coast of India and so discovered the sea route to the Indies and created the foundations of the Portuguese empire in Asia. He made a second voyage to India in 1502, and in 1524, the year of his death, was brought reluctantly out of retirement to become for a few months viceroy of India. This book is not primarily concerned with reconstructing the details of Vasco da Gama’s life from the scanty evidence available. Its chief aim is to place his first voyage to India in the context of the European and Asian worlds in which he lived and against which his achievements should be assessed. Making extensive use of contemporary sources, the author first gives an account of Portuguese society in the late 15th century and of the motives that lay behind the Portuguese search for the sea route to the Indies. He describes Vasco da Gama’s first and subsequent voyages, the states and societies in Africa and India which he encountered and the relations he established with their rulers, and ends with an assessment of the impact which his discoveries had throughout Europe and in the Indian Ocean.

Hardback - ISBN: 1859284051 - c. £30.00 - January 2006 - pp. c. 280

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

With Words and Knives
Learning Medical Dispassion in Early Modern England
Lynda Payne

The practice of medicine in the days before the development of anaesthetics could often be a brutal and painful experience. Many procedures, especially those involving surgery, which elicited much discomfort for the patient, must have proved almost as distressing to the doctor. Yet in order to cure the patient the medical practitioner was often required to inflict pain.

In order to do so, it is clear that some level of clinical detachment must be developed by the doctor or surgeon. It is the construction of this detachment, or dispassion, with which this work is concerned. However, rather than simply conducting a search for the roots of a modern phenomenon, this book explores the idea of clinical detachment within a broad historical context. In so doing it shows how the medical profession developed the intellectual, verbal and manual skill of being able to replace passion with equanimity and distance.

As the skill of 'dispassion' became more widespread it was both enthusiastically promoted and vehemently attacked by scientific and literary writers throughout the early modern period. To explain why the practice was so controversial and aroused such passions, this study takes into account not only patterns of medical education and clinical practice but wider debates concerning social, philosophical and religious ideas.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754636895 - c. £47.50 - January 2006 - pp. c. 200

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Women and Poor Relief in Seventeenth-Century France
The Early History of the Daughters of Charity
Susan E. Dinan

Chronicling the history of the Daughters of Charity through the seventeenth century, this study examines how the community's existence outside of convents helped to change the nature of women's religious communities and the early modern Catholic church. This book places the Daughters of Charity within the context of early modern poor relief in France, showing how they played a critical role in shaping the system, and also how they were shaped by it.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754655539 - £45.00 - 1 February 2006 - pp. 200

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

Women, Wealth, and Community in Perpignan, c. 1250-1300
Christians, Jews, and Enslaved Muslims in a Medieval Mediterranean Town
Rebecca L. Winer

This book investigates the gender system at work in medieval Perpignan. Using a series of notarial registers, unique as surviving records for the social history of the thirteenth-century realms of Aragon and Majorca, Rebecca L. Winer opens a window onto the experiences of women and their families. Her interpretive framework reveals medieval assumptions about the distinct natures of Christian, Jewish, and enslaved Muslim women by analyzing which actions were curbed, controlled, or fostered in these different groups. Analyzing how class, gender and religious difference shaped everyday practice, the volume constitutes a major contribution to the history of inter-faith relations and medieval studies.

Hardback - ISBN: 0754608042 - £47.50 - January 2006 - pp. 276

Ashgate Publishing - further details for this title
Ashgate Publishing - home page

14 June 2006