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What would the Enlightenment look like from the perspective of artistes, the learned artisans with esprit, who presented themselves in contrast to philosophers, savants, and routine-bound craftsmen? Making a radical change of historical protagonists, this book places the mechanical arts and the world of making at the heart of the Enlightenment. At a time of great colonial, commercial, and imperial concerns, artistes planned encyclopedic projects and sought an official role in the administration of the French state. The Société des Arts, which they envisioned as a state institution that would foster France's colonial and economic expansion, was the most ambitious expression of their collective aspirations. This book provides the first in-depth study of the Société, and demonstrates its legacy in scientific programs, academies, and the making of Diderot and D'Alembert's Encyclopédie. Through insightful analysis of textual, visual, and material sources, the book provides a ground-breaking perspective on the politics of writing on the mechanical arts and the development of key Enlightenment concepts such as improvement, utility, and progress.

This book sheds new light on the notorious Florentine Lorenzino de' Medici (also known as Lorenzaccio) and on two of the most infamous assassinations of Italian Renaissance history. In 1537 Lorenzino changed the course of history by murdering Alessandro de' Medici, first duke of Florence, and paving the way for the accession of the new duke, Cosimo I. In 1548 Lorenzino was killed in Venice in revenge for the assassination he had committed. Based on research in the historical archives of Florence and Simancas, the text reconstructs the events surrounding these murders and involving the Medici, their loyalists, the Florentine republican exiles, and some of the most powerful sovereigns of the time.

This book provides the history of a major Tudor event: an extraordinary international gathering of Renaissance rulers unparalleled in its opulence, pageantry, controversy, and mystery. Throughout most of the late medieval period, from 1300 to 1500, England and France were bitter enemies, often at war or on the brink of it. In 1520, in an effort to bring conflict to an end, England's monarch, Henry VIII, and Francis I of France agreed to meet, surrounded by virtually their entire political nations, at “the Field of Cloth of Gold.” In the midst of a spectacular festival of competition and entertainment, the rival leaders hoped to secure a permanent settlement between them, as part of a European-wide “Universal Peace.” The author offers a new appraisal of this remarkable historical event, describing the preparations and execution of the magnificent gathering, exploring its ramifications, and arguing that it was far more than the extravagant elitist theater and cynical charade it historically has been considered to be.

Prior histories of the first Spanish mariners to circumnavigate the globe in the sixteenth century have focused on Ferdinand Magellan and the other illustrious leaders of these daring expeditions. This book is the first to concentrate on the hitherto anonymous sailors, slaves, adventurers, and soldiers who manned the ships. The book contends that these initial transglobal voyages occurred by chance, beginning with the launch of Magellan's armada in 1519, when the crews dispatched by the king of Spain to claim the Spice Islands in the western Pacific were forced to seek a longer way home, resulting in bitter confrontations with rival Portuguese. The book's enthralling history, based on more than thirty years of research in European and American archives, offers fascinating stories of treachery, greed, murder, desertion, sickness, and starvation but also of courage, dogged persistence, leadership, and loyalty.

Spain’s infamous “false chronicles” were alleged to have been unearthed in 1595 in a monastic library deep in the heart of the German-speaking territories of the Holy Roman Empire by the Jesuit priest Jerónimo Román de la Higuera. Though rife with anachronisms and chronological inaccuracies, these four volumes of invented “truths” about Spanish sacred history radically transformed the religious landscape in Counter-Reformation Spain and were not definitively exposed as forgeries until centuries later, after nearly two hundred years of scholarly debate. This book explores the history, author, and legacy of one of the world’s most compelling and consequential frauds. The book examines how a relatively obscure Jesuit priest so successfully fabricated a set of supposedly historical documents that they were accepted as authentic for generation after generation. The chronicles’ influence was so powerful, in fact, that they continued to shape scholarly discourse, religious practice, and local heritage throughout Spain well into the twentieth century, despite having been debunked as forgeries in the eighteenth. This analysis brings together intellectual, cultural, religious, and political history while reinvigorating an ongoing debate on the uses and abuses of history and the nature of historical and religious truth.

This intimate history of the extraordinary Black Plague pandemic that swept through the British Isles in 1665 focuses on the plague’s effects on smaller towns, where every death was a singular blow affecting the entire community. The author’s reconstruction of life during plague times presents the personal experiences of a wide range of individuals, from historical notables Samuel Pepys and Isaac Newton to common folk who tilled the land and ran the shops. She brings this dark era to vivid life through stories of loss and survival from those who grieved, those who fled, and those who hid to await their fate.

Early modern Spain has long been viewed as having a culture obsessed with honor, where a man resorted to violence when his or his wife's honor was threatened, especially through sexual disgrace. This book overturns this idea, arguing that the way Spanish men and women actually behaved was very different from the behavior depicted in dueling manuals, law books, and “honor plays” of the period. Drawing on criminal and other records to assess the character of violence among non-elite Spaniards, the author finds that appealing to honor was a rhetorical strategy, and that insults, gestures, and violence were all part of a varied repertoire which allowed both men and women to decide how to dispute issues of truth and reputation.

This book tells the history of the French Renaissance through the lives of its most prominent queens and mistresses, beginning with Agnes Sorel, the first officially recognized royal mistress in 1444, and including Anne of Brittany, Catherine de Medici, Anne Pisseleu, Diane de Poitiers, and Marguerite de Valois, among others. It concludes with Gabrielle d'Estrees, Henry IV's powerful mistress during the 1590s. The author shows that women in both roles—queen and mistress—enjoyed great influence over French politics and culture, not to mention over the powerful men with whom they were involved. The book also addresses the enduring mythology surrounding these women, relating captivating tales that uncover much about Renaissance modes of argument, symbols, and values, as well as our own modern preoccupations.

The late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are known as the Age of Enlightenment, a time of science and reason. This book reveals the surprising extent to which Newton, Boyle, Locke, and other giants of rational thought and empiricism also embraced the spiritual, the magical, and the occult. Although public acceptance of occult and magical practices waxed and waned during this period, they survived underground, experiencing a considerable revival in the mid-eighteenth century with the rise of new antiestablishment religious denominations. The occult spilled over into politics with the radicalism of the French Revolution, and into literature in early Romanticism. Even when official disapproval was at its strongest, the evidence points to a growing audience for occult publications as well as to subversive popular enthusiasm. Ultimately, the author argues, the occult was not discarded in favor of “reason” but was incorporated into new forms of learning. In that sense, the occult is part of the modern world, not simply a relic of an unenlightened past, and is still with us today.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Rome was an aged but still vigorous power while Spain was a rising giant on track toward becoming the world's most powerful and first truly global empire. This book tells the story of the meeting of these two great empires at a critical moment in European history. The author explores the close relationship between the Spanish Empire and Papal Rome that developed in the dynamic period of the Italian Renaissance and the Spanish Golden Age. He examines on the one hand the role the Spanish Empire played in shaping Roman politics, economics, culture, society, and religion, and on the other the role the papacy played in Spanish imperial politics and the development of Spanish absolutism and monarchical power. Reconstructing the large Spanish community in Rome during this period, the book reveals the strategies used by the Spanish monarchs and their agents that successfully brought Rome and the papacy under their control. Spanish ambassadors, courtiers, and merchants in Rome carried out a subtle but effective conquest by means of a distinctive “informal” imperialism that relied largely on patronage politics. As Spain's power grew, Rome enjoyed enormous gains as well, and the close relations they developed became a powerful influence on the political, social, economic, and religious life not only of the Iberian and Italian peninsulas but also of Catholic Reformation Europe as a whole.