History / <1799

The Enlightenment: And Why It Still Matters

by Anthony Pagden

One of our most renowned and brilliant historians takes a fresh look at the revolutionary intellectual movement that laid the foundation for the modern world.

Liberty and equality. Human rights. Freedom of...

Louisbourg 1758: Wolfe's first siege

by Rene Chartrand & Patrice Courcelle

Osprey's study of James Wolfe's siege of Louisbourg during the French and Indian War (1754-1763). Louisbourg represented a major threat to Anglo-American plans to invade Canada. Bypassing it would leave an immensely...

The Forts of New France in Northeast America 1600-1763

by Rene Chartrand & Brian Delf

"New France" consisted of the area colonized and ruled by France in North America from the 16th to the 18th century. At its peak in the early 18th century its territory was huge, stretching from Newfoundland...

Monongahela 1754#55: Washington's defeat, Braddock's disaster

by Rene Chartrand & Stephen Walsh

On 9 July 1755 amid the wilderness of North America, Britain suffered one of the most humiliating defeats in her history. General Braddock’s army, a mixture of British regulars and American militia, was shattered,...

How to Create the Perfect Wife: Britain's Most Ineligible Bachelor and his Enlightened Quest to Train the Ideal Mate

by Wendy Moore

Thomas Day, an 18th-century British writer and radical, knew exactly the sort of woman he wanted to marry. Pure and virginal like an English country maid yet tough and hardy like a Spartan heroine, she would...

Verse and Poetics in George Herbert and John Donne

by Frances Cruickshank

Innovative and highly readable, this study traces George Herbert's and John Donne's development of a distinct poetics through close readings of their poetry, as well as letters, sermons, and prose treatises....

Literatures of Exile in the English Revolution and its Aftermath, 1640-1690

by Philip Major & with a foreword by Lisa Jardine

Original and thought-provoking, this collection sheds new light on an important yet understudied feature of seventeenth-century England's political and cultural landscape: exile. It considers exile both as physical...

Roxolana in European Literature, History and Culture

by Galina I. Yermolenko

The essays gathered here examine the legacy of Roxolana, a sixteenth-century Ukrainian woman who, from harem slave, became legal wife and advisor of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. The collection views Roxolana...

John Norden's The Surveyor's Dialogue (1618): A Critical Edition

by Mark Netzloff

This edition provides the first complete, modern version of John Norden's The Surveyor's Dialogue, a text remarkable for its unique commentary on the agrarian roots of English capitalism. In his extensive introduction,...

The Eighteenth-Century Novel and the Secularization of Ethics

by Carol Stewart

Linking the decline in Church authority in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries with the increasing respectability of fiction, Carol Stewart provides a new perspective on the rise of the novel....

Word and Self Estranged in English Texts, 1550-1660

by Philippa Kelly & L.E. Semler

All of the essays in this collection investigate and extrapolate understandings of the strange. In presenting contrasts and analogies between diverse kinds of estrangement, the volume reveals an interplay of...

The Culture of Piracy, 1580-1630: English Literature and Seaborne Crime

by Claire Jowitt

By examining the often marginal figure of the pirate (and also the hard-to-distinguish privateer), The Culture of Piracy, 1580-1630 shows how flexibly these figures served to comment on English nationalism,...

Narrating Marriage in Eighteenth-Century England and France

by Chris Roulston

Drawing on a wide range of English and French fiction and advice literature, this study analyzes the problems of representation that emerge in light of the changing definition of marriage from one of hierarchy...

Popular Medicine, Hysterical Disease, and Social Controversy in Shakespeare's England

by Kaara L. Peterson

Mining a series of previously uncharted conversations springing up in 16th- and 17th-century popular medicine and culture, this study explores early modern England's significant and sustained interest in the...

Mary Sidney, Lady Wroth

by Margaret P. Hannay

In this first full-length biography of Lady Mary Wroth, Margaret Hannay's reliance on primary sources results in some corrections, as well as additions, to our knowledge of the lives of Wroth and of her children....

Staging Spectatorship in the Plays of Philip Massinger

by Joanne Rochester

In Staging Spectatorship in the Plays of Philip Massinger, Joanne Rochester examines examples of on-stage spectatorship in three plays by Massinger, head playwright for the King's Men from 1625 to 1640. Focusing...

Renaissance Food from Rabelais to Shakespeare: Culinary Readings and Culinary Histories

by Joan Fitzpatrick

Providing a unique perspective on a fascinating aspect of early modern culture, this volume focuses on the role of food and diet as read in the works of a range of European authors, including Shakespeare, from...

English Fictions of Communal Identity, 1485-1603

by Joshua Phillips

Focusing on Tudor prose fiction from Malory's Morte D'Arthur through the works of Sir Philip Sidney and Thomas Nashe, this study explores the concept of "collective agency" and the extensive impact it had on...

Mentoring in Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture

by Anthony W. Lee

Making a case for the importance of mentoring in the eighteenth century, particularly in expanding print culture, this collection employs a variety of critical and methodological approaches reflective of the...

Herrick, Fanshawe and the Politics of Intertextuality: Classical Literature and Seventeenth-Century Royalism

by Syrithe Pugh

Royalist polemic and a sophisticated use of classical allusion are at the heart of the two 1648 volumes which are the focus of this study, yet there are striking differences in their politics and in the ways...