The government of Louis XIV developed two taxes during the last thirty years of the king's reign that forced the privileged to pay. This book is a study of how those taxes developed and what caused them to be adopted.

Drawing on rich archival sources, explores the relationship between honor and violence in the Périgord region in prerevolutionary France.

How gunpowder technology exploded heroes, heroics, and war stories from 1400 to 1700, and how German writers tried to glue them back together.

Analyzes how negotiations between Dutch consuls and North African rulers over the liberation of Dutch sailors helped create a new diplomatic order in the western Mediterranean.

A richly documented study of early modern state formation, sovereignty, legitimacy, and comparative political culture in Alsace between the Peace of Westphalia and the French Revolution

This study takes as its focus the early-sixteenth-century metropolis of Antwerp in the southern Low Countries. Reformation thought made swift inroads into this community, not least via the city's active trade routes and renowned publishing houses. As part of his patrimonial inheritance, Charles V was keen to quash reforming thought in Antwerp, and constructed a secular inquisition in an attempt to achieve this aim. But the city fathers of Antwerp fought all of Charles's efforts to curtail the religious activities of their inhabitants, albeit for reasons that were dominated by economic and social rather than religious concerns.

Early modern Europe's most extensive commonwealth -- the Republic of Letters -- could not be found on any map. This republic had patriotic citizens, but no army; it had its own language, but no frontiers. From its birth during the Renaissance, the Republic of Letters long remained a small and close-knit elite community, linked by international networks of correspondence, sharing an erudite neo-Latin culture. In the late seventeenth century, however, it confronted fundamental challenges that influenced its transition to the more public, inclusive, and vernacular discourse of the Enlightenment.

Transforming the Republic of Letters is a cultural and intellectual history that chronicles this transition to "modernity" from the perspective of the internationally renowned scholar Pierre-Daniel Huet (1630-1721). Under Shelford's direction, Huet guides us into the intensely social intellectual world of salons, scientific academies, and literary academies, while his articulate critiques illumine a combative world of Cartesians versus anti-Cartesians, ancients versus moderns, Jesuits versus Jansenists, and salonnières versus humanist scholars. Transforming the Republic of Letters raises questions of critical importance in Huet's era, and our own, about defining, sharing, and controlling access to knowledge.

April G. Shelford is Assistant Professor in the History Department at American University, Washington, D.C.

Civic Christianity in Renaissance Italy explores the often subtle and sometimes harsh realities of life on the Venetian mainland. Focusing on the confraternity of Santa Maria dei Battuti and its Ospedale, the book addresses a number of well-established and newly articulated historiographical questions: the governance of territorial states, the civic and religious role of confraternities, the status of women and marginalized groups, and popular religious devotion. Adapting the objectives and methods of microhistory, D'Andrea has written neither a traditional history of political subjugation nor a straightforward survey of poor relief. Instead, thematic chapters survey the activities of a powerful religious brotherhood [Santa Maria dei Battuti] and document the interconnected local, regional, and international factors that fashioned the social world of Venetian subjects.
Grounded in previously unexplored archival material, the book is an innovative study of the nexus between local religion and Venetian territorial power, providing scholars with this first scholarly monograph of the city that served as the keystone of Venice's mainland empire. This original approach to the critical relationship between provincial powers and the central government also contributes to other important areas of historical inquiry, including the history of popular religion, poor relief, medicine, and education.

David D'Andrea is Associate Professor of History at Oklahoma State University.

This study meticulously traces the social boundaries that characterized seventeenth-century Europe - region, religion, social state, and kinship - by analyzing a distinctive life that crossed them all. During the turbulent events of Europe's Thirty Years' War, both ruthlessness and adaptability were crucial ingredients for success. In this engaging volume, Randolph C. Head traces the career of an extraordinarily adaptable and ruthless figure, George Jenatsch (1596-1639). Born a Protestant pastor's son, Jenatsch's career took him from the clergy to the military to the nobility. A passionate Calvinist in his youth, he converted to Catholicism and prudence as his power grew. A native speaker of the Romansh language, he crossed the boundaries of language and local loyalty in his service to France, Venice, and his own people. Violence marked every turning point of his life. After fleeing the 'Holy Massacre' of Protestants in the Valtellina in 1620, Jenatsch helped assassinate the powerful Pompeius von Planta, in 1621, using an axe. He killed his commanding officer in a duel in 1629, and his own life ended in a tavern in 1639 when he was murdered - with an axe - by a man dressed as a bear. After his death, myth took over. Rumors spread that Jenatsch was killed by the same axe that he had wielded on von Planta - and from there the story only got better, culminating in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's celebrated 1876 novel, 'Jurg Jenatsch.' This study meticulously traces the social boundaries that characterized seventeenth-century Europe - region, religion, social state, and kinship - by analyzing a distinctive life that crossed them all. Professor Randolph C. Head teaches European history at the University of California, Riverside and is the author of 'Early Modern Democracy in the Grisons'.