Renaissance category: 1000 books

First published in 1926. 'These documents are full of intimate interest' Times Literary Supplement 'A serious and intensely interesting piece of work' The Guardian The Jesuit missionaries were some of the earliest Europeans to find their way into the Mogul empire in the sixteenth century. Spending...

Katherine Manners was the richest girl in England, a Catholic, and wife to the notorious George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham. George's reputation spiralled until his bloody assassination. Kate's second marriage to Randal, Earl of Antrim, lead to her participation in the 1638 rebellions against the king. She was a woman behind great men, and this is her definitive biography.

Qui pense le monde ? Les hommes du passé ou les historiens du présent ? L’histoire universelle telle qu’elle était pratiquée depuis l’Antiquité s’est transformée à partir du XVIe siècle dans des contextes variés, de l’Asie orientale à l’Amérique espagnole. Grâce à sa connaissance...

Can the inadvertent clashes between collaborators produce more powerful effects than their concordances? For Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, the playwriting team best known for their tragedy The Changeling, disagreements and friction proved quite beneficial for their work. This first full-length...

In 1666 London was devastated by the Great Fire, which gutted over 13,000 houses, over eighty parish churches and St Paul’s Cathedral. Robert Wynn Jones has set out to discover the original structures and streets that survived the Great Fire and can still be seen today. This book maps, describes...

It has been 400 years since William Shakespeare, the man heralded as the greatest writer in the English language and England’s national poet, died. Shakespeare has made a profound mark on our culture and heritage. Yet many aspects of his life remain in the shadows, and many places throughout England...

Mary, Queen of Scots is one of the great tragic figures of British history. Born in Scotland one December morning in 1542, she was to become Queen of Scots just six days later. Growing up mostly in France and marrying the sickly French king Francis II in 1559, she returned to Scotland on his death,...

This introductory textbook provides a wide-ranging survey of the political, social, cultural and economic history of early modern Britain, charting the gradual integration of the four kingdoms, from the Wars of the Roses to the formation of 'Britain', and the aftermath of England's unions with Wales...

The Duchy of Savoy first claimed royal status in the seventeenth century, but only in 1713 was Victor Amadeus II, Duke of Savoy (1666–1732), crowned King of Sicily. The events of the Peace of Utrecht (1713) sanctioned the decades-long project the Duchy had pursued through the convoluted maze of...

Divided into ten days of ten novellas each, Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron is one of the literary gems of the fourteenth century. The ‘Decameron’ Third Day in Perspective is an interpretive guide to the stories of the text’s Third Day. For each novella, a distinguished Boccaccio scholar offers...

The Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895 is a seminal event in world history, yet it has been virtually ignored in Western literature. In the East, the focus of Chinese foreign policy has been to undo its results whereas the focus of Japanese foreign policy has been to confirm them. Japan supplanted China...

15mn d'Histoire : une collection numérique de textes courts pour apprendre et comprendre l'Histoire en 15 minutes ! Pour l'histoire, elle restera toujours associée à la pire horreur des guerres de religion, le massacre de la Saint-Barthélemy le 24 août 1572. Descendante de marchands florentins...

In Ink, Stink Bait, Revenge, and Queen Elizabeth, Steven W. May and Arthur F. Marotti present a recently discovered "household book" from sixteenth-century England. Its main scribe, John Hanson, was a yeoman who worked as a legal agent in rural Yorkshire. His book, a miscellaneous collection of documents...

Erasmus' Adagia has been called 'one of the world's biggest bedside books,' and certainly the more than 4000 proverbs and maxims gathered and commented on by Erasmus, sometimes in a few lines and sometimes in full-scale essays, have great appeal for both scholar and educated layman. The aim of the...