The essays in this volume seek to analyze biographical films as representations of historical individuals and the times in which they lived. To do this, contributors examine the context in which certain biographical films were made, including the state of knowledge about their subjects at that moment, and what these films reveal about the values and purposes of those who created them. This is an original approach to biographical (as opposed to historical) films and one that has so far play...

Henry VIII remains the most iconic and controversial of all English Kings. For over four-hundred years he has been lauded, reviled and mocked, but rarely ignored. In his many guises - model Renaissance prince, Defender of the Faith, rapacious plunderer of the Church, obese Bluebeard-- he has featured in numerous works of fact and faction, in books, magazines, paintings, theatre, film and television. Yet despite this perennial fascination with Henry the man and monarch, there has been littl...

Paul Hazard’s magisterial, widely influential, and beloved intellectual history offers an unforgettable account of the birth of the modern European mind in all its dynamic, inquiring, and uncertain glory. Beginning his story in the latter half of the seventeenth century, while also looking back to the Renaissance and forward to the future, Hazard traces the process by which new developmentsin the sciences, arts, philosophy, and philology came to undermine the stable foundations of t...

In the early seventeenth century, a crippled, graying, almost toothless veteran of Spain's wars against the Ottoman Empire published a book. It was the story of a poor nobleman, his brain addled from reading too many books of chivalry, who deludes himself that he is a knight errant and sets off on hilarious adventures. That book, Don Quixote, went on to sell more copies than any other book beside the Bible, making its author, Miguel de Cervantes, the single most-read author in hum...

Plague has been the most feared disease across Europe since the Black Death in the 1340s. Dreaded because of the scale of the mortality and its sheer foulness, its periodic outbreaks had a devastating impact. London’s last and most destructive attack came in 1665, when, according to Bishop Gilbert Burnet, ‘a most terrible plague broke out, that depopulated the city of London, ruined the trade of the nation, and swept away about a hundred thousand persons’. Roughly one-fifth of the city’s p...

Renaissance in Japan is a superb survey of Japan's literary giants-forerunners of today's modern Japanese writers.Called the "Kyoto epoch," the age in which these writers lived was the period in which Japanese cultural development made many of its greatest advances. In these years of the early Tokugawa era, the old aristocratic culture was confronted with the new plebeian awakening, giving rise to dynamic social developments, in effect a peaceful revolutio...

En Garde! is a small-scale skirmish game based on the successful Ronin rules, in which small groups of warriors fight each other for honour or riches. Rather than just rolling a few dice, the rules allow players to make tactical decisions about how the models that they control will fight – offensively, defensively, or by applying special skills and abilities. En Garde! covers the conflicts of the 16th, 17th and early 18th centuries, when black-powder weapons started to become common in bat...

TO COMMANDER ROBERT FALCON SCOTT, R.N., M.V.O., F.R.G.S.; LEADER OF THE NATIONAL ANTARCTIC EXPEDITION, 1901 TO 1904. My Dear Scott, Believe me to be ever, my dear Scott, Your attached friend and well-wisher

Examining the impact of the English and European Reformations on social interaction and community harmony, this volume simultaneously highlights the tension and degree of accommodation amongst ordinary people when faced with religious and social upheaval. Building on previous literature which has characterised the progress of the Reformation as 'slow' and 'piecemeal', this volume furthers our understanding of the process of negotiation at the most fundamental social and political levels - ...

Eberhard Happel, German Baroque author of an extensive body of work of fiction and nonfiction, has for many years been categorized as a “courtly-gallant” novelist. In Mediating Culture in the Seventeenth-Century German Novel, author Gerhild Scholz Williams argues that categorizing him thus is to seriously misread him and to miss out on a fascinating perspective on this dynamic period in German history.Happel primarily lived and worked in the vigorous port city of Hamburg, ...

Exploiting the turbulence and strife of sixteenth-century France, the House of Guise arose from a provincial power base to establish themselves as dominant political players in France and indeed Europe, marrying within royal and princely circles and occupying the most important ecclesiastical and military positions. Propelled by ambitions derived from their position as cadets of a minor sovereign house, they represent a cadre of early modern elites who are difficult to categorise neatly: n...

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Europeans raised a number of questions about the nature of reality and found their answers to be different from those that had satisfied their forebears. They discounted tales of witches, trolls, magic, and miraculous transformations and instead began looking elsewhere to explain the world around them. In The Limits of Matter, Hjalmar Fors investigates how conceptions of matter changed during the Enlightenment and pins this importan...