The Story of the Barbary Corsair Raid on Iceland in 1627
In the summer of 1627, Barbary corsairs raided Iceland, killing dozens of people and abducting close to four hundred to sell into slavery in North Africa. Among those taken were the Lutheran minister Reverend Olafur Egilsson. Reverend Olafur (born in the same year as William Shakespeare and Galileo Galilei) wrote The Travels to chronicle his ......
This provocative examination of Aztec marriage practices offers a powerful analysis of the dynamics of society and politics in Mexico before and after the Spanish conquest. The author surveys what it means to be polygynous by comparing the practice in other cultures, past and present, and he uses its demographic consequences to flesh out this ......
This is the story of Elizabeth of Bohemia, James I's captivating but unfortunate daughter who was driven from the throne of Bohemia in 1620. Among the many men who championed her sorrowful fortunes, Lord Craven was the most faithful. Brave, wealthy and supremely generous, this latter-day knight-errant fought for her and supported her unstintingly.
For historians of the Wars of the Roses William Shakespeare is both a curse and a blessing: a curse because he immortalized Tudor spin on fifteenth-century civil wars that helped justify Elizabeth Is occupation of the English throne; a blessing because, without Shakespeares 8 -play Plantagenet history cycle, hardly anyone beyond specialists in the ......
Performing Religion and Race in the Puritan Atlantic
In the seventeenth-century English Atlantic, religious beliefs and practices played a central role in creating racial identity. English Protestantism provided a vocabulary and structure to describe and maintain boundaries between insider and outsider. In this path-breaking study, Heather Miyano Kopelson peels back the layers of conflicting ......
Native Wills from the Colonial Americas showcases new testamentary sources from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. It provides readers with translations and analyses of wills written in Spanish, Nahuatl, Yucatec Maya, K'iche' Maya, Mixtec, and Wampanoag. Divided into three thematic sections, the book provides insights and details that ......
This book is the first full-length study to examine Moliere's evolving (and at times contradictory) authorial strategies, as evidenced both by his portrayal of authors and publication within the plays and by his own interactions with the seventeenth-century Parisian publishing industry. Historians of the book have described the time period that ......
"Allen offers important insights that are likely to inform the debate on the Indian Ocean slave trade for years...The volume's annotated tables alone speak to several years of painstaking research on a variety of sources ...a significant contribution that should find a place in the library of any scholar of the slave trade." - African Studies ......