During the early modern period, thousands of Jesuits across Europe wrote individual applications for appointments in the “Indies” directly to the superior general of the Society of Jesus in Rome. Known today as litterae indipetae (from Indias petere, that is, applying for the missions in the Eastern and Western territories), these letters encompassed the most personal desires, hopes, and dr…
This volume sets out to explore the world of domestic devotions and is premised on the assumption that the home was a central space of religious practice and experience throughout the early modern world. The contributions to this book, which deal with themes dating from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, tell of the intimate relationship between humans and the sacred within the walls of t…
Domestic Devotions in Early Modern Italy illuminates the vibrancy of spiritual beliefs and practices which profoundly shaped family life in this era. Scholarship on Catholicism has tended to focus on institutions, but the home was the site of religious instruction and reading, prayer and meditation, communal worship, multi-sensory devotions, contemplation of religious images and the performance…
This open access book offers a new approach to understandings of welfare in modern Britain. Foregrounding the agency individuals and groups claimed through experiential expertise, it traces deep connections between personal experience, welfare, and activism across diverse settings in modern Britain. The experiential experts studied in this collection include women, students, children, women who…
This volume explores the various strategies by which appropriate pasts were construed in scholarship, literature, art, and architecture in order to create “national”, regional, or local identities in late medieval and early modern Europe. Because authority was based on lineage, political and territorial claims were underpinned by historical arguments, either true or otherwise. Literature, s…
This volume explores the production of knowledge of normativity in the age of early modern globalisation by looking at an extraordinarily pragmatic and normative book: Manual de Confessores, by the Spanish canon law professor Martín de Azpilcueta (1492-1586). Intertwining expertise, methods, and questions of legal history and book history, this book follows the actors and analyses the factors …
The Archive of the Sacromonte Abbey in Granada preserves a historical treasure: Arabic texts on a sheet of parchment and on numerous small tablets of lead, which were discovered in Granada at the end of the sixteenth century in the tower of the old Friday Mosque and in caves of the "Valparaíso" hillock, from then on called "Sacromonte". They became the object of heated discussions in Europe an…
The Law of Nations and Natural Law 1625-1800 offers innovative studies on the development of the law of nations after the Peace of Westphalia. This period was decisive for the origin and constitution of the discipline which eventually emancipated itself from natural law and became modern international law. A specialist on the law of nations in the Swiss context and on its major figure, Emer …
The book Becoming Human: Li Zehou’s Ethics offers a critical introduction and in-depth analysis of Li Zehou’s moral philosophy and ethics. Li Zehou, who is one of the most influential contemporary Chinese philosophers, believes that ethics is the most important philosophical discipline. He aims to revive, modernize, develop, and complement Chinese traditional ethics through what he calls …
This book provides the first comprehensive historical account of the evolution of scientific traditions in astronomy, astrophysics, and the space sciences within the Max Planck Society. Structured with in-depth archival research, interviews with protagonists, unpublished photographs, and an extensive bibliography, it follows a unique history: from the post-war relaunch of physical sciences in W…