This book accompanies the opening of the V&A's newly redesigned Europe gallery, which features spectacular decorative arts from the 17th and 18th centuries made for the period's most important tastemakers, among them Louis XIV, Marie Antoinette, and Catherine the Great. Outstanding art and domestic objects are discussed within their original contexts to highlight the rhythms and rituals of life during this period. Lavishly illustrated, the book includes essays explaining the grandeur of court interiors as well as more humble period rooms and intimate interiors.

An innovative collection that interrogates the global paradigm of our period and offers a new history of globalization by exploring its influences on English culture and literature of the early modern period. Moves beyond traditional notions of Renaissance history mainly as a revival of antiquity and presents a new perspective on England′s mercantile and cross-cultural interactions with the New and Old Worlds of the Americas, Africa, and the East, as well with Northern Europe. Illustrates how twentieth-century globalization was the result of a lengthy and complex historical process linked to the emergence of capitalism and colonialism. Explores vital topics such as East-West relations and Islam; visual representations of cultural ′others′; gender and race struggles within the new economies and cultures; global drama on the cosmopolitan English stage, and many more.

This collection brings together provocative essays examining various facets of Elizabethan foreign affairs, encompassing England and The British Isles, continental Europe, and the Islamic world. As an entirely domestic queen who never physically left her realm, Elizabeth I cast an inordinately large shadow internationally. The essays in this volume collectively reveal a ruler and her kingdom more connected and integrated into the wider world than is usually acknowledged in conventional studies of Elizabethan foreign affairs.

"This collection investigates the relations between literature and the economy in the context of the unprecedented expansion of early modern England's long distance trade. Studying a range of genres and writers, both familiar and lesser known, the essays offer a new history of globalization as a complex of unevenly developing cultural, discursive, and economic phenomena. While focusing on how long distance trade contributed to England's economic growth and cultural transformation, the collection taps into scholarly interest in race, gender, travel and exploration, domesticity, mapping, the state and emergent nationalism, and proto-colonialism in the early modern period."--BOOK JACKET.

With Impressions from China, Romano delivers a study of how European science confronted Chinese knowledge at a time when a "new world order" was needed. The author follows encounters between these two worlds, decrypting learned writings attentively.

As early modern Europe launched its multiple projects of global empire, it simultaneously embarked on an ambitious program of describing and picturing the world. Inventing Exoticism draws on a vast range of sources from history, literature, science, and art to describe the energetic and sustained international engagements that gave birth to our modern conceptions of exoticism and globalism. Inventing Exoticism interrogates traditional postcolonial theories of knowledge and power. It proposes a wholly revisionist understanding of geography in a pivotal age of expansion and offers a crucial historical perspective on our own global culture as it engages in a media-saturated world.

In this study, Christopher Warren argues that early modern literary genres were deeply tied to debates about global legal order and that today's international law owes many of its most basic suppositions to early modern literary culture. The book shows how the separation of scholarship on law from scholarship on literature has limited the understanding of international law on both sides. Warren recognizes the specific nature of early modern international law by showing how major writers of the English Renaissance - including Shakespeare, Milton, and Hobbes - deployed genres like epic, tragedy, comedy, tragicomedy, and history to shore up the canonical subjects and objects of modern international law.

"This book brings together a range of essays from leading scholars and writers, providing a fascinating and original approach to the Renaissance which challenges settled certainties, such as the difference between East and West, the invariable conflict between Islam and Christianity, the 'rebirth' of European civilization from roots in classical Greece and Imperial Rome, and points the way for a comprehensive re-orientation of our thinking about the Renaissance."--BOOK JACKET.

This is an edition of Some Years Travels into Africa and Asia the Great, especially describing the famous Empires of Persia and Hindustan, as also divers other Kingdoms in the oriental Indies, 1627-30. Herbert (1608-1682) at the age of 21 travelled to India and Persia as a member of Sir Dodmore Cotton’s diplomatic mission to Shah Abbas I, and his book, which proved very popular, ran into several editions over a forty-year period. Herbert made many additions to the original text of his travels so that the enthusiastic young traveller can still be discerned, along with the opinions of a gentleman-scholar and antiquarian .

Travel Knowledge examines European travel writing from 1500-1800, with an emphasis on travel to the East Indies, Africa, and the Levant. The importance of travel literature has grown in the humanities as scholars plumb such texts for their insights on colonialism, the other, and the nation, but this is one of the first volumes on European travel in the early modern period. This collection includes both critical essays and the primary texts to which they refer, a unique pairing.

During the early modern period, hundreds of Turks and Moors traded in English and Welsh ports, dazzled English society with exotic cuisine and Arabian horses, and worked small jobs in London, while the "Barbary Corsairs" raided coastal towns and, if captured, lingered in Plymouth jails or stood trial in Southampton courtrooms. In turn, Britons fought in Muslim armies, traded and settled in Moroccan or Tunisian harbor towns, joined the international community of pirates in Mediterranean and Atlantic outposts, served in Algerian households and ships, and endured captivity from Salee to Alexandria and from Fez to Mocha. In Turks, Moors, and Englishmen, Nabil Matar vividly presents new data about Anglo-Islamic social and historical interactions. Matar's detailed research provides a new direction in the study of England's geographic imagination. It also illuminates the subtleties and interchangeability of stereotype, racism, and demonization that must be taken into account in any responsible depiction of English history.

Merchants and Explorers follows Barlow, a merchant, and Cabot, a navigator, across the Atlantic to South America and back to Spain and Reformation England. Although it is generally accepted that the English were not significantly attracted to the Americas until the second half of the sixteenth century, Dalton demonstrates that Barlow, Cabot, and their cohorts had a knowledge of the world and its opportunities that was extraordinary for this period. She reveals how shared knowledge as well as the accumulation of capital in international trading networks prior to 1560 influenced emerging ideas of trade, "discovery", settlement, and race in Britain.

The personal rule of Louis XIV, following on from a long period of royal minority and apprenticeship, lasted 54 years from 1661 to 1715. But the second half of this personal rule has, until recently, received significantly less scholarly attention than the 1660s and 1670s. This has obscured some of the very real changes and developments that occurred between the early 1680s and the mid-1690s, by which time a new generation of younger royals had come to prominence, France was engulfed in international war on a greater scale than ever before, and the king was visibly no longer as vigorous or healthy as he had once been. The essays in this volume take a close look at the way a new set of political, social, cultural and economic dispensations emerged from the mid-1680s to create a different France in the final decades of Louis XIV's reign, even though the basic ideological, social and economic underpinnings of the country remained very largely the same. The contributions examine such varied matters as the structure and practices of government, naval power, the financial operations of the state, trade and commerce, social pressures, overseas expansion, religious dissent, music, literature and the fine arts.