Books

Promoted Content

History

November 2015

Indispensable immigrants

The wine porters of northern Italy and their saint, 1200–1800

by Lester Little

Indispensable immigrants recreates the world of peasants who streamed into the cities of late medieval and early modern northern Italy to carry crushingly heavy containers of wine. Written in an easily accessible and unassuming style, it is solidly grounded in previously untapped archival and visual sources. In this first-ever reconstruction of the forgotten metier of wine porter, topography plays a key role in forming the labour market; in the scramble to distinguish professionals from manual labourers the term artist gets divorced from lowly artisan, and wretched diet is invoked to explain why workers are so unintelligent; the wine porters make one of their own their patron saint in thirteenth-century Cremona and other interest groups scheme successfully to get him canonised in Rome five centuries later; and when enlightened despots abolish the guilds, the wine porters' trade fades away just as the candles on their patron's altars sputter and die out.

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Promoted Content

History

November 2015

Indispensable immigrants

The wine porters of northern Italy and their saint, 1200–1800

by Lester Little

Indispensable immigrants recreates the world of peasants who streamed into the cities of late medieval and early modern northern Italy to carry crushingly heavy containers of wine. Written in an easily accessible and unassuming style, it is solidly grounded in previously untapped archival and visual sources. In this first-ever reconstruction of the forgotten metier of wine porter, topography plays a key role in forming the labour market; in the scramble to distinguish professionals from manual labourers the term artist gets divorced from lowly artisan, and wretched diet is invoked to explain why workers are so unintelligent; the wine porters make one of their own their patron saint in thirteenth-century Cremona and other interest groups scheme successfully to get him canonised in Rome five centuries later; and when enlightened despots abolish the guilds, the wine porters' trade fades away just as the candles on their patron's altars sputter and die out.

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Trusted Partner

History of religion

November 2015

Faith in the family

A lived religious history of English Catholicism, 1945–82

by Alana Harris

Drawing upon a multi-disciplinary methodology employing diverse written sources, material practices and vivid life histories, Faith in the family seeks to assess the impact of the Second Vatican Council on the ordinary believer, alongside contemporaneous shifts in British society relating to social mobility, the sixties, sexual morality and secularisation. Chapters examine the changes in the Roman Catholic liturgy and Christology; devotion to Mary, the rosary and the place of women in the family and church, as well as the enduring (but shifting) popularity of Saints Bernadette and Thérèse. Appealing to students of modern British gender and cultural history, as well as a general readership interested in religious life in Britain in the second half of the twentieth century, Faith in the family illustrates that despite unmistakable differences in their cultural accoutrements and interpretations of Catholicism, English Catholics continued to identify with and practise the 'Faith of Our Fathers' before and after Vatican II.

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Trusted Partner

History of religion

November 2015

Faith in the family

A lived religious history of English Catholicism, 1945–82

by Alana Harris

Drawing upon a multi-disciplinary methodology employing diverse written sources, material practices and vivid life histories, Faith in the family seeks to assess the impact of the Second Vatican Council on the ordinary believer, alongside contemporaneous shifts in British society relating to social mobility, the sixties, sexual morality and secularisation. Chapters examine the changes in the Roman Catholic liturgy and Christology; devotion to Mary, the rosary and the place of women in the family and church, as well as the enduring (but shifting) popularity of Saints Bernadette and Thérèse. Appealing to students of modern British gender and cultural history, as well as a general readership interested in religious life in Britain in the second half of the twentieth century, Faith in the family illustrates that despite unmistakable differences in their cultural accoutrements and interpretations of Catholicism, English Catholics continued to identify with and practise the 'Faith of Our Fathers' before and after Vatican II.

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History of religion

February 2013

Creating a Scottish church

Catholicism, gender and ethnicity in nineteenth-century Scotland

by S. Karly Kehoe

This book highlights how the Catholic population participated in the extension of citizenship in Scotland and considers Catholicism's transition from an underground and isolated church to a multi-faceted institution by taking a critical look at gender, ethnicity and class. It prioritises the role of women in the transformation and modernization of Catholic culture and represents a radical departure from the traditional perception of the church as an institution on the fringes of Scotland's religious and civic landscape. It examines how Catholicism participated in constructions of national identity and civic society. Industrialisation, urbanisation, and Irish migration forced Catholics and non-Catholics to reappraise Catholicism's position in Scotland and in turn Scotland's position in England. Using previously unseen archival material from private church and convent collections, it reveals how the construction of a Catholic social welfare system and associational culture helped to secure a civil society and national identity that was distinctively Scottish.

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History of religion

May 2013

Death, life, and religious change in Scottish towns c. 1350–1560

by Mairi Cowan

Death, life, and religious change in Scottish towns c. 1350-1560 examines lay religious culture in Scottish towns between the Black Death and the Protestant Reformation. It looks at what the living did to influence the dead and how the dead were believed to influence the living in turn; it explores the ways in which townspeople asserted their individual desires in the midst of overlapping communities; and it considers both continuities and changes, highlighting the Catholic Reform movement that reached Scottish towns before the Protestant Reformation took hold. Students and scholars of Scottish history and of medieval and early modern history more broadly will find in this book a new approach to the religious culture of Scottish towns between 1350 and 1560, one that interprets the evidence in the context of a time when Europe experienced first a flourishing of medieval religious devotion and then the sterner discipline of early modern Reform.

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History of religion

May 2013

Infidel feminism

Secularism, religion and women's emancipation, England 1830–1914

by Laura Schwartz

Infidel feminism is the first in-depth study of a distinctive brand of women's rights that emerged out of the Victorian Secularist movement. It looks at the lives and work of a number of female activists, whose renunciation of religion shaped their struggle for emancipation. Anti-religious or secular ideas were fundamental to the development of feminist thought, but have, until now, been almost entirely passed over in the historiography of the Victorian and Edwardian women's movement. In uncovering an important tradition of Freethinking feminism, this book reveals an ongoing radical and free love current connecting Owenite feminism with the more 'respectable' post-1850 women's movement and the 'New Women' of the early twentieth century. This book will be invaluable to both scholars and students of social and cultural history and feminist thought, and to interdisciplinary studies of religion and secularisation, as well as those interested in the history of women's movements more broadly.

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History of religion

July 2013

George Fox and Early Quaker Culture

by Hilary Hinds

What was distinctive about the founding principles and practices of Quakerism? In George Fox and Early Quaker Culture, Hilary Hinds explores how the Light Within became the organizing principle of this seventeenth-century movement, inaugurating an influential dissolution of the boundary between the human and the divine. Taking an original perspective on this most enduring of radical religious groups, Hinds combines literary and historical approaches to produce a fresh study of Quaker cultural practice. Close readings of Fox's Journal are put in dialogue with the voices of other early Friends and their critics to argue that the Light Within set the terms for the unique Quaker mode of embodying spirituality and inhabiting the world. In this important study of the cultural consequences of a bedrock belief, Hinds shows how the Quaker spiritual self was premised on a profound continuity between sinful subjects and godly omnipotence. This study will be of interest not only to scholars and students of seventeenth-century literature and history, but also to those concerned with the Quaker movement, spirituality and the changing meanings of religious practice in the early modern period.

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Trusted Partner

History of religion

July 2013

George Fox and Early Quaker Culture

by Hilary Hinds

What was distinctive about the founding principles and practices of Quakerism? In George Fox and Early Quaker Culture, Hilary Hinds explores how the Light Within became the organizing principle of this seventeenth-century movement, inaugurating an influential dissolution of the boundary between the human and the divine. Taking an original perspective on this most enduring of radical religious groups, Hinds combines literary and historical approaches to produce a fresh study of Quaker cultural practice. Close readings of Fox's Journal are put in dialogue with the voices of other early Friends and their critics to argue that the Light Within set the terms for the unique Quaker mode of embodying spirituality and inhabiting the world. In this important study of the cultural consequences of a bedrock belief, Hinds shows how the Quaker spiritual self was premised on a profound continuity between sinful subjects and godly omnipotence. This study will be of interest not only to scholars and students of seventeenth-century literature and history, but also to those concerned with the Quaker movement, spirituality and the changing meanings of religious practice in the early modern period.

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Trusted Partner

History of religion

July 2012

George Fox and Early Quaker Culture

by Hilary Hinds

What was distinctive about the founding principles and practices of Quakerism? In George Fox and Early Quaker Culture, Hilary Hinds explores how the Light Within became the organizing principle of this seventeenth-century movement, inaugurating an influential dissolution of the boundary between the human and the divine. Taking an original perspective on this most enduring of radical religious groups, Hinds combines literary and historical approaches to produce a fresh study of Quaker cultural practice. Close readings of Fox's Journal are put in dialogue with the voices of other early Friends and their critics to argue that the Light Within set the terms for the unique Quaker mode of embodying spirituality and inhabiting the world. In this important study of the cultural consequences of a bedrock belief, Hinds shows how the Quaker spiritual self was premised on a profound continuity between sinful subjects and godly omnipotence. This study will be of interest not only to scholars and students of seventeenth-century literature and history, but also to those concerned with the Quaker movement, spirituality and the changing meanings of religious practice in the early modern period.

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Trusted Partner

History of religion

July 2013

Black Bartholomew's Day

Preaching, polemic and Restoration nonconformity

by David J. Appleby

Black Bartholomew's Day explores the religious, political and cultural implications of a collision of highly-charged polemic prompted by the mass ejection of Puritan ministers from the Church of England in 1662. It is the first in-depth study of this heated exchange, centres centring on the departing ministers' farewell sermons. Many of these valedictions, delivered by hundreds of dissenting preachers in the weeks before Bartholomew's Day, would be illegally printed and widely distributed, provoking a furious response from government officials, magistrates and bishops. Black Bartholomew's Day re-interprets the political significance of ostensibly moderate Puritan clergy, arguing that their preaching posed a credible threat to the restored political order This book is aimed at readers interested in historicism, religion, nonconformity, print culture and the political potential of preaching in Restoration England.

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Trusted Partner

History of religion

May 2014

Faith in the family

A lived religious history of English Catholicism, 1945–82

by Alana Harris

Drawing upon a multi-disciplinary methodology employing diverse written sources, material practices and vivid life histories, Faith in the family seeks to assess the impact of the Second Vatican Council on the ordinary believer, alongside contemporaneous shifts in British society relating to social mobility, the sixties, sexual morality and secularisation. Chapters examine the changes in the Roman Catholic liturgy and Christology; devotion to Mary, the rosary and the place of women in the family and church, as well as the enduring (but shifting) popularity of Saints Bernadette and Thérèse. Appealing to students of modern British gender and cultural history, as well as a general readership interested in religious life in Britain in the second half of the twentieth century, Faith in the family illustrates that despite unmistakable differences in their cultural accoutrements and interpretations of Catholicism, English Catholics continued to identify with and practise the 'Faith of Our Fathers' before and after Vatican II.

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Trusted Partner

History of religion

July 2016

Making and remaking saints in nineteenth-century Britain

by Edited by Gareth Atkins

This book examines the place of 'saints' and sanctity in a self-consciously modern age, and argues that Protestants were as fascinated by such figures as Catholics were. Long after the mechanisms of canonisation had disappeared, people continued not only to engage with the saints of the past but continued to make their own saints in all but name. Just as strikingly, it claims that devotional practices and language were not the property of orthodox Christians alone. Making and remaking saints in the nineteenth-century Britain explores for the first time how sainthood remained significant in this period both as an enduring institution and as a metaphor that could be transposed into unexpected contexts. Each of the chapters in this volume focuses on the reception of a particular individual or group, and together they will appeal to not only historians of religion, but those concerned with material culture, the cult of history, and with the reshaping of British identities in an age of faith and doubt.

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Humanities & Social Sciences

August 2016

Faith in the family

A lived religious history of English Catholicism, 1945–82

by Alana Harris

Drawing upon a multi-disciplinary methodology employing diverse written sources, material practices and vivid life histories, Faith in the family seeks to assess the impact of the Second Vatican Council on the ordinary believer, alongside contemporaneous shifts in British society relating to social mobility, the sixties, sexual morality and secularisation. Chapters examine the changes in the Roman Catholic liturgy and Christology; devotion to Mary, the rosary and the place of women in the family and church, as well as the enduring (but shifting) popularity of Saints Bernadette and Thérèse. Appealing to students of modern British gender and cultural history, as well as a general readership interested in religious life in Britain in the second half of the twentieth century, Faith in the family illustrates that despite unmistakable differences in their cultural accoutrements and interpretations of Catholicism, English Catholics continued to identify with and practise the 'Faith of Our Fathers' before and after Vatican II. ;

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Trusted Partner

Humanities & Social Sciences

October 2015

Enlightening enthusiasm

Prophecy and religious experience in early eighteenth-century England

by Lionel Laborie

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Trusted Partner

Humanities & Social Sciences

October 2015

Enlightening enthusiasm

Prophecy and religious experience in early eighteenth-century England

by Lionel Laborie

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Trusted Partner

Humanities & Social Sciences

May 2016

Enlightening enthusiasm

Prophecy and religious experience in early eighteenth-century England

by Lionel Laborie

In the early modern period, the term 'enthusiasm' was a smear word used to discredit the dissenters of the radical Reformation as dangerous religious fanatics. In England, the term gained prominence from the Civil War period and throughout the eighteenth century. Anglican ministers and the proponents of the Enlightenment used it more widely against Paracelsian chemists, experimental philosophers, religious dissenters and divines, astrologers or anyone claiming superior knowledge. But who exactly were these enthusiasts? What did they believe in and what impact did they have on their contemporaries? This book concentrates on the notorious case of the French Prophets as the epitome of religious enthusiasm in early Enlightenment England. Based on new archival research, it retraces the formation, development and evolution of their movement and sheds new light on key contemporary issues such as millenarianism, censorship and the press, blasphemy, dissent and toleration, and madness. ;

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Humanities & Social Sciences

March 2017

English Benedictine nuns in exile in the seventeenth century

Living spirituality

by Laurence Lux-Sterritt, Anne Dunan-Page

This study of English Benedictine nuns is based upon a wide variety of original manuscripts, including chronicles, death notices, clerical instructions, texts of spiritual guidance, but also the nuns' own collections of notes. It highlights the tensions between the contemplative ideal and the nuns' personal experiences, illustrating the tensions between theory and practice in the ideal of being dead to the world. It shows how Benedictine convents were both cut-off and enclosed yet very much in touch with the religious and political developments at home, but also proposes a different approach to the history of nuns, with a study of emotions and the senses in the cloister, delving into the textual analysis of the nuns' personal and communal documents to explore aspect of a lived spirituality, when the body which so often hindered the spirit, at times enabled spiritual experience.

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Humanities & Social Sciences

June 2017

Hospitals and charity

Religious culture and civic life in medieval northern Italy

by Sally Mayall Brasher

This is the first book in English to provide a comprehensive examination of the hospital movement that arose and prospered in northern Italy between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries. Throughout this flourishing urbanised area hundreds of independent semi-religious facilities appeared, offering care for the ill, the poor and pilgrims en route to holy sites in Rome and the eastern Mediterranean. Over three centuries they became mechanisms for the appropriation of civic authority and political influence in the communities they served, and created innovative experiments in healthcare and poor relief which are the precursors to modern social welfare systems. Will appeal to students and lecturers in medieval, social, religious, and urban history and includes a detailed appendix that will assist researchers in the field.

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Trusted Partner

Humanities & Social Sciences

June 2017

Hospitals and charity

Religious culture and civic life in medieval northern Italy

by Sally Mayall Brasher

This is the first book in English to provide a comprehensive examination of the hospital movement that arose and prospered in northern Italy between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries. Throughout this flourishing urbanised area hundreds of independent semi-religious facilities appeared, offering care for the ill, the poor and pilgrims en route to holy sites in Rome and the eastern Mediterranean. Over three centuries they became mechanisms for the appropriation of civic authority and political influence in the communities they served, and created innovative experiments in healthcare and poor relief which are the precursors to modern social welfare systems. Will appeal to students and lecturers in medieval, social, religious, and urban history and includes a detailed appendix that will assist researchers in the field.

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The wine porters of northern Italy and their saint, 1200–1800

by Lester Little

The wine porters of northern Italy and their saint, 1200–1800

by Lester Little

A lived religious history of English Catholicism, 1945–82

by Alana Harris

A lived religious history of English Catholicism, 1945–82

by Alana Harris

Catholicism, gender and ethnicity in nineteenth-century Scotland

by S. Karly Kehoe

by Mairi Cowan

Secularism, religion and women's emancipation, England 1830–1914

by Laura Schwartz

by Hilary Hinds

by Hilary Hinds

by Hilary Hinds

Preaching, polemic and Restoration nonconformity

by David J. Appleby

A lived religious history of English Catholicism, 1945–82

by Alana Harris

by Edited by Gareth Atkins

A lived religious history of English Catholicism, 1945–82

by Alana Harris

Prophecy and religious experience in early eighteenth-century England

by Lionel Laborie

Prophecy and religious experience in early eighteenth-century England

by Lionel Laborie

Prophecy and religious experience in early eighteenth-century England

by Lionel Laborie

Living spirituality

by Laurence Lux-Sterritt, Anne Dunan-Page

Religious culture and civic life in medieval northern Italy

by Sally Mayall Brasher

Religious culture and civic life in medieval northern Italy

by Sally Mayall Brasher

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