Voltaire's correspondence has been described as his 'greatest masterpiece' – but if it is, it is also his least studied. One of the most prodigious correspondences in Western literature, it poses significant interpretative challenges to the critic and reader alike. Considered individually, the letters present a series of complex, subtle, and playful literary performances; taken together, they constitute a formidable, and even forbidding, ensemble. How can modern readers even attempt to understand such an imposing work? This Element addresses this question through the use of digital reading methods and resources that enhance our understanding of this complex literary object and its relationship to Voltaire's more canonical literary output, and indeed to the Enlightenment world at large. Nicholas Cronk and Glenn Roe provide scholars and students with new pathways into this particular corpus, using tools and approaches that can then be applied to correspondences and life-writing texts in all languages and periods.

We live in a networked world. Online social networking platforms and the World Wide Web have changed how society thinks about connectivity. Because of the technological nature of such networks, their study has predominantly taken place within the domains of computer science and related scientific fields. But arts and humanities scholars are increasingly using the same kinds of visual and quantitative analysis to shed light on aspects of culture and society hitherto concealed. This Element contends that networks are a category of study that cuts across traditional academic barriers, uniting diverse disciplines through a shared understanding of complexity in our world. Moreover, we are at a moment in time when it is crucial that arts and humanities scholars join the critique of how large-scale network data and advanced network analysis are being harnessed for the purposes of power, surveillance, and commercial gain. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

An innovative account of English constitutional ideas from the mid-fifteenth century to the time of Charles I, showing how the emergence of grand claims for common law, the country's strange unwritten legal system, shaped England's cultural development. Though he does not neglect the role of narrowly religious disagreements, Cromartie brings out the way that 'religious' and 'secular' values came to be closely intertwined: to the majority of Charles's subjects, the rights of the clergy and the king were legal rights; the institutional structure of Church and state was an expression of monarchical power, obedience to the king and to the law was a religious duty. A proper understanding of this cluster of ideas reveals why Charles found England so difficult to control and why both parties in the civil war believed that they were fighting for established institutions.

This is the final volume in a four-part series covering the development of the university in Europe (east and west) from its origins to the present day, focusing on a number of major themes viewed from a European perspective. The originality of the series lies in its comparative, interdisciplinary, collaborative and transnational nature. It deals also with the content of what was taught at the universities, but its main purpose is an appreciation of the role and structures of the universities as seen against a backdrop of changing conditions, ideas and values. This volume deals with the reconstruction and epoch-making expansion of higher education after 1945, which led to the triumph of modern science. It traces the development of the relationship between universities and national states, teachers and students, their ambitions and political activities. Special attention is paid to fundamental changes in the content of teaching at the universities.

Art, Science, and Witchcraft in Early Modern Holland is the first sustained study to offer an account of the rise of scientific naturalism in Dutch art and the simultaneous interest in fantastic imagery, representations of witches in particular. Claudia Swan uses the work of artist Jacques de Gheyn II (1565-1629) to explore the reciprocity between visual representation and early modern descriptive science, and of the parallel demonological theories of the human imagination and artistic theories of creation. This book is the first to examine De Gheyn's work in the context of cultural history and image theory.

From the French Revolution onwards, constituent power has been a key concept for thinking about the principle of popular power, and how it should be realised through the state and its institutions. Tracing the history of constituent power across five key moments - the French Revolution, nineteenth-century French politics, the Weimar Republic, post-WWII constitutionalism, and political philosophy in the 1960s - Lucia Rubinelli reconstructs and examines the history of the principle. She argues that, at any given time, constituent power offered an alternative understanding of the power of the people to those offered by ideas of sovereignty. Constituent Power: A History also examines how, in turn, these competing understandings of popular power resulted in different institutional structures and reflects on why contemporary political thought is so prone to conflating constituent power with sovereignty.

Historical GIS is an emerging field that uses Geographical Information Systems (GIS) to research the geographies of the past. Ian Gregory and Paul Ell present the first study comprehensively to define this emerging field, exploring all aspects of using GIS in historical research. A GIS is a form of database in which every item of data is linked to a spatial location. This technology offers unparalleled opportunities to add insight and rejuvenate historical research through the ability to identify and use the geographical characteristics of data. Historical GIS introduces the basic concepts and tools underpinning GIS technology, describing and critically assessing the visualisation, analytical and e-science methodologies that it enables and examining key scholarship where GIS has been used to enhance research debates. The result is a clear agenda charting how GIS will develop as one of the most important approaches to scholarship in historical geography.

This innovative cultural history of financial risk-taking in Renaissance Italy argues that a new concept of the future as unknown and unknowable emerged in Italian society between the mid-fifteenth and mid-sixteenth centuries. Exploring the rich interchanges between mercantile and intellectual cultures underpinning this development in four major cities - Florence, Genoa, Venice, and Milan - Nicholas Scott Baker examines how merchants and gamblers, the futurologists of the pre-modern world, understood and experienced their own risk taking and that of others. Drawing on extensive archival research, this study demonstrates that while the Renaissance did not create the modern sense of time, it constructed the foundations on which it could develop. The new conceptions of the past and the future that developed in the Renaissance provided the pattern for the later construction a single narrative beginning in classical antiquity stretching to the now. This book thus makes an important contribution toward laying bare the historical contingency of a sense of time that continues to structure our world in profound ways.

Based on a close examination of more than 700 homicide trials, A Renaissance of Violence exposes the deep social instability at the core of the early modern states of North Italy. Following a series of crises in the early seventeenth century, interpersonal violence in the region grew to frightening levels, despite the efforts of courts and governments to reduce social conflict. In this detailed study of violence in early modern Europe, Colin Rose shows how major crises, such as the plague of 1630, reduced the strength of social bonds among both elite and ordinary Italians. As a result, incidents of homicidal violence exploded - in small rural communities, in the crowded urban center and within tightly-knit families. Combining statistical analysis and close reading of homicide patterns, Rose demonstrates how the social contexts of violence, as much as the growth of state power, can contribute to explaining how and why interpersonal violence grew so rapidly in North Italy in the seventeenth century.

It has long been thought that the ancient Greeks did not take mechanics seriously as part of the workings of nature, and that therefore their natural philosophy was both primitive and marginal. In this 2009 book Sylvia Berryman challenges that assumption, arguing that the idea that the world works 'like a machine' can be found in ancient Greek thought, predating the early modern philosophy with which it is most closely associated. Her discussion ranges over topics including balancing and equilibrium, lifting water, sphere-making and models of the heavens, and ancient Greek pneumatic theory, with detailed analysis of thinkers such as Aristotle, Archimedes, and Hero of Alexandria. Her book shows scholars of ancient Greek philosophy why it is necessary to pay attention to mechanics, and shows historians of science why the differences between ancient and modern reactions to mechanics are not as great as was generally thought.

The scholarship and teaching of manuscript studies has been transformed by digitisation, rendering previously rarefied documents accessible for study on a vast scale. The Cambridge Companion to Medieval British Manuscripts orientates students in the complex, multidisciplinary study of medieval book production and contemporary display of manuscripts from c.600–1500. Accessible explanations draw on key case studies to illustrate the major methodologies and explain why skills in understanding early book production are so critical for reading, editing, and accessing a rich cultural heritage. Chapters by leading specialists in manuscript studies range from explaining how manuscripts were stored, to revealing the complex networks of readers and writers which can be understood through manuscripts, to an in depth discussion on the Wycliffite Bible.

Between 1525 and 1640, a remarkable phenomenon occurred in the world of print: England saw the production of more than two dozen editions identified by their imprints or by contemporaries as 'herbals'. Sarah Neville explains how this genre grew from a series of tiny anonymous octavos to authoritative folio tomes with thousands of woodcuts, and how these curious works quickly became valuable commodities within a competitive print marketplace. Designed to serve readers across the social spectrum, these rich material artifacts represented both a profitable investment for publishers and an opportunity for authors to establish their credibility as botanists. Highlighting the shifting contingencies and regulations surrounding herbals and English printing during the sixteenth and early seventeenth century, the book argues that the construction of scientific authority in Renaissance England was inextricably tied up with the circumstances governing print. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core at doi.org/10.1017/9781009031615.
Reviews
‘Sarah Neville's fascinating account of how stationers contributed to the creation of botanical texts brings English herbals and the early modern book trade together for the first time. Her reframing of their history irrevocably alters our sense of their importance for the publishers who commissioned them, the printers who manufactured them, and the booksellers who retailed herbals as well as for the Renaissance physicians, lay medical practitioners, and elite and common readers who so frequently consulted them. Early modern ecocritics will want to read this book along with book historians, historians of science, and those interested in Renaissance literature and culture.'
Valerie Wayne - University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa

The stories in the Thousand and One Nights, or the Arabian Nights, are familiar to many of us: from the tales of Aladdin, Sinbad the Sailor, Ali Baba and his forty thieves, to the framing story of Scheherazade telling these stories to her homicidal husband, Shahrayar. This book offers a rich and wide-ranging analysis of the power of this collection of tales that penetrates so many cultures and appeals to such a variety of predilections and tastes. It also explores areas that were left untouched, like the decolonization of the Arabian Nights, and its archaeologies. Unique in its excavation into inroads of perception and reception, Muhsin J. al-Musawi's book unearths means of connection with common publics and learned societies. Al-Musawi shows, as never before, how the Arabian Nights has been translated, appropriated, and authenticated or abused over time, and how its reach is so expansive as to draw the attention of poets, painters, illustrators, translators, editors, musicians, political scientists like Leo Strauss, and novelists like Michel Butor, James Joyce and Marcel Proust amongst others. Making use of documentaries, films, paintings, novels and novellas, poetry, digital forums and political jargon, this book offers nuanced understanding of the perennial charm and power of this collection.
Reviews
‘This is a work of incredible erudition. Al-Musawi tells the story of the Nights, orientalism, world literature, and structuralism simultaneously, revealing a network of readings, influences, and critical practices that allow us to see literature in a new light.’
Tarek El-Ariss - Dartmouth College
‘A scholarly study of magisterial magnitude in both theoretical and textual terms. Briefly stated, few can compose so wizardly and converse so enchantingly, indeed so Shahrazadingly, about Alf Layla wa-Layla as a cherished world literary treasure and a prized global cultural commodity as al-Musawi. One is impressed but never surprised.’
Nizar F. Hermes - The University of Virginia
‘Al-Musawi brings a lifetime of Arabian Nights’ scholarship to bear on his expansive new study of its generative role in the Western and Global literary and cultural imagination from the 18th century to the present. Ranging from Romanticism through Modernism to Post-Modernism, al-Musawi compellingly demonstrates how this protean Arabic story collection has shaped the novel, music, fine arts, and film.’
Suzanne Stetkevych - Georgetown University

Thomas Hobbes and John Locke sit together in the canon of political thought but are rarely treated in common historical accounts. This book narrates their intertwined careers during the Restoration period, when the two men found themselves in close proximity and entangled in many of the same political conflicts. Bringing new source material to bear, In the Shadow of Leviathan establishes the influence of Hobbesian thought over Locke, particularly in relation to the preeminent question of religious toleration. Excavating Hobbes's now forgotten case for a prudent, politique toleration gifted by sovereign power, Jeffrey R. Collins argues that modern, liberal thinking about toleration was transformed by Locke's gradual emancipation from this Hobbesian mode of thought. This book investigates those landmark events - the civil war, Restoration, the popish plot, the Revolution of 1688 - which eventually forced Locke to confront the limits of politique toleration, and to devise an account of religious freedom as an inalienable right.
‘This is a major scholarly contribution, and among many important contributions of this extremely valuable new book by one of the most important interpreters of Hobbes, and now also of Locke.’
John Marshall Source: Hobbes Studies
‘In the Shadow of Leviathan is a worthy sequel to Jeffrey Collins’s outstanding 2005 book, The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes … Among the many virtues of Collins’s book, the most impressive is his meticulous examination of the historical context in which the shift in Locke’s thinking occurred. In a time in which many academic books are written too hastily, it is satisfying to read a work that is clearly the product of many years of painstaking research. Political theorists, in particular, will find that they have much to learn - as this one did - from Collins’s thorough examination of the debates and political dynamics of the Interregnum and especially the Restoration.’
Devin Stauffer Source: The Review of Politics
‘A definitive and transformative study.’
E. J. Eisenach Source: Choice

This is a wide-ranging exploration of the similarities and differences between ancient Greek and ancient Chinese science and philosophy, concentrating on the period down to AD 300. Professor Lloyd studies such questions as the attitudes towards authority, the practice of confrontational debate, the role of methodological inquiries, the development of techniques of persuasion, the assumptions made about causal explanation and the focus of interest in the study of the heavens and in that of the human body. In each case the Greek and Chinese ways of posing the problems are carefully distinguished to avoid applying either Greek categories to Chinese thought or vice versa. Professor Lloyd shows that the science produced in each ancient civilisation differs in important respects and relates those differences to the values and social institutions in question.

In early modern England, boxes furnished minds as readily as they furnished rooms, shaping ideas about the challenges of interpretation, and negotiations of the book itself as text and material object. Engaging with recent work on material culture and the history of the book, Lucy Razzall weaves together close readings of texts and objects, from wills, plays, sermons and religious polemic, to chests, book-bindings, reliquaries and coffins. She demonstrates how the material and imaginative possibilities of the box were dynamically connected in post-Reformation England, structuring modes of thought. These early modern responses to materiality offer ways in which the discipline of book history might reframe its analysis of the material text. In tracing the early modern significance of the box as matter and metaphor, this book reveals the origins of some of the enduring habits of thought with which we still respond to people, texts and things.

From the recovery of ancient ritual magic at the height of the Renaissance to the ignominious demise of alchemy at the dawn of the Enlightenment, Mark A. Waddell explores the rich and complex ways that premodern people made sense of their world. He describes a time when witches flew through the dark of night to feast on the flesh of unbaptized infants, magicians conversed with angels or struck pacts with demons, and astrologers cast the horoscopes of royalty. Ground-breaking discoveries changed the way that people understood the universe while, in laboratories and coffee houses, philosophers discussed how to reconcile the scientific method with the veneration of God. This engaging, illustrated new study introduces readers to the vibrant history behind the emergence of the modern world.
‘An enchanting, yet eminently accessible, tour of the magical and mysterious in European thought from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. The real wizardry is how Waddell masterfully explains the uniqueness of early modern views of magic, religion and nature, while emphasizing the profound links between this past and our present.'
Matthew James Crawford - Kent State University
‘Waddell provides a superb review of the intersections among belief systems and underlines the great extent to which they determined early modern lived experience. Magic, Science, and Religion in Early Modern Europe is deftly written and invites the reader to imagine as well as learn, to engage curiosity and passion as well as intellect. It is a triumph in the genre.'
Allison Kavey - CUNY John Jay College and CUNY Graduate Center
‘Waddell’s book is a brilliant work of synthesis and, in effect, he performs his own kind of alchemy, transforming heavyweight theories in the history and philosophy of science into crystal clear, accessible prose, creating a rich summary of his topic in just over 200 pages. Magic, Science, and Religion in Early Modern Europe will be a staple on student reading lists for years to come.’
Ross MacFarlane Source: Fortean Times

Book description
In this discipline-redefining book, Elizabeth T. Hurren maps the post-mortem journeys of bodies, body-parts, organs, and brains, inside the secretive culture of modern British medical research after WWII as the bodies of the deceased were harvested as bio-commons. Often the human stories behind these bodies were dissected, discarded, or destroyed in death. Hidden Histories of the Dead recovers human faces and supply-lines in the archives that medical science neglected to acknowledge. It investigates the medical ethics of organ donation, the legal ambiguities of a lack of fully-informed consent and the shifting boundaries of life and re-defining of medical death in a biotechnological era. Hurren reveals the implicit, explicit and missed body disputes that took second-place to the economics of the national and international commodification of human material in global medical sciences of the Genome era. This title is also available as Open Access.
Reviews
‘This is an exceptional book. Incredibly well researched, exhaustive and compelling, Hurren engages powerfully with the shifting ethics of anatomical ‘ownership’, identity and use and brings to the fore the complex history and status of the corpse. As Hurren demonstrates, these issues are as pressing now as they were in the last three hundred years or so.’
Julie-Marie Strange - Professor in Modern British History, Durham University