Folger guides provide lively, authoritative surveys of important aspects of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English cultural history. Attractively illustrated with material from contemporary documents, the Guides are designed for the general reader and are particularly valuable as enrichment resources for courses in Renaissance history and literature.
The English/British have always been known as the sailor race with hearts of oak: the Royal Navy as the Senior Service and First Line of Defense. It facilitated the motto: The sun never set on the British Empire. The Royal Navy has exerted a powerful influence on Great Britain, its Empire, Europe, and, ultimately, the world. This superior annotated bibliography supplies entries that explore the influence of the English/British Navy through its history. This survey will provide a major reference guide for students and scholars at all levels. It incorporates evaluative, qualitative, and critical analysis processes, the essence of historical scholarship. Each one of the 4,124 annotated entries is evaluated, assessed, analyzed, integrated, and incorporated into the historiographical scholarship.
Whether humans crossed the seas between the Old World and the New in the times before Columbus is a tantalizing question that has long excited scholarly interest and tempted imaginations the world over. From the myths of Atlantis and Mu to the more credible, perhaps, but hardly less romantic tales of Viking ships and Buddhist missionaries, people have speculated upon what is, after all, not simply a question of contact, but of the nature and growth of civilization itself. To the specialist, it is an important question indeed. If people in the Western Hemisphere and in the Eastern Hemisphere developed their cultures more or less independently from the end of the last Ice Age until the voyages of Columbus, the remarkable similarities between New World and Old World cultures reveal something important about the evolution of culture. If, on the other hand, there were widespread or sustained contacts between the hemispheres in pre-Columbian times, these contacts represent events of vast significance to the prehistory and history of humanity. Originally delivered at a symposium held in May 1968, during the national meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, the papers presented here, by scholars eminent in the field, offer differing points of view and considerable evidence on the pros and cons of pre-Columbian contact between the Old World and the New. Various kinds of data—archaeological, botanical, geographical, and historical—are brought to bear on the problem, with provocative and original results. Introductory and concluding remarks by the editors pull together and evaluate the evidence and suggest ground rules for future studies of this sort. Man across the Sea provides no final answers as to whether people from Asia, Africa, or Europe visited the American Indian before Columbus. It does, however, present new evidence, suggested lines of approach, and a fresh attempt to delineate the problems involved and to establish acceptable canons of evidence for the future.
The Tudor Navy is a subject which is very unevenly known. The last significant general histories were written at the end of the last century. Since then much detailed research has been undertaken, particularly on the Armada, the end of Henry VIII's reign and the early Elizabethan period. As a result, it has been generally thought that the navy went through a series of booms and slumps during the sixteenth century. Further research on the intervening periods now presents a much more even picture of development, although the pace of advance was uneven. At the same time naval history has tended to be seen in isolation, presented by special naval experts. It is better understood as a part of the general administrative, political and above all financial history of the period. This book is designed to present a whole story, set in its proper contemporary context.
Writing the Nation in Reformation England offers a major re-evaluation of English writing between 1530 and 1580. Studying authors such as Andrew Borde, John Leland, William Thomas, Thomas Smith, and Thomas Wilson, Cathy Shrank highlights the significance of these decades to the formation of English nationhood and examines the impact of the break with Rome on the development of a national language, literary style, and canon. As well as demonstrating the close relationship between literary culture and English identities, it reinvests Tudor writers with a sense of agency. As authors, counsellors, and thinkers they were active citizens participating within, and helping to shape, a national community. In the process, their works were also used to project an image of themselves as authors, playing - and fitted to play - their part in the public domain. In showing how these writers engaged with, and promoted, concepts of national identity, the book makes a significant contribution to our broader understanding of the early modern period, demonstrating that nationhood was not a later Elizabethan phenomenon, and that the Reformation had an immediate impact on English culture, before England emerged as a 'Protestant' nation.
This bibliography provides easy access to the most important Shakespeare studies in the past four decades. Brief annotations, a detailed table of contents, cross-references, and a complete index make this bibliography especially useful.
This remarkable work is a comprehensive historiographical and bibliographical survey of the most important scholarly and printed materials about the naval and maritime history of England and Great Britain from the earliest times to 1815. More than 4,000 popular, standard and official histories, important articles in journals and periodicals, anthologies, conference, symposium and seminar papers, guides, documents and doctoral theses are covered so that the emphasis is the broadest possible. But the work is far, far more than a listing. The works are all evaluated, assessed and analysed and then integrated into an historical narrative that makes the book a hugely useful reference work for student, scholar, and enthusiast alike. It is divided into twenty-one chapters which cover resource centres, significant naval writers, pre-eminent and general histories, the chronological periods from Julius Caesar through the Vikings, Tudors and Stuarts to Nelson and Bligh, major naval personalities, warships, piracy, strategy and tactics, exploration, discovery and navigation, archaeology and even naval fiction. Quite simply, no-one with an interest and enthusiasm for naval history can afford to be without this book at their side.
John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, is arguably the most intriguing, controversial and possibly misunderstood figure of the Wars of the Roses period. Politically adept, he occupied a string of important offices, first under the Lancastrian Henry VI and then the Yorkist Edward IV.A man of action, he held commands on both and sea, in England, Ireland and Wales.As Constable of England he acted as Edwards enforcer and earned the sobriquet Butcher of England for his beheadings and impalements. Yet he was also an outstanding Renaissance scholar who studied at Oxford, Padua and Ferrara, a collector of books and patron. This, in conjunction with his political actions, makes him a proto-Machiavellian Prince.Peter Spring also looks beyond the Earls public life to glean insights into the man himself, concluding that the available information generally reveals an attractive personality. He presents a balanced reappraisal, seeing him, as did many contemporary Europeans and some fellow countrymen, as a man of great intellect and capability who did not shirk the hard tasks imposed by a merciless age.Worcesters execution for the application of Roman law, lampooned as the laws of Padua, demonstrated the danger of indentification with continental influences in an England increasingly defining itselfthrough common law, Parliament, and soon religionagainst Europe. The contemporary denigration of his character by little Englander chroniclers reflected a deepening antipathy towards the cosmopolitan a recurring trait in the English character perhaps re-emerging with Brexit.
