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This volume investigates the relationship between archives and information in the early modern world. It explores how the physical documentation that proliferated on an unprecedented scale between the 16th and 18th centuries was managed in the context of wider innovations in the sphere of communication and of significant upheaval and change. The chapters assess how archives were implicated in patterns of statecraft and scrutinise critical issues of secrecy and publicity, access and concealment. They analyse the interconnections between documentation and geographical distance, probing the part played by record-keeping in administration, governance, and justice, as well as its links with trade, commerce, education, evangelism, and piety. Alive to how the contents of archives were organised and filed, the contributors place paper technologies and physical repositories under the microscope. Extending beyond the framework of formal institutions to the family, household, and sect, this volume offers fresh insight into the possibilities and constraints of political participation and the nature of human agency. It deepens our understanding of the role of archives in the construction and preservation of knowledge and the exercise of power in its broadest sense. Above all, it calls for greater dialogue and creative collaboration to breach the lingering disciplinary divide between historians and archival scientists.

Complete Gentlemen is the first study to look beyond the Italian Grand Tour to the wider culture of educational travel that thrived among British and Irish landowners between 1650 and 1750. The ‘lure of Italy’ still distorts most scholarship, but this study uses a broader conception of educational travel and analyses it as part of family strategy. Different experiences emerged from the varying means, ambitions and obligations of families, who invested time, money and effort in the hope of social return. Historians usually pick up travellers as they arrive on the Continent and drop them as they recross the Channel, but this book also pays unprecedented attention to what families thought and did before, after and instead of time abroad, stages that are equally important to understanding its meanings. This new approach requires a deep source base over several generations, provided by the letters, journals and financial accounts of four clusters of families from England and Ireland. They allow the book to relate travel, too often a stand-alone topic, to broader questions in social and cultural history. It can therefore examine the role of time abroad in social mobility and elite formation, as well as its meanings for landed identity, masculinity and Englishness.

For generations of historians, 1789 was a defining moment in world history and it has been said to mark, amongst other things, the triumph of the bourgeoisie, the birth of modernity, the rise of nationalism, or even the invention of ideology. To explain an event of such magnitude, it was understandable that historians should seek no less portentous origins with factors such as the rise of capitalism, class struggle or the impact of the Enlightenment cited as the long-term causes of Revolution. In recent years, however, there has been a preoccupation with the actual course of the Revolution. The prevailing concern with political culture and gender as analytical tools has illuminated developments in Paris and in the French provinces, and has brought to prominence many themes inadequately explored during earlier scholarly generations. Rather less attention is given currently to how France was plunged into revolutionary turmoil, which is now taken largely as a ‘given’. This book by contrast focuses once again upon the origins of the dramatic events within and beyond France, which transformed later-eighteenth century Europe so comprehensively and established the terms of political and social struggle for the next two centuries. It presents a series of up-to-date essays which, collectively, provide a new interpretation of the origins of the Revolution.

Jodocus Badius Ascensius (1462-1535), also known as Josse Bade, was a scholar and printer who played a central role in the flourishing of humanism and print culture in the French Renaissance. In a career spanning four decades, he was involved with the print publication of something approaching one thousand editions. He was known for the ‘familiar’ commentaries he wrote and published as introductions to the major authors of Latin (and less frequently, Greek) antiquity, as well as on texts by medieval and contemporary authors. His commentaries and prefaces document the early stages of French humanism, and his texts played a major role in forming the minds of future generations. This book provides an account of Badius’s contributions to pedagogy, scholarship, printing and humanist culture. Its main focus is on Latin language commentaries on classical texts. It examines Badius’s multiple roles in the light of changing conceptions of textual culture during the Renaissance. It also explores the wider context of the communities with which Badius cultivated relationships: scholars and printers, figures from religious orders, the university and officialdom. It considers the readerships for which Badius produced texts in France, England, Scotland, the Low Countries, and beyond. It explores the ways in which humanists understood the circulation of knowledge in terms of economy and commerce, and their conceptualizations of commentary as a site of cultural mediation.

This is the first comprehensive interdisciplinary study of the cult of St Margaret of Antioch in medieval England. Margaret was one of the most famous female saints of both the Catholic world and of Eastern Christianity (as St Marina). Her legend is remembered by her confrontation with a dragon-shaped devil, who allegedly swallowed Margaret and then burst asunder. This episode became firmly established in iconography, making her one of the most frequently represented saints. Margaret was supposedly martyred in the late third century, but apart from the historically problematic legend there is no evidence concerning her in other contemporary sources. The sudden appearance of her name in liturgical manuscripts in the late eighth century is connected with the coeval dispersal of her relics. The cult grew in England from Anglo-Saxon times, with over 200 churches dedicated to Margaret (second only to Mary among female saints), with hundreds of her images and copies of her life known within the country. This monograph examines Greek, Latin, Old English, Middle English, and Anglo-Norman versions of Margaret’s life, their mouvance and cultural context, providing editions of the hitherto unpublished texts. In considering these versions, the iconographic evidence, their patronage, and audience, the monograph traces the changes in St Margaret’s story through the eight centuries before the Reformation. It also considers the further trajectory of the legend as reflected in popular fairy tales and contemporary cultural stereotypes. Special attention is given to the interpretation of St Margaret’s demonic encounter, central to the legend’s iconography and theology.

The protagonist of this study, the Jesuit Martin Delrio (1551–1608), is a largely forgotten figure, purposefully elided from many of the scholarly and religious spheres to which he contributed. To the extent that he is remembered today it is for his Disquisitiones magicae (1599–1600), a study of witchcraft and superstition that went through numerous editions and was last reprinted in 1755. The present volume recovers the lost world of Delrio’s wider scholarship and shows that the Disquisitiones, removed from this context, has been widely misunderstood. Martin Delrio, as a friend of the Flemish philosopher Justus Lipsius and an enemy of the Huguenot scholar Joseph Scaliger played an important part in the confessional Republic of Letters. As the editor of classical texts, notably Senecan tragedy, he had a number of philological achievements to his name. Delrio’s scholarship after his admission to the Society of Jesus (the Disquisitiones included) marked an important contribution to wider Counter-Reformation scholarship. Catholic contemporaries accordingly rated him highly, as evidenced by a published Vita, but later generations proved less kind. In an important chapter, the book demonstrates that demonology, in Delrio’s hands, was a textual science, an insight that sheds new light on the way witchcraft was believed in. At the same time, the book also develops a wider argument about the significance of Delrio’s scholarship, arguing that the Counter-Reformation must be seen as a textual project and Delrio’s contribution to it as the product of a mindset forged in its fragile borderlands.