"At its peak in the late sixteenth century," this history begins, "Spain controlled the first empire upon which the sun never set and exercised a tremendous influence in European affairs. By 1600, thoughtful Spaniards knew that something had gone terribly wrong, and by 1650 the rest of Europe knew it too."

By focusing on one Castilian city, Ciudad Real, Carla Rahn Phillips seeks to shed light on the mysterious downfall of Spanish power. Looking first at the general history of the city and region, she goes on to examine population, agriculture, industry, taxation, and elite patterns of investment. She shows how Ciudad Real's economy grew from about 1500 to 1580, faltered and stagnated through most of the seventeenth century, and reestablished a subsistence economy around 1750. Self-contained though Ciudad Real was, its history illuminates economic and social change during Spain's Golden Age.

A major reinterpretation of the development of European literary theory, this wide-ranging study offers a new approach to ways of thinking about man's work in general. The book is a history of the idea of convention, the roles it played in the formative stages of English and Continental literary theory and in the development of modern thought.

Lawrence Manley traces the idea of convention to its sources in an ancient debate between philosophers and rhetoricians, whose conflicting views of convention established the terms of the controversy that was revived with new implications during the Renaissance. As a result of related developments in political, legal, moral, religious, and artistic thought, Manley argues, the growing prominence of convention eventually challenged the ancient formulation and brought about a major revision in the order and techniques for the study of human things.

Convention, 1500–1750 discusses literary developments in the context of a much larger debate about the role of convention in the life of man. It attempts to show how this debate marked a transition in intellectual history between ancient and modern views of man's relation to his civilized setting.

This lively overview of the papal justice system reaches a transatlantic readership and makes available the fruit of Fosi's decades-long research in unpublished archives in Rome and the Vatican.