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The writings of a sixteenth-century advocate who challenged empire in defense of Indigenous peoples.

With the exception of Christopher Columbus, Bartolomé de las Casas is arguably the most notable figure of the Encounter Age. He is remembered principally as the creator of the Black Legend, as well as the protector of American Indians. He was one of the pioneers of the human rights movement, and a Christian activist who invoked law and Biblical scripture to challenge European colonialism in the great age of the Encounter. He was also one of the first and most thorough chroniclers of the conquest, and a biographer who saved the diary of Columbus’s first voyage for posterity by transcribing it in his History of the Indies before the diary was lost.

Bartolomé de las Casas and the Defense of Amerindian Rights: A Brief History with Documents provides the most wide-ranging and concise anthology of Las Casas’s writings, in translation, ever made available. It contains not only excerpts from his most well-known texts, but also his largely unavailable writings on political philosophy and law, and addresses the underappreciated aspects of his thought. Fifteen of the twenty-six documents are entirely new translations of Las Casas’s writings, a number of them appearing in English for the first time.

This volume focuses on his historical, political, and legal writings that address the deeply conflicted and violent sixteenth-century encounter between Europeans and indigenous peoples of the Americas. It also presents Las Casas as a more comprehensive and systematic philosophical and legal thinker than he is typically given credit for. The introduction by Lawrence A. Clayton and David M. Lantigua places these writings into a synthetic whole, tracing his advocacy for indigenous peoples throughout his career. By considering Las Casas’s ideas, actions, and even regrets in tandem, readers will understand the historical dynamics of Spanish imperialism more acutely within the social-political context of the times.
 

Drawing on evidence from a wide collection of surviving family papers, Beloved Children is a valuable contribution to literature available concerning childhood history in pre-industrial Central Europe.

With the aid of detailed case studies, the volume illustrates every aspect of Hungarian childhood in the early modern age from a variety of contrasting perspectives—birth, care, education, marriage, orphanhood and death. The book also includes a unique portrayal of family life in the Hungarian aristocracy.

Beloved Children is a comprehensive study examining topics such as family intimacy, paternal and maternal attitudes, providing the reader with a valuable insight into a child’s life in Hungary during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Upends current thinking about how early modern people started to conceptualize human beings in terms of populations.
 
Bloody Numbers is a provocative account of the violent world of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century South Atlantic slave-trading societies, where traders, financiers, officials, surgeons, notaries, ship captains, and others began thinking about human bodies as aggregate populations understood through numbers: measurements, averages, and calculations of risk and value assessed through the tabulation of heights, weights, tumors, scars, and other characteristics. Pablo F. Gómez explores how figures within the world of slave trading used this model for understanding human bodies to generalize about behavior and disease in ways that foreshadowed the work of modern epidemiologists and public health officials—though they employed their calculations with the aim of protecting their financial interests rather than of caring for enslaved people. The ruthlessness inherent in these practices became ingrained in the modern corporeal mathematics that emerged from the early slave trade and diffused through its vast political, financial, logistical, and intellectual networks.

A pathbreaking work, Bloody Numbers reveals the historical actions that rendered populations quantifiable. In doing so, it shows that confronting these origins is essential to understanding the violent political, legal, economic, and scientific practices that ascribe numbers to our own bodies.

Traces how conscience—inner moral conviction—came to shape public life, fueling martyrdom, free speech, and political revolts

Bold Conscience: Luther to Shakespeare to Milton is a sweeping, original study of how conscience became one of the most powerful ideas in early modern England. Tracing the emergence of what Joshua R. Held calls the “bold conscience,” the book shows how inner moral conviction moved from the realm of private guilt to public action, fueling debates about authority, obedience, free speech, and resistance. By placing conscience at the center of literary, religious, and political conflict, Bold Conscience reveals a vital intellectual throughline linking the Reformation to the birth of modern ideas of liberty and toleration.

The book unfolds chronologically, beginning with Martin Luther and Henry VIII and moving through Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Henry VIII, John Donne’s court sermons, and John Milton’s polemical and poetic works, including Areopagitica and Paradise Lost. Each chapter combines close literary reading with historical and theological analysis, showing how conscience operates across genres—drama, sermon, pamphlet, and epic poetry. Joshua R. Held is a distinguished scholar of early modern literature whose work bridges literary criticism, intellectual history, and religious studies, bringing clarity and narrative energy to complex debates.

Bold Conscience will appeal to scholars and students of early modern literature, Shakespeare, Milton, and Reformation history, as well as readers interested in the origins of religious freedom and political dissent. It will also engage anyone concerned with how moral conviction shapes public life then and now.