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In January 1966, Colonel Francisco Caamano Deno, president of the Dominican Republic during the "Constitutionalist" uprising of 1965 and the subsequent U.S. invasion, was exiled to London. Spending twenty months in the British capital as military attache at the Dominican Embassy, Caamano remained intensely involved in the affairs of his home country. He rallied opposition to the U.S. presence and prepared for his own return before secretly flying, in October 1967, to Cuba. Six years later he lost his life while attempting to launch a guerrilla war in the mountains west of Santo Domingo. Until now, little has been known about Caamano's London sojourn, the most important by any Latin American radical leader in the British capital since the visits of Bolivar and San Martin in 1809. This book includes material from people who met Caamano in Britain and a chapter on the London period by his Dominican biographer, Hamlet Herman. It also presents, for the first time, documents from official archives on Caamano's conversations with British and American diplomats.
The result is a complex and informative study on a missing chapter in the history of the Dominican Republic and, more broadly, a contribution to the often forgotten history of the cold war in the Caribbean.

In May 1940, the British War Cabinet debated over the course of nine meetings a simple question: Should Britain fight on in the face of overwhelming odds, sacrificing hundreds of thousands of lives, or seek a negotiated peace? Using Cabinet papers from the United Kingdom’s National Archives, David Owen illuminates in fascinating detail this little-known, yet pivotal, chapter in the history of World War II.

Eight months into the war, defeat seemed to many a certainty. With the United States still a year and half away from entering, Britain found itself in a perilous position, and foreign secretary Lord Halifax pushed prime minister Winston Churchill to explore the possibility of a negotiated peace with Hitler, using Mussolini as a conduit. Speaking for England is the story of Churchill’s triumph in the face of this pressure, but it is also about how collective debate and discussion won the day—had Churchill been alone, Owen argues, he would almost certainly have lost to Halifax, changing the course of history. Instead, the Cabinet system, all too often disparaged as messy and cumbersome, worked in Britain’s interests and ensured that a democracy on the brink of defeat had the courage to fight on.
 

Blending political, historical, and sociological analysis, Bernard S. Silberman offers a provocative explanation for the bureaucratic development of the modern state. The study of modern state bureaucracy has its origins in Max Weber's analysis of the modes of social domination, which Silberman takes as his starting point.

Whereas Weber contends that the administration of all modern nation-states would eventually converge in one form characterized by rationality and legal authority, Silberman argues that the process of bureaucratic rationalization took, in fact, two courses. One path is characterized by permeable organizational boundaries and the allocation of information by "professionals." The other features well-defined boundaries and the allocation of information by organizational rules. Through case studies of France, Japan, the United States, and Great Britain, Silberman demonstrates that this divergence stems from differences in leadership structure and in levels of uncertainty about leadership succession in the nineteenth century.

Silberman concludes that the rise of bureacratic rationality was primarily a response to political problems rather than social and economic concerns. Cages of Reason demonstrates how rationalization can have occurred over a wide range of cultures at various levels of economic development. It will be of considerable interest to readers in a number of disciplines: political science, sociology, history, and public administration.

"Silberman has produced an invaluable, densely packed work that those with deep knowledge of public administrative development will find extremely rewarding." —David H. Rosenbloom, American Political Science Review

"An erudite, incisive, and vibrant book, the product of intensive study and careful reflection. Given its innovative theoretical framework and the wealth of historical materials contained in it, this study will generate debate and stimulate research in sociology, political science, and organizational theory. It is undoubtedly the best book on the comparative evolution of the modern state published in the last decade."—Mauro F. Guillen, Contemporary Sociology

Guided by myths of golden cities and worldly rewards, policy makers, conquistador leaders, and expeditionary aspirants alike came to the new world in the sixteenth century and left it a changed land. Came Men on Horses follows two conquistadors—Francisco Vázquez de Coronado and Don Juan de Oñate—on their journey across the southwest.

Driven by their search for gold and silver, both Coronado and Oñate committed atrocious acts of violence against the Native Americans, and fell out of favor with the Spanish monarchy. Examining the legacy of these two conquistadors Hoig attempts to balance their brutal acts and selfish motivations with the historical significance and personal sacrifice of their expeditions. Rich human details and superb story-telling make Came Men on Horses a captivating narrative scholars and general readers alike will appreciate.

‘Campaigning in Europe for a Free Indonesia’ explores Indonesian transnational political networks in the late colonial period, connecting the history of Indonesian nationalism with that of anticolonial internationalism and transnational activism. This book adds an international dimension to our understanding of the nationalist and anticolonial movement in the Netherlands Indies. Offering important new understandings of the Indonesian independence struggle, this fine-grained study explores the international activities in the capitals of interwar Europe of the Perhimpoenan Indonesia (PI), an Indonesian nationalist student organisation based in the Netherlands. Operating in a vibrant political environment, the PI interacted with different anticolonial movements in cities across Europe. Focusing on the period between 1917 and 1931, the book follows the personal journeys of different students to cities such as Zürich, Paris, Brussels and Berlin as they established contacts, joined associations and attended international conferences. Here, the complex reality of movement building is examined, going beyond superficial suggestions of contact and collaboration. The study shows that the activities of the PI reverberated in the Indonesian political landscape, where the new collaborations in Europe were followed with great interest. In this way, the book offers new findings for multiple audiences – Indonesianists and scholars of anticolonial resistance alike. However, it also demonstrates that the political awakening of Indonesian elites should be understood not just as an indigenous response to Dutch rule but also as part of global anticolonial movements and struggles.

In Capitalism and Cartography in the Dutch Golden Age, Elizabeth A. Sutton explores the fascinating but previously neglected history of corporate cartography during the Dutch Golden Age, from ca. 1600 to 1650. She examines how maps were used as propaganda tools for the Dutch West India Company in order to encourage the commodification of land and an overall capitalist agenda.

Building her exploration around the central figure of Claes Jansz Vischer, an Amsterdam-based publisher closely tied to the Dutch West India Company, Sutton shows how printed maps of Dutch Atlantic territories helped rationalize the Dutch Republic’s global expansion. Maps of land reclamation projects in the Netherlands, as well as the Dutch territories of New Netherland (now New York) and New Holland (Dutch Brazil), reveal how print media were used both to increase investment and to project a common narrative of national unity. Maps of this era showed those boundaries, commodities, and topographical details that publishers and the Dutch West India Company merchants and governing Dutch elite deemed significant to their agenda. In the process, Sutton argues, they perpetuated and promoted modern state capitalism.

Named for its mythical leader “Captain Rock,” avenger of agrarian wrongs, the Rockite movement of 1821–24 in Ireland was notorious for its extraordinary violence. In Captain Rock, James S. Donnelly, Jr., offers both a fine-grained analysis of the conflict and a broad exploration of Irish rural society after the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars.
    Originating in west Limerick, the Rockite movement spread quickly under the impact of a prolonged economic depression. Before long the insurgency embraced many of the better-off farmers. The intensity of the Rockites’ grievances, the frequency of their resort to sensational violence, and their appeal on such key issues as rents and tithes presented a nightmarish challenge to Dublin Castle—prompting in turn a major reorganization of the police, a purging of the local magistracy, the introduction of large military reinforcements, and a determined campaign of judicial repression. A great upsurge in sectarianism and millenarianism, Donnelly shows, added fuel to the conflagration. Inspired by prophecies of doom for the Anglo-Irish Protestants who ruled the country, the overwhelmingly Catholic Rockites strove to hasten the demise of the landed elite they viewed as oppressors.
    Drawing on a wealth of sources—including reports from policemen, military officers, magistrates, and landowners as well as from newspapers, pamphlets, parliamentary inquiries, depositions, rebel proclamations, and threatening missives sent by Rockites to their enemies—Captain Rock offers a detailed anatomy of a dangerous, widespread insurgency whose distinctive political contours will force historians to expand their notions of how agrarian militancy influenced Irish nationalism in the years before the Great Famine of 1845–51.

The most comprehensive contemporaneous record of the rise and fall of the Carolingian Empire

Recreates the 9th-century world of Charlemagne through portraits of outstanding figures of the age

Piechocki calls for an examination of the idea of Europe as a geographical concept, tracing its development in the 15th and 16th centuries.

What is “Europe,” and when did it come to be? In the Renaissance, the term “Europe” circulated widely. But as Katharina N. Piechocki argues in this compelling book, the continent itself was only in the making in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Cartographic Humanism sheds new light on how humanists negotiated and defined Europe’s boundaries at a momentous shift in the continent’s formation: when a new imagining of Europe was driven by the rise of cartography. As Piechocki shows, this tool of geography, philosophy, and philology was used not only to represent but, more importantly, also to shape and promote an image of Europe quite unparalleled in previous centuries. Engaging with poets, historians, and mapmakers, Piechocki resists an easy categorization of the continent, scrutinizing Europe as an unexamined category that demands a much more careful and nuanced investigation than scholars of early modernity have hitherto undertaken. Unprecedented in its geographic scope, Cartographic Humanism is the first book to chart new itineraries across Europe as it brings France, Germany, Italy, Poland, and Portugal into a lively, interdisciplinary dialogue.

French scientists, engineers, and public officials were responsible for the most important and distinctive innovations in cartography in eighteenth-century Europe. By expanding the analytical uses of maps, by establishing unprecedented standards of accuracy, and by nurturing institutional frameworks to sustain mapping projects over many years, the French contributed to one of the central concepts of modern times: that man, through direct observation and accumulated information can better understand and manage his affairs.

Concentrating on how and why new concepts and techniques of making and using maps were introduced, Josef Konvitz skillfully traces the modernization of cartography during the French Enlightenment. The story he unfolds is not merely a narrative of who did what, but an analysis of how the map itself influenced attitudes toward the land and the consequent effects on planning and the development of resources. Throughout, Konvitz demonstrates the significant relationship between cartography and political, economic, and military life. He emphasizes efforts to enlarge the practical applications of maps in government and the impact of government policy on the evolution of cartography.

The period between the French Revolution and World War II was a time of tremendous growth in both mapmaking and map reading throughout Europe. There is no better place to witness this rise of popular cartography than in Alsace-Lorraine, a disputed borderland that the French and Germans both claimed as their national territory. Desired for its prime geographical position and abundant natural resources, Alsace-Lorraine endured devastating wars from 1870 to 1945 that altered its borders four times, transforming its physical landscape and the political allegiances of its citizens. For the border population whose lives were turned upside down by the French-German conflict, maps became essential tools for finding a new sense of place and a new sense of identity in their changing national and regional communities.
 
Turning to a previously undiscovered archive of popular maps, Cartophilia reveals Alsace-Lorraine’s lively world of citizen mapmakers that included linguists, ethnographers, schoolteachers, hikers, and priests. Together, this fresh group of mapmakers invented new genres of maps that framed French and German territory in original ways through experimental surveying techniques, orientations, scales, colors, and iconography. In focusing on the power of “bottom-up” maps to transform modern European identities, Cartophilia argues that the history of cartography must expand beyond the study of elite maps and shift its emphasis to the democratization of cartography in the modern world.

His is a name synonymous with seduction. His was a life lived without limits. Giacomo Casanova left behind thousands of pages detailing his years among Europe's notable and noble. In Casanova the Irresistible, Philippe Sollers--prolific intellectual and revered visionary of the French avant-garde--proffers a lively reading of and guide to the famed libertine's sprawling memoir.
 
Armine Kotin Mortimer's translation of Sollers's reading tracks the alluring Venetian through the whole of his astounding and disreputable life. Eschewing myth, Sollers dares to present the plain realities of a man "simple, direct, courageous, cultivated, seductive, funny. A philosopher in action." The lovers are here, and the ruses and adventures. But Sollers also rescues Casanova the writer, a gifted composer of words who reigns as a titan of eighteenth-century literature. As always, Sollers seeks to shame society for its failure to recognize its failings. By admiring those of Casanova's admirable qualities present in himself, Sollers spurns bourgeois hypocrisy and cliché to affirm a jocund philosophy of life devoted to the twinned pursuits of pleasure and joy.
 
A masterful translation that captures Sollers's idiosyncratic style, Casanova the Irresistible escorts readers on a journey into the heads and hearts of two singular personalities.
 

Cataclysms is a profoundly original look at the last century. Approaching twentieth-century history from the periphery rather than the centers of decision-making, the virtual narrator sits perched on the legendary stairs of Odessa and watches as events between the Baltic and the Aegean pass in review, unfolding in space and time between 1917 and 1989, while evoking the nineteenth century as an interpretative backdrop.
     Influenced by continental historical, legal, and social thought, Dan Diner views the totality of world history evolving from an Eastern and Southeastern European angle. A work of great synthesis, Cataclysms chronicles twentieth century history as a “universal civil war” between a succession of conflicting dualisms such as freedom and equality, race and class, capitalism and communism, liberalism and fascism, East and West.
    Diner’s interpretation rotates around cataclysmic events in the transformation from multinational empires into nation states, accompanied by social revolution and “ethnic cleansing,” situating the Holocaust at the core of the century’s predicament. Unlike other Eurocentric interpretations of the last century, Diner also highlights the emerging pivotal importance of the United States and the impact of decolonization on the process of European integration.

When we catastrophize, we think the worst. We make too much of too little, or something of nothing. Yet what looks simply like a bad habit, Gerard Passannante argues, was also a spur to some of the daring conceptual innovations and feats of imagination that defined the intellectual and cultural history of the early modern period.

Reaching back to the time between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, Passannante traces a history of catastrophizing through literary and philosophical encounters with materialism—the view that the world is composed of nothing but matter. As artists, poets, philosophers, and scholars pondered the physical causes and material stuff of the cosmos, they conjured up disasters out of thin air and responded as though to events that were befalling them. From Leonardo da Vinci’s imaginative experiments with nature’s destructive forces to the fevered fantasies of doomsday astrologers, from the self-fulfilling prophecies of Shakespeare’s tragic characters to the mental earthquakes that guided Kant toward his theory of the sublime, Passannante shows how and why the early moderns reached for disaster when they ventured beyond the limits of the sensible. He goes on to explore both the danger and the critical potential of thinking catastrophically in our own time.

Natural history in the eighteenth century was many things to many people—diversion, obsession, medically or economically useful knowledge, spectacle, evidence for God’s providence and wisdom, or even the foundation of all natural knowledge. Because natural history was pursued by such a variety of people around the globe, with practitioners sharing neither methods nor training, it has been characterized as a science of straightforward description, devoted to amassing observations as the raw material for classification and thus fundamentally distinct from experimental physical science. In Catching Nature in the Act, Mary Terrall revises this picture, revealing how eighteenth-century natural historians incorporated various experimental techniques and strategies into their practice.
           
At the center of Terrall’s study is René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur (1683–1757)—the definitive authority on natural history in the middle decades of the eighteenth century—and his many correspondents, assistants, and collaborators. Through a close examination of Réaumur’s publications, papers, and letters, Terrall reconstructs the working relationships among these naturalists and shows how observing, collecting, and experimenting fit into their daily lives. Essential reading for historians of science and early modern Europe, Catching Nature in the Act defines and excavates a dynamic field of francophone natural history that has been inadequately mined and understood to date.

Renaissance Essays, published in 1985, confirmed Hugh Trevor-Roper's reputation as one of the most distinguished writers of history and as an unequaled master of the historical essay. Received with critical acclaim in both England and the United States, the volume gathered wide-ranging essays on both British and European history from the fifteenth century to the early seventeenth centuries. This sequel, Catholics, Anglicans, and Puritans, is composed of five previously unpublished essays on the intellectual and religious movements which lay behind the Puritan revolution in England and Ireland.

The opening essay, a skillful work of historical detection, investigates the strange career of Nicholas Hill. In "Laudianism and Political Power," Trevor-Roper returns to the subject of his first, now classic, book. He analyzes the real significance of the ecclesiastical movement associated with Archbishop Laud and speculates on what might have happened if the Stuarts had not abandoned it. "James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh" deals with a key figure in the intellectual and religious life of his time. A long essay on "The Great Tew Circle" reinstates Lord Falkland as an important influence on the continuity of ideas through the English revolution. The final essay reassesses the political ideology of Milton.

English intellectual history, as Trevor-Roper constructs it here for the seventeenth century, is conditioned by its social and political context. Always engaging and fresh, these essays deal with currently interesting historical topics and up-to-date controversies.

Leader of a Conspiracy to Overthrow the Roman Republic, a Reform-Minded Senator Whose Reputation, Life, and Legacy Were Destroyed to Maintain the Status Quo
In 62 BC, Roman Senator Lucius Sergius Catiline lay dead on a battlefield in Tuscany. He was slain along with his soldiers after his conspiracy to overthrow the Roman Republic had been exposed by his adversary Cicero. It was an ignominious end for a man described at the time as a perverted, insane monster who had attempted to return his family to fortune and social standing. Chroniclers were not kind to Catiline, and his name over the centuries was synonymous with treachery. Recently, scholars have been reappraising the life and influence of this ancient Roman. In Catiline, The Monster of Rome: An Ancient Case of Political Assassination, economic historian Francis Galassi provides the first book-length account of Catiline in more than a generation.
            Rome first achieved a status as an empire during Catiline’s lifetime. The republic was, however, constantly at war with foreign powers and occasionally its own allies, and the disparity between the wealthy and the poor threatened to destabilize society. Catiline was from an aristocratic but impoverished family and first served as an officer with Cornelius Sulla during that general’s purges against Gaius Marius, the supposed champion of the oppressed masses. Catiline’s goal was to serve Sulla and then use that as a springboard to public office where he could recover his family’s former wealth and honor. However, the senatorial elite became suspicious if not threatened by the upstart Catiline and blocked his ambitions. Catiline was dogged by trumped-up charges, including raping a Vestal virgin and murdering his brother-in-law; he was acquitted each time, but his political life was ruined. With citizens demanding land and agrarian reform, Catiline genuinely embraced their dissatisfaction, and realizing that the elite would stop his attempt to gain status through elections, he organized a conspiracy to take control of Roman government through arms. Once his actions had been made public, many of his supporters and co-conspirators left him; but honoring the course he had chosen, he and his remaining soldiers fought a Roman army to their deaths. Rather than the “monster” as portrayed by his contemporaries, the author contends that Catiline was compelled to act for the benefit of common Romans to save Rome even if it meant overthrowing the government. As Galassi notes, Catiline’s contemporary, the slave Spartacus, has been a symbol of social reform for centuries, but it was actually Catiline, not Spartacus, who attempted to change Rome.

Catina’s Haircut: A Novel in Stories spans four generations of a peasant family in the brutal poverty of post-Unification southern Italy and in an immigrant’s United States. The women in these tales dare to cross boundaries by discovering magical leaps inherent in the landscape, in themselves, and in the stories they tell and retell of family tragedy at a time of political unrest. Through an oral tradition embedded in the stone of memory and the flow of its reinvention, their passionate tale of resistance and transformation courses forward into new generations in a new world.

A woman threatens to join the land reform struggle in her Calabrian hill town, against her husband’s will, during a call for revolution in 1919. A brother and sister turn to the village sorceress in Fascist Italy to bring rain to their father’s drought-stricken farm. In Pittsburgh, new immigrants witness a miraculous rescue during the Great Flood of 1936. A young girl courageously dives into the Allegheny River to save her grandfather’s only memento of the old country. With only broken English to guide her, a widow hops a bus in search of live chickens to cook for Easter dinner in her husband’s memory. An aging woman in the title story is on a quest to cut the ankle-length hair as hard as the rocky soil of Calabria in a drought. A lonely woman who survived World War II bombings in her close-knit village, struggles to find community as a recent immigrant. A daughter visits her mother’s hill town to try and fulfill a wish for her to see the Fata Morgana. These haunting images permeate Corso’s linked stories of loss, hope, struggle, and freedom.

An official selection of The Sons of Italy® Book Club

Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the Public Library Association

Sébastien Roch Nicolas Chamfort (1740-1794), whom Nietzsche called the "wittiest of all moralists," is now known for little more than brillian aphorisms that captivated a long line of thinkers, from Stendhal to Cioran, Schopenhauer to Camus. Yet the fascination of Chamfort's life is barely suggested by the fragments of writing that have survived him. In Claude Arnaud's captivating biography, Chamfort the libertine, playwright, journalist, and revolutionary stands revealed as the most telling emblem of his times.

Changing Identities in Early Modern France offers new interpretations of what it meant to be French during a period of profound transition, from the outbreak of the Hundred Years War to the consolidation of the Bourbon monarchy in the seventeenth century. As medieval notions were gradually replaced by new definitions of the state, society, and family, dynastic struggles and religious wars raised questions about loyalty and identity and destabilized the meaning of "Frenchness."
After examining the interplay between competing ideologies and public institutions, from the monarchy to the Parlement of Paris to the aristocratic household, the volume explores the dynamics of deviance and dissent, particularly in regard to women’s roles in religious reform movements and such sensationalized phenomena as the witch hunts and infanticide trials. Concluding essays examine how regional and confessional identities reshaped French identity in response to the discovery of the New World and the spectacular spread of Calvinism.

Contributors. Charmarie Blaisdell, William Bouwsma, Lawrence M. Bryant, Denis Crouzet, Robert Descimon, Barbara B. Diefendorf, Richard M. Golden, Sarah Hanley, Mack P. Holt, Donald R. Kelley, Kristen B. Neuschel, J. H. M. Salmon, Zachary Sayre Schiffman, Silvia Shannon, Alfred Soman, Michael Wolfe

Changing Places is a transnational history of the birth, life, and death of a modern borderland and of frontier peoples' changing relationships to nations, states, and territorial belonging. The cross-border region between Germany and Habsburg Austria---and after 1918 between Germany and Czechoslovakia---became an international showcase for modern state building, nationalist agitation, and local pragmatism after World War I, in the 1930s, and again after 1945.

Caitlin Murdock uses wide-ranging archival and published sources from Germany and the Czech Republic to tell a truly transnational story of how state, regional, and local historical actors created, and eventually destroyed, a cross-border region. Changing Places demonstrates the persistence of national fluidity, ambiguity, and ambivalence in Germany long after unification and even under fascism. It shows how the 1938 Nazi annexation of the Czechoslovak "Sudetenland" became imaginable to local actors and political leaders alike. At the same time, it illustrates that the Czech-German nationalist conflict and Hitler's Anschluss are only a small part of the larger, more complex borderland story that continues to shape local identities and international politics today.

Caitlin E. Murdock is Associate Professor of History at California State University, Long Beach.

Jacket Credit: Cover art courtesy of the author

Alongside the architectural splendor and intellectual brilliance of early Renaissance Florence there existed a second world of poverty, misery, social despair, and child abandonment. The Ospedale degli Innocenti (Hospital of the Innocents), designed and built between 1419 and 1445 by the renowned architect Filippo Brunelleschi, united these disparate worlds. Christian charity and compassion, as well as the humanist commitment to social perfection, family values, and love for children, were intertwined with a civic pride in which charity curried God's favor and invoked God's blessings on the city's fortunes.

Based on a close and attentive reading of archival material from the hospital and from the Florentine State Archives, Charity and Children in Renaissance Florence both chronicles the concerns and ambivalence of parents who abandoned children and follows the lives of the hospital's inhabitants from childhood to death. The book also demonstrates how hospital officials deliberately duplicated the structure and values of the Florentine family within the hospital walls. Gavitt's research shows that early modern foundling hospitals were not charnel houses where parents knowingly and impersonally abandoned their unwanted children to certain death. Charity and Children in Renaissance Florence provokes reflection on the contrast between our own views on the care of homeless children and those of the Italian Renaissance.

Winner of the Society for Italian Historical Studies 1988 Award for Best Unpublished Manuscript.

Sir Charles Bell (1774–1842) was a medical reformer in a great age of reform—an occasional and reluctant vivisectionist, a theistic popularizer of natural science, a Fellow of the Royal Society, a surgeon, an artist, and a teacher. He was among the last of a generation of medical men who strove to fashion a particularly British science of medicine; who formed their careers, their research, and their publications through the private classrooms of nineteenth-century London; and whose politics were shaped by the exigencies of developing a living through patronage in a time when careers in medical science simply did not exist. A decade after Bell’s death, that world was gone, replaced by professionalism, standardized education, and regular career paths.
           
In Charles Bell and the Anatomy of Reform, Carin Berkowitz takes readers into Bell’s world, helping us understand the life of medicine before the modern separation of classroom, laboratory, and clinic. Through Bell’s story, we witness the age when modern medical science, with its practical universities, set curricula, and medical professionals, was born.

How did early modern England—an island nation on the periphery of world affairs—transform itself into the center of a worldwide empire? Lesley B. Cormack argues that the newly institutionalized study of geography played a crucial role in fueling England's imperial ambitions.

Cormack demonstrates that geography was part of the Arts curriculum between 1580 and 1620, read at university by a broad range of soon-to-be political, economic, and religious leaders. By teaching these young Englishmen to view their country in a global context, and to see England playing a major role on that stage, geography supplied a set of shared assumptions about the feasibility and desirability of an English empire. Thus, the study of geography helped create an ideology of empire that made possible the actual forays of the next century.

Geography emerges in Cormack's account as the fruitful ground between college and court, in whose well-prepared soil the seeds of English imperialism took root. Charting an Empire will interest historians of science, geography, cartography, education, and empire.

Renowned scholar of medieval literature, Lee Patterson,  presents a compelling vision of the shape and direction of Geoffrey Chaucer’s entire career in Chaucer and the Subject of History.
    Chaucer's interest in individuality was strikingly modern.  At the same time he was profoundly aware of the pressures on individuality exerted by the past and by society—by history.  This tension between the subject and history is Patterson's topic.  He begins by showing how Chaucer’s understanding of history as a subject for poetry—a world to be represented and a cultural force affecting human action—began to take shape in his poems on classical themes, especially in Troilus and Criseyde.  Patterson's extended analysis of this profound yet deeply conflicted exploration of the relationship between "history" and "the subject" provides the basis for understanding Chaucer's shift to his contemporary world in the Canterbury Tales.  There, in the shrewdest and most wide-ranging analysis of late medieval society we possess, Chaucer investigated not just the idea of history but the historical world intimately related to his own political and literary career.
    Patterson's chapters on individual tales clarify and confirm his provocative arguments.   He shows, for example, how the Knight's Tale represents the contemporary crisis of governance in terms of a crisis in chivalric identity itself; how the Miller’s Tale reflects the social pressures and rhetoric of peasant movements generally and the Rising of 1381 in particular; and how the tales of the Merchant and Shipman register the paradoxical placement of a bourgeois class lacking class identity.  And Patterson's brilliant readings of the Wife of Bath’s Tale—"the triumph of the subject"—and the Pardoner’s Tale —"the subject of confession"—reveal how Chaucer reworked traditional materials to accomplish stunning innovations that make visible unmistakably social meanings.  Chaucer and the Subject of History is a landmark book, one that will shape the way that Chaucer is read for years to come.