Shearer provides 28 biographies of world leaders from the 16th- and 17th-centuries in chronological order.

Witchcraft, astrology, divination and every kind of popular magic flourished in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from the belief that a blessed amulet could prevent the assaults of the Devil to the use of the same charms to recover stolen goods. At the same time the Protestant Reformation attempted to take the magic out of religion, and scientists were developing new explanations of the universe. Keith Thomas's classic analysis of beliefs held on every level of English society begins with the collapse of the medieval Church and ends with the changing intellectual atmosphere around 1700, when science and rationalism began to challenge the older systems of belief.

Among the earliest written texts on the history and theory of Netherlandish art, these two key writings are now available together in an English translation. Dominicus Lampsonius’s The Life of Lambert Lombard (1565) is the earliest published biography of a Netherlandish artist. This neo-Latin account of the life of the painter, architect, and draftsman Lambert Lombard of Liège offers a theoretical exposition on the nature and ideal practice of Netherlandish art, emphasizing Lombard’s intellectual curiosity, interest in antiquity, attentive study of the human body, and exemplary generosity as a teacher. This volume offers the first English edition of The Life of Lambert Lombard, complemented by a new translation of the inscriptions Lampsonius composed to accompany the Effigies of Several Famous Painters from the Low Countries (1572), a cycle of twenty-three engraved portraits of Netherlandish artists developed in collaboration with the print publisher Hieronymus Cock. Together, The Life of Lambert Lombard and the Effigies established frameworks for a distinctly Netherlandish history of art. Responding to a growing sense of Netherlandish cultural and political identity on the eve of the Dutch Revolt, these texts proposed a critical alternative to Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists and its Italian model of art historical development, celebrating local ingenuity and skill. They remain the starting point for any history of the northern Renaissance.

This study of popular songs offers a new hypothesis about the role of elite in popular culture and evidences how commercial publishing facilitated the rise of selective reading and imitation of texts in late-Ming China, creating a new basis for describing desire and the self.