William Shakespeare brings history to life. His plays take us from the Forum in Rome to the palaces of London and the battlefields of France. He dramatizes the personal and political conflicts that cost Julius Caesar his life, Marc Antony and Cleopatra an empire, and a succession of English kings their thrones. Dick Riley, co-author of Continuum's The Bedside, Bathtub and Armchair Companion to Shakespeare ("an engaging blend of homage and irreverence ..." Publishers Weekly) has now created a popular volume specifically designed to help illuminate the Bard's "history" plays. Shakespeare's Consuls, Cardinals and Kings sets the historical context for the events portrayed in Shakespeare's major histories. It reviews the sources he used and analyzes how he reshaped that material -- often telescoping events and combining characters -- to create his dramas. It also offers the insights of later historians about the lives and careers of Julius Caesar, Marc Antony, and the English monarchs King John, Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VI, Richard III and Henry VIII. Designed to give both students and casual readers a deeper understanding and a more enjoyable experience of the "history" plays, each chapter of Shakespeare's Consuls, Cardinals and Kings focuses on the period and lives portrayed in one of these dramas, and also provides a brief guide to available film and video versions. While focusing on the most important of Shakespeare's sources -- the Greco-Roman historian Plutarch and the English histories of Raphael Holinshed -- Shakespeare's Consuls, Cardinals and Kings also discusses other writers who helped inform Shakespeare's work, from Suetonius, author of The Twelve Caesars, to John Foxe, whose The Book of Martyrs memorialized the struggles of English religious reformers.

Early in 1733 Augustus II, elector of Saxony and king of Poland, died in Warsaw from complications of a gangrenous foot. The elective throne of Poland thus fell vacant, and the states of Europe began cautious maneuvers designed to secure for each some national advantage in the choice of a successor. Before the year was out, diplomacy had given way to military force. Yet the Age of Reason fostered a relationship between diplomacy and warfare that limited the violence of military action. The War of Polish Succession might have produced widespread carnage. It was a major struggle among the great powers of Europe with actions in Poland, the Rhineland, and Italy. Many illustrious commanders took part -- Marshal Villars and Prince Eugene, Maurice de Saxe and Count Daun. Behind them stood the powerful figures of Cardinal Fleury, anxious to uphold the honor of King Louis even as he guarded against escalation of the war, and Emperor Charles VI, obsessed with his desire to keep the Holy Roman Empire in Hapsburg hands. After three years of wary military action the war ended as it had begun, in a series of secret diplomatic maneuvers. No nation was annihilated, no prince unthroned, and once again Europe's precarious balance of power had been restored. John L. Sutton's engrossing account, the first in any major European language to bring together the evidence from the great diplomatic and military archives of Europe, reveals the very essence of eighteenth-century warfare, with its grand campaigns as formal as minuets, its sieges as gentlemanly as court receptions. On another level, the plight of the mercenaries who did much of the fighting yet had no stake in the conflict beyond day-to-day survival is portrayed just as vividly in this clear-eyed examination of a dynastic war and its setting.

Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) won fame and infamy as a natural scientist and visionary theosopher, but he was also a master intelligencer, who served as a secret agent for the French king, Louis XV, and the pro-French, pro-Jacobite party of "Hats" in Sweden. This study draws upon unpublished diplomatic and Masonic archives to place his financial and political actitivities within their national and international contexts. It also reveals the clandestine military and Masonic links between the Swedish Hats and Charles Edward Stuart ("Bonnie Prince Charlie"), providing new evidence for the prince's role as hidden Grand Master of the Order of the Temple. Swedenborg's usage of Kabbalistic meditative and interpretative techniques and his association with Hermetic and Rosicrucian adepts reveal the extensive esoteric networks that underlay the exoteric politics of the supposedly "enlightened" eighteenth century, especially in the troubled "Northern World" of Sweden and Scotland.

The King's Body offers a unique and up-to-date overview of a central theme in European history: the nature and meaning of the sacred rituals of kingship. Informed by the work of recent cultural anthropologists, Sergio Bertelli explores the cult of kingship, which pervaded the lives of hundreds of thousands of subjects, poor and rich, noble and cleric. His analysis takes in a wide spectrum, from the Vandal kings of Spain and the long-haired kings of France, to the beheaded kings of England and France, Charles I and Louis XVI. Bertelli explores the multiple meanings of the rites related to the king's body, from his birth (with the exhibition of his masculinity) to the crowning (a rebirth) to his death (a triumph and an apotheosis). We see how particular occasions such as entrances, processions, and banquets make sense only as they related directly to the king's body. Bertelli also singles out crowd-participatory aspects of sacred kingship, including the rites of violence connected with the interregnum (perceived as a suspension of the law) and the rites of expulsion for a tyrant's body, emphasizing the inversion of crowning rituals. First published in Italy in 1990, The King's Body has been revised and updated for English-speaking readers and expertly translated from the Italian by R. Burr Litchfield. Deftly argued and amply illustrated, this book is a perfect introduction to the cult of kingship in the West; at the same time, it illuminates for modern readers how strangely different the medieval and early modern world was from our own.