This comprehensive survey of European history between 1300 and 1600 gentry subverts a conventional vision of Europe that divides the world between the late-medieval and early modern periods, emphasizing the distortion involved in that construction. Important changes toward "modernity" are evident, the book argues, as early as the fourteenth century; only in religious history does there appear to be some justification for retaining the traditional notion that "modern age" began with Martin Luther, though even in that arena the institutional break of the Protestants with Rome cannot conceal fundamental continuity of expression and attitude.

Later generations have sometimes found such actions perplexing, often dismissing them as evidence that business people of the late medieval and early modern worlds did not fully understand market rules.

Placing the development of Catholicism in the context of both social and political changes as well as the Protestant Reformation, this comprehensive study incorporates new research and reflects the changing perspectives of the late 20th century.

"The sixteenth century in Europe was a period of vigorous economic expansion that led to social, political, religious, and cultural transformations and established the early modern age. This resource explores the emergence of monarchial nation-states and early Western capitalism during this period. Also examined in depth are the Protestant Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, which exacerbated tensions between states and contributed to the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648). Readers will come to understand how these events developed, how they led to the age of exploration, and how they inform modern European history."

"Explores two principal genres of illicit learned magic in late Medieval manuscripts: image magic, which could be interpreted and justified in scholastic terms, and ritual magic, which could not"--Provided by publisher.

This book looks at the economic civilisation of Europe in the last epoch before the Industrial Revolution.

This major survey of political life in late medieval Europe provides a framework for understanding the developments that shaped this turbulent period. Rather than emphasising crisis, decline, disorder or the birth of the modern state, this account centres on the mixed results of political and governmental growth across the continent. The age of the Hundred Years War, schism and revolt was also a time of rapid growth in jurisdiction, taxation and representation, of spreading literacy and evolving political technique. This mixture of state formation and political convulsion lay at the heart of the 'making of polities'. Offering a full introduction to political events and processes from the fourteenth century to the sixteenth, this book combines a broad, comparative account with discussion of individual regions and states, including eastern and northern Europe alongside the more familiar west and south.