City On The Ocean Sea La Rochelle 1530 1650

This important volume presents the first comprehensive history of early modern La Rochelle, a port town whose fractious residents became embroiled in the French Reformations. Opening chapters situate the Rochelais within the geopolitics of an oceanic frontier, where urbanites created a strong, heavily armed civic government, in part because they perceived themselves as isolated civilizing agents surrounded by the savage inhabitants of a lawless environment. Analysis of the city's Reformation proceeds within this context of place and politics, showing how various ranks of the citizenry idiosyncratically adopted the tenets of Calvinism, amalgamating these salvific doctrines with traditional civic rites and values - to the consternation of more orthodox pastors. Juxtaposing serial sources from multiple archives, Robbins shows with innovative detail how local political and religious struggles intermeshed, setting the city and its Reformed congregations on a fatal collision course with the Bourbon monarchy. Concluding chapters examine how great aristocratic families, churchmen, and Catholic magistrates joined in a local Counter-Reformation, remaking urban power politics from the ground up.

For a number of years scholars who are concerned with issues of poverty and the poor have turned away from the study of charity and poor relief, in order to search for a view of the life of the poor from the point of view of the poor themselves. Great studies have been conducted using a variety of records, resulting in seminal works that have enriched our understanding of pauper experiences and the influence and impact of poverty on societies. If we return our gaze to ’charity’ with the benefit of those studies' questions, approaches, sources and findings, what might we see differently about how charity was experienced as a concept and in practice, at both community and personal levels? In this collection, contributors explore the experience of charity towards the poor, considering it in spiritual, intellectual, emotional, personal, social, cultural and material terms. The approach is a comparative one: across different time periods, nations, and faiths. Contributors pay particular attention to the way faith inflected charity in the different national environments of England and France, as Catholicism and Calvinism became outlawed and/or minority faith positions in these respective nations. They ask how different faith and beliefs defined or shaped the act of charity, and explore whether these changed over time even within one faith. The sources used to answer such questions go beyond the textual as contributors analyse a range of additional sources that include the visual, aural, and material.

Jacob Leisler emigrated to the Dutch colony of Nieu Nederlandt in North America in 1660. He was the son of a Reformed minister and hailed from Frankfurt on the Main. To posterity Jacob Leisler is known for his role during the Glorious Revolution in 1689 as rebel against the English governor of the colony of New York - for which he was cruelly put to death in 1691. The essays in this collection show that Leisler's world had many more faces and sides: there is the military aspect of Leisler's career, the mercantile world in which Leisler lived (and was captured by Algerian pirates), the religious world that got him into a fierce fight with a Dutch-Reformed pastor, and finally the larger ideological, political, and economic context that ranges from a study of the role of the little port of Dover (England) to the larger issues related to the role of colonies in the Atlantic economy and the British Empire. A number of general themes hold the essays together: Two are of particular importance: The Atlantic nature of religion and the transnational character of the Atlantic economy. Most of the essays were presentations to a workshop held at the Centre for the Study of Human Settlement and Historical Change at the National University of Ireland in Galway.

The French Atlantic is a compelling and timely contribution to ongoing debates about nationhood, culture, and “Frenchness” that have come to define France and its diaspora in light of the diplomatic fracas surrounding the Iraq war and other mass cultural events. With interdisciplinary navigation of fields nearly as diverse as the locations he explores, Bill Marshall considers the cultural history of seven different French Atlantic spaces—from Quebec to the southern Caribbean to North Atlantic territory and back to metropolitan France—in this groundbreaking study of the Atlantic world.

The role of the navy as an instrument of royal power in France, C16/C17, with a reappraisal of Richelieu's performance as Grand-Master of Navigation.

Situating his life and thought within the broader context of the northern European Renaissance and French humanism, this work offers a critical re-evaluation of Andrew Melville in light of current research and the primary historical sources of the period.

The practical application of micro-historical approaches in 'Women in Port' helps to re-frame our understanding of women's possibilities in the Atlantic world.

As Enlightenment notions of predictability, progress and the sense that humans could control and shape their environments informed European thought, catastrophes shook many towns to the core, challenging the new world view with dramatic impact. This book concentrates on a period marked by passage from a society of scarcity to one of expenditure and accumulation, from ranks and orders to greater social mobility, from traditional village life to new bourgeois and even individualistic urbanism. The volume employs a broad definition of catastrophe, as it examines how urban communities conceived, adapted to, and were transformed by catastrophes, both natural and human-made. Competing views of gender figure in the telling and retelling of these analyses: women as scapegoats, as vulnerable, as victims, even as cannibals or conversely as defenders, organizers of assistance, inspirers of men; and men in varied guises as protectors, governors and police, heroes, leaders, negotiators and honorable men. Gender is also deployed linguistically to feminize activities or even countries. Inevitably, however, these tragedies are mediated by myth and memory. They are not neutral events whose retelling is a simple narrative. Through a varied array of urban catastrophes, this book is a nuanced account that physically and metaphorically maps men and women into the urban landscape and the worlds of catastrophe.