First Kings Of Europe Set

Contains the Essay volume and the Exhibit Catalogue volume. The catalogue accompanies an international exhibition, "First Kings of Europe," and the essay volume, First Kings of Europe: From Farmers to Rulers in Prehistoric Southeastern Europe, that examine the artifacts and cultures of this area from the Neolithic to the Iron Age. Over several millennia, early agricultural villages gave rise to tribal kingdoms and monarchies, replacing smaller, more egalitarian social structures with complex state organizations led by royal individuals invested with power. Several hundred objects and artifacts in the exhibition are portrayed in the catalog, accompanied by introductory text and detailed entries for each item. The spectacular and highly detailed color photographs introduce us to the gold and silver ornaments, bronze and iron weaponry, rich metal hoards and magnificent ceremonial vessels that are masterpieces from this period of history. Many of them have never left their countries of origin, making this exhibition and these two volumes documenting it an opportunity not to miss.

In this lively and pathbreaking book, William Monter sketches Europe's increasing acceptance of autonomous female rulers between the late Middle Ages and the French Revolution. Monter surveys the governmental records of Europe's thirty women monarchs—the famous (Mary Stuart, Elizabeth I, Catherine the Great) as well as the obscure (Charlotte of Cyprus, Isabel Clara Eugenia of the Netherlands)—describing how each of them achieved sovereign authority, wielded it, and (more often than men) abandoned it. Monter argues that Europe's female kings, who ruled by divine right, experienced no significant political opposition despite their gender.

In All the King’s Women Jan Rüdiger investigates medieval elite polygyny and its ‘uses’ in Northern Europe with a comparative perspective on England and France as well as Iberia.

Some of history's greatest dramas have unfolded in the stories of kings and their sons in early modern Europe; and their conflicts presaged in some ways today's tensions in family-run businesses. In several notorious cases, the kings despised their sons to the point of committing murder, thus killing their own heirs. Prof. Konnert shows that these tragic dramas actually represent an extreme of the normal state of affairs rather than unusual occurrences. They are different in degree, not kind. This book is the first to look at these episodes in a systematic and comparative fashion. The stories are moving in themselves, but viewed in their historical context, they illuminate aspects of a past society which has faded from view in the 21st century. Two of the most famous episodes?those of Frederick the Great of Prussia and his father, and of Peter the Great of Russia and his son?are examined here, as well as three less well-known cases. These episodes are put into historical context, and the family dynamics of these royal dynasties are discussed, showing not only how they differed from those of today but also from those of their more common contemporaries. These tensions are also compared to those that have emerged in family-run businesses, where conflicts between fathers and sons are also very common. Furthermore, when the interests of the dynastic enterprise, whether political or corporate, take precedence over family life and personal happiness, marriage practices can produce particularly toxic relations. The cases examined here are unusual only in the degree of hostility rather than in its existence.

A collection of 6 volumes of Oakeshott's work: Notebooks, 1922-86, Early Political Writings 1925-30, The Concept of a Philosophical Jurisprudence, Vocabulary of a Modern European State, Lectures in the History of Political Thought, and What is History?

In the years before the First World War, the great European powers were ruled by three first cousins: King George V of Britain, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. Together, they presided over the last years of dynastic Europe and the outbreak of the most destructive war the world had ever seen, a war that set twentieth-century Europe on course to be the most violent continent in the history of the world. Through brilliant and often darkly comic portraits of these men and their lives, their foibles and obsessions, Miranda Carter delivers the tragicomic story of Europe’s early twentieth-century aristocracy, a solipsistic world preposterously out of kilter with its times.