Showing titles in 16th Century

Brought to you by Penguin. Can anyone truly understand Russia? Let one of the world's leading experts show you how, using the fascinating history of a nation to illuminate its future. Russia is a country with no natural borders, no single ethnos, no true central identity. At the crossroads of...

In this Very Short Introduction, now thoroughly revised and updated to take account of the most recent scholarship, Peter Marshall argues that the Reformation was a long-term process of social, political, and cultural change.

Now an esoteric of legal and criminal history, A Hangman's Diary gives a year-by-year breakdown on all of Master Franz Schmidt's executions, which included hangings, beheadings, and other methods, as well as details of each capital crime and the reason for the punishment.

Cousin to Elizabeth I - and possibly Henry VIII's illegitimate granddaughter - Lettice Knollys had a life of dizzying highs and pitiful lows. Entangled in a love triangle with Robert Dudley and Elizabeth I, banished from court, plagued by scandals, embroiled in treason, Lettice would lose a husband and son to the executioner's ax. In the first ever biography of this remarkable woman, Nicola Tallis takes us through her dramatic life and the grand sweep of the Tudor Age and the events that define it.

Carlos Eire, popular professor and gifted writer, chronicles the 200-year era of the Renaissance and Reformation with particular attention to issues that persist as concerns in the present day. Eire connects the Protestant and Catholic Reformations in new and profound ways, and he demonstrates convincingly that this crucial turning point in history not only affected people long gone but continues to shape our world and define who we are today.

Brought to you by Penguin. A major reassessment of one of Britain’s most strange and fascinating kings, James I of England and VI of Scotland James VI & I, who died 400 years ago, was one of Britain’s most consequential and interesting monarchs, not least in creating the British monarchy...

Illegitimate children, adulterous queens, impotent kings, and a whole dynasty resting on their shoulders. Sex and childbirth were quite literally a matter of life or death for the Tudors.

Born in the midst of the Wars of the Roses, Margaret Beaufort became the greatest heiress of her time. She survived a turbulent life, marrying four times and enduring imprisonment before passing her claim to the crown of England to her son, Henry VII, the first of the Tudor monarchs.

The Teutonic Knights were powerful and ferocious advocates of holy war. Their history is suffused with crusading, campaigning, and struggle. Feared by their enemies but respected by medieval Christendom, the knights and their Order maintained a firm hold over the Baltic and Northern Germany and established a formidable regime that flourished across Central Europe for 300 years. William Urban's narrative charts the rise and fall of the Order and, in an accessible and engaging style, throws light on a band of knights whose deeds and motives have long been misunderstood.

WINNER OF THE CUNDILL HISTORY PRIZE 2025 A FINANCIAL TIMES, BBC HISTORY MAGAZINE AND HISTORY TODAY BOOK OF THE YEAR The definitive history of the sixteenth-century uprising that revolutionized Europe. The German Peasants' War was the greatest popular uprising in Western Europe before the French...

Master Italian sculptor, goldsmith, and writer Benvenuto Cellini is best remembered for his magnificent autobiography. In this work, which was actually begun in 1558 but not published until 1730, Cellini beautifully chronicles his flamboyant times. He tells of his adventures in Italy and France, and his relations with popes, kings, and fellow artists.

Like its popular and acclaimed predecessors, Restoration London and Dr Johnson's London, this fascinating evocation of Elizabethan London is the result of the author's passionate interest in the practical details of everyday life and the conditions in which most people lived, which most history books ignore: the streets, houses and gardens; cooking, housework and shopping; clothes, jewellery and make-up; medicine and sex; education, etiquette and hobbies; religion, law and crime.

During the long 18th century, Europe's travelers, scholars, and intellectuals looked to Asia in a spirit of puzzlement, irony, and openness. In this panoramic book, author Jürgen Osterhammel tells the story of the European Enlightenment's nuanced encounter with the great civilizations of the East, from the Ottoman Empire and India to China and Japan. A momentous work by one of Europe's most eminent historians, Unfabling the East takes listeners on a thrilling voyage to the farthest shores, bringing back vital insights for our own multicultural age.

Step behind the portraits, poetry, and pageantry to uncover the real woman who shaped one of the most extraordinary chapters in English history. The Virgin Queen Unveiled reveals the remarkable life of Elizabeth I—her dangers, her triumphs, her brilliance, and the decisions that forged the destiny of a nation.

Philip II is not only the most famous king in Spanish history, but one of the most famous monarchs in English history: the man who married Mary Tudor and later launched the Spanish Armada against her sister Elizabeth I. This compelling biography of the most powerful European monarch of his day begins with his conception (1526) and ends with his ascent to Paradise (1603), two occurrences surprisingly well documented by contemporaries. Eminent historian Geoffrey Parker draws on four decades of research on Philip as well as a recent, extraordinary archival discovery - a trove of 3,000 documents in vaults in New York City....

In the fifteenth century, even before the city states of the Apennine Peninsula began to coalesce into what would become, several centuries later, a nation, "Italy" exerted enormous influence over all of Europe and throughout the Mediterranean. Viewing the Italy (the many Italies?) of that time through the lens of today allows us to gather a fragmented, multi-faceted, and seemingly contradictory history into a single unifying narrative that speaks to our current reality as much as it does to a specific historical period. This is what the French historian Fernand Braudel achieves here.

August 2019 saw numerous commemorations of the year 1619, when what was said to be the first arrival of enslaved Africans occurred in North America. Yet in the 1520s, the Spanish, from their imperial perch in Santo Domingo, had already brought enslaved Africans to what was to become South Carolina. The enslaved people here quickly defected to local Indigenous populations, and compelled their captors to flee. Deploying such illuminating research, The Dawning of the Apocalypse is a riveting revision of the "creation myth" of settler colonialism and how the US was formed.

In the sixteenth century, the Spaniards became the first nation in history to have worldwide reach; across most of Europe to the Americas, the Philippines, and India. Goodwin tells the story of Spain and the Spaniards, from great soldiers like the Duke of Alba to literary figures and artists such as El Greco, Velázquez, Cervantes, and Lope de Vega, and the monarchs who ruled over them.

What is the mind? How does it relate to the body and soul? These questions were as perplexing for the Elizabethans as they are for us today—although their answers were often startlingly different. Shakespeare and his contemporaries believed the mind was governed by the humors and passions, and was susceptible to the Devil’s interference. In this insightful and wide-ranging account, Helen Hackett explores the intricacies of Elizabethan ideas about the mind.

Situated in the early decades of the magnificent Mughal Empire, this first ever biography of Princess Gulbadan offers an enthralling portrait of a charismatic adventurer and unique pictures of the multicultural society in which she lived. Following a migratory childhood that spanned Kabul and north India, Gulbadan spent her middle years in a walled harem established by her nephew Akbar to showcase his authority as the Great Emperor.