The cartulary of Byland Abbey

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Sarah Allan

"Four Warring States texts discovered during the late twentieth-century challenge longstanding understandings of Chinese intellectual history. The discovery of previously unknown philosophical texts from the Axial Age is revolutionizing our understanding of Chinese intellectual history. Buried Ideas presents and discusses four texts found on brush-written slips of bamboo and their seemingly unprecedented political philosophy. Written in the regional script of Chu during the Warring States period (475-221 BCE), all of the works discuss Yao's abdication to Shun and are related to but differ significantly from the core texts of the classical period, such as the Mencius and Zhuangzi. Notably, these works evince an unusually meritocratic stance, and two even advocate abdication over hereditary succession as a political ideal. Sarah Allan includes full English translations and her own modern-character editions of the four works examined: Tang Yú zhi dao, Zi Gao, Rongchengshi, and Bao xun. In addition, she provides an introduction to Chu-script bamboo-slip manuscripts and the complex issues inherent in deciphering them"--From publisher's website.

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Hans-Jürgen Goertz

The Anabaptists were at the radical, utopian edge of the Reformation, ruthlessly repressed by Catholic, Lutheran and secular authorities alike. Hans-Jurgen Goertz gives a comprehensive account of their political and religious significance, their views and their social setting within the wider context of the Reformation. Particular attention is paid to the role and experience of women and of 'ordinary' Anabaptists in addition to those of the educated elite. While the focus of the book is on Germany, extensive coverage is also given to Anabaptism in England, Switzerland, the Netherlands and elsewhere. This English edition includes a new introduction which considers the historiographical context of the book. The opening chapter has also been expanded to include a section on the emergence of Anabaptism in England. The Anabaptists has been fully revised since its publication in German, and takes account of the most recent historiography on the subject. It also includes a selection of primary sources together with a full listing of important Anabaptist works.

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Kristen Poole

"Bringing together recent scholarship on religion and the spatial imagination, Kristen Poole examines how changing religious beliefs and transforming conceptions of space were mutually informative in the decades around 1600. Supernatural Environments in Shakespeare's England explores a series of cultural spaces that focused attention on interactions between the human and the demonic or divine: the deathbed, purgatory, demonic contracts and their spatial surround, Reformation cosmologies and a landscape newly subject to cartographic surveying. It examines the seemingly incongruous coexistence of traditional religious beliefs and new mathematical, geometrical ways of perceiving the environment. Arguing that the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century stage dramatized the phenomenological tension that resulted from this uneasy confluence, this groundbreaking study considers the complex nature of supernatural environments in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and Shakespeare's Othello, Hamlet, Macbeth and The Tempest"--

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Ian Hall & Lisa Hill

In the modern era, British thinkers have made significant - indeed perhaps even disproportionate - contributions to our understanding of the workings of international relations. This book brings together eleven original essays by an inter-disciplinary team of historians, political theorists and international relations specialists that reconsider some of those contributions and their legacies. It aims to provide new insights into the work of thinkers from Thomas Hobbes and Edmund Burke to Goldsworthy Lowes and Lewis Namier as well as to advance the study of the history of international thought.