The Peace of Utrecht (1713), which brought an end to the War of the Spanish Succession, was a milestone in global history. Performances of Peace aims to rethink the significance of the Peace of Utrecht by exploring the nexus between culture and politics. For too long, cultural and political historians have studied early modern international relations in isolation. By studying the political as well as the cultural aspects of this peace (and its concomitant paradoxes) from a broader perspective, this volume aims to shed new light on the relation between diplomacy and performative culture in the public sphere. Contributors are: Samia Al-Shayban, Lucien Bély, Renger E. de Bruin, Suzan van Dijk, Heinz Duchhardt, Julie Farguson, Linda Frey, Marsha Frey, Willem Frijhoff, Henriette Goldwyn, Cornelis van der Haven, Clare Jackson, Lotte Jensen, Phil McCluskey, Jane O. Newman, Aaron Alejandro Olivas, David Onnekink. This book is available in Open Access.

"Performances of Peace: Utrecht 1713" aims to rethink the significance of the Peace of Utrecht (1713) by exploring the nexus between culture and politics.

An environmental history of natural disasters during the eighteenth-century decline of the Dutch Republic.

Today, wellbeing is high on the personal and societal agenda, but thinking about wellbeing certainly is not a new phenomenon. The Greek philosopher Aristotle, for example, came up with the concept of Eudaimonia – the contented state of feeling healthy, happy, and prosperous – and this concept has been influential up until today. Starting from Augustine's thoughts on the topic of wellbeing, which had a great influence on theologians and others in the Early Modern Era, the contributions in this book reflect on a variety of topics ranging from wellbeing for the soul and the body to broader related concepts and theories approaching the theme from such disciplines as music, literature, history and theology.

New Diplomatic History has turned into one of the most dynamic and innovative areas of research – especially with regard to early modern history. It has shown that diplomacy was not as homogenous as previously thought. On the contrary, it was shaped by a multitude of actors, practices and places. The handbook aims to characterise these different manifestations of diplomacy and to contextualise them within ongoing scientific debates. It brings together scholars from different disciplines and historiographical traditions. The handbook deliberately focuses on European diplomacy – although non-European areas are taken into account for future research – in order to limit the framework and ensure precise definitions of diplomacy and its manifestations. This must be the prerequisite for potential future global historical perspectives including both the non-European and the European world.

A Cultural History of Peace presents an authoritative survey from ancient times to the present. The set of six volumes covers over 2500 years of history, charting the evolving nature and role of peace throughout history. This volume, A Cultural History of Peace in the Enlightenment, explores peace in the period from 1648 to 1815. As with all the volumes in the illustrated Cultural History of Peace set, this volume presents essays on the meaning of peace, peace movements, maintaining peace, peace in relation to gender, religion and war and representations of peace. A Cultural History of Peace in the Enlightenment is the most authoritative and comprehensive survey available on peace in the long eighteenth century.

"Heirs of Flesh and Paper" tells the story of early modern dynastic politics through subjects’ practical responses to royal illness, failing princely reproduction, and heirs’ premature deaths. It treats connected dynastic crises between 1699 and 1716 as illustrative for early modern European political regimes in which the rulers’ corporeality defined politics. This political order grappled with the endemic uncertainties induced by dynastic bodies. By following the day-to-day practices of knowledge making in response to the unpredictability of royal health, the book shows how the ruling family’s mortal coils regularly threatened to destabilize the institutionalized legal fiction of kingship. Dynastic politics was not only as a transitory stage of state formation, part of elite cooperation, or a cultural construct. It needs to be approached through everyday practices that put ailing dynastic bodies front and center. In a period of intensifying political planning, it constituted one of the most important sites for changing the political itself.

This is the first book to bring perspectives from the interdisciplinary field of Peace Studies to bear on the writing of the Romantic period. Particularly significant is that field's attention not only to the work of anti-war protest, but more purposefully to considerations of how peace can actively be fostered, established, and sustained. Bravely resisting discourses of military propaganda, writers such as Amelia Opie, Helen Maria Williams, William Wordsworth, William Cobbett, John Keats, and Jane Austen embarked on the challenging and urgent rhetorical work of imagining--and inspiring others to imagine--the possibility of peace. The writers formulate a peace imaginary in various registers. Sometimes this means identifying and eschewing traditional militaristic tropes in order to craft alternative images for a patriotism compatible with peace. Other times it means turning away from xenophobic discourse to write about relations with other nations in terms other than those of conflict. If historically informed literary criticism has illustrated the importance of writing about war during the Romantic period, this volume invites readers to redirect critical attention to move beyond discourses of war, and to recognize the era's complex and vibrant writing about and for peace.

This comprehensive and authoritative edition of the correspondence of Daniel Defoe situates each letter in its biographical, literary, and historical contexts. A unique source for a turbulent period of British history, Defoe's correspondence spans topics including the first age of party marked by Tory and Whig rivalry, religious tensions between the Church and Dissenters, the uncertainty of the monarchical succession, the birth of Great Britain and its establishment as a global empire, and the use of the press to mould public opinion. As well as an introduction discussing Defoe's epistolary habits and the distinctive features of his letters, headnotes and annotations explain each document's occasion, beginning in 1703 with Defoe hunted by the government for sedition, and ending in 1730 with him again in hiding, fleeing creditors months before his death. The volume is illustrated with examples of Defoe's letters, offering a fresh window onto Defoe's manuscript habits.

This book explores how states, scholars and other actors have justified war from early modernity to the present. Looking at narratives of the justification of war in theory and practice, this book offers a comprehensive investigation of the emergence of the modern international order and its normative foundation.