This book offers thirteen case studies from premodern and contemporary Europe that demonstrate the process through which political corporations-bodies politic-were and continue to be constructed and challenged.

Scholars have long argued over whether the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which ended more than a century of religious conflict arising from the Protestant Reformations, inaugurated the modern sovereign-state system. But they largely ignore a more fundamental question: why did the emergence of new forms of religious heterodoxy during the Reformations spark such violent upheaval and nearly topple the old political order? In this book, Daniel Nexon demonstrates that the answer lies in understanding how the mobilization of transnational religious movements intersects with--and can destabilize--imperial forms of rule. Taking a fresh look at the pivotal events of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries--including the Schmalkaldic War, the Dutch Revolt, and the Thirty Years' War--Nexon argues that early modern "composite" political communities had more in common with empires than with modern states, and introduces a theory of imperial dynamics that explains how religious movements altered Europe's balance of power. He shows how the Reformations gave rise to crosscutting religious networks that undermined the ability of early modern European rulers to divide and contain local resistance to their authority. In doing so, the Reformations produced a series of crises in the European order and crippled the Habsburg bid for hegemony. Nexon's account of these processes provides a theoretical and analytic framework that not only challenges the way international relations scholars think about state formation and international change, but enables us to better understand global politics today.

Anthropological archaeology and other disciplines concerned with the formation of early complex societies are undergoing a theoretical shift. Given the need for new directions in theory, the book proposes that anthropologists look to political science, especially the rational choice theory of collective action. The authors subject collective action theory to a methodologically rigorous evaluation using systematic cross-cultural analysis based on a world-wide sample of societies.

Nations are not trapped by their pasts, but events that happened hundreds or even thousands of years ago continue to exert huge influence on present-day politics. If we are to understand the politics that we now take for granted, we need to understand its origins. Francis Fukuyama examines the paths that different societies have taken to reach their current forms of political order. This book starts with the very beginning of mankind and comes right up to the eve of the French and American revolutions, spanning such diverse disciplines as economics, anthropology and geography. The Origins of Political Order is a magisterial study on the emergence of mankind as a political animal, by one of the most eminent political thinkers writing today.

In this book the beauty and meaning of Byzantine art and its aesthetics are for the first time made accessible through the original sources. More than 150 medieval texts are translated from nine medieval languages into English, with commentaries from over seventy leading scholars. These include theories of art, discussions of patronage and understandings of iconography, practical recipes for artistic supplies, expressions of devotion, and descriptions of cities. The volume reveals the cultural plurality and the interconnectivity of medieval Europe and the Mediterranean from the late eleventh to the early fourteenth centuries. The first part uncovers salient aspects of Byzantine artistic production and its aesthetic reception, while the second puts a spotlight on particular ways of expressing admiration and of interpreting of the visual.

In vormodernen Monarchien beobachten wir Widerspruch und Widerstand gegen einzelne Herrscher, ihre politischen Entscheidungen und ihre Verwaltung, aber in der Regel keine direkten Angriffe auf die Ordnungsprinzipien und das politische System. Wenn Unzufriedenheit zu Aufständen und Revolten führten, blieb es normalerweise bei einem bloßen Austausch des Regenten. Subtilere Methoden der Herrscherkritik konnten sich mittels fester Usancen oder spezifischer Codes und Spielregeln innerhalb des legalen Rahmens Gehör verschaffen und zielten darauf ab, die Qualitäten des Regenten zu verbessern oder spezifische Modi der Amtsführung zu reformieren. Diese verschiedenen Formen und Praktiken von Herrscherkritik in vormodernen monarchischen Gesellschaften sind Gegenstand dieses Bandes. When looking at pre-modern monarchical societies, one does not expect to observe fundamental dissent directed at the social order as such or at the political system. As a rule, criticism was limited to individual monarchs, their performance and decisions. While discontent could lead to insurrection and rebellion, which normally only culminated in the ruler being replaced by another monarchical figurehead, the subtler methods of voicing criticism were applied within a framework of legality, of a set of customs or of a code of rules of the game and intended to improve the performance of the incumbent or reform his conduct at court. The various forms of verbal or staged censure of rulers in pre-modern monarchical societies are the subject of this volume.

Text and Textuality in Early Medieval Iberia is a study of the functions and conceptions of writing and reading, documentation and archives, and the role of literate authorities in the Christian kingdoms of the northern Iberian Peninsula between the Muslim conquest of 711 and the fall of the Islamic caliphate at Córdoba in 1031. Based on the first complete survey of the over 4,000 surviving Latin charters from the period, it is an essay in the archaeology and biography of text: part one concerns materiality, tracing the lifecycle of charters from initiation and composition to preservation and reuse, while part two addresses connectivity, delineating a network of texts through painstaking identification of more than 2,000 citations of other charters, secular and canon law, the Bible, liturgy, and monastic rules. Few may have been able to read or write, yet the extent of textuality was broad and deep, in the authority conferred upon text and the arrangements made to use it. Via charter and scribe, society and social arrangements came increasingly to be influenced by norms originating from a network of texts. By profiling the intersection and interaction of text with society and culture, Graham Barrett reconstructs textuality, how the authority of the written and the structures to access it framed and constrained actions and cultural norms, and proposes a new model of early medieval reading. As they cited other texts, charters circulated fragments of those texts; we must rethink the relationship of sources and audiences to reflect fragmentary transmission, in a textuality of imperfect knowledge.

The first systematic study of the practice of royal self-coronations from late antiquity to the present.

The first comparative study of royal childhood and child kingship, revealing the fundamental role they played in medieval rulership.

'The Open Access publishing costs of this volume were covered by the Dutch Research Council (NWO), Veni-project “Leaving a Lasting Impression. The Impact of Incunabula on Late Medieval Spirituality, Religious Practice and Visual Culture in the Low Countries” (grant number 275-30-036).' This volume explores various approaches to study vernacular books and reading practices across Europe in the 15th-16th centuries. Through a shared focus on the material book as an interface between producers and users, the contributors investigate how book producers conceived of their target audiences and how these vernacular books were designed and used. Three sections highlight connections between vernacularity and materiality from distinct perspectives: real and imagined readers, mobility of texts and images, and intermediality. The volume brings contributions on different regions, languages, and book types into dialogue. Contributors include Heather Bamford, Tillmann Taape, Stefan Matter, Suzan Folkerts, Karolina Mroziewicz, Martha W. Driver, Alexa Sand, Elisabeth de Bruijn, Katell Lavéant, Margriet Hoogvliet, and Walter S. Melion.