Amsterdam was, after London and Paris, the third largest city in early modern Europe, and was renowned throughout Europe for its widespread and visible prostitution. Delving deep into a wide range of sources, but making particular use of the transcripts of thousands of trials, The Burgher and the Whore reconstructs Amsterdam's whoredom in detail. The colourful and fascinating descriptions of the prostitutes, their bawds, their clients, and the police shed new light on the cultural, social, and economic conditions of the lives of poor women in a seafaring society. Lotte van de Pol explores how the vice trade was embedded in Amsterdam's society, economy, and judicial system, and how legislation and policing were shaped by misogynist attitudes towards women and fear of God's wrath and venereal diseases towards sex. The story concentrates on the people living at the margins of a rich metropolis, in which there was a large surplus of women, many of them poor immigrants with little prospect of marriage. Many changes are visible in the 150 years under scrutiny, including the view of prostitution from immorality to trade, and of prostitutes from whores and criminals to paupers. The result is a book that can be read as the history of the Dutch Golden Age from below.

Amsterdam was, after London and Paris, the third largest city in early modern Europe, and was renowned throughout Europe for its widespread and visible prostitution. Delving deep into a wide range of sources, but making particular use of the transcripts of thousands of trials, The Burgher and the Whore reconstructs Amsterdam's whoredom in detail. The colourful and fascinating descriptions of the prostitutes, their bawds, their clients, and the police shed new light on thecultural, social, and economic conditions of the lives of poor women in a seafaring society.Lotte van de Pol explores how the vice trade was embedded in Amsterdam's society, economy, and judicial system, and how legislation and policing were shaped by misogynist attitudes towards women and fear of God's wrath and venereal diseases towards sex. The story concentrates on the people living at the margins of a rich metropolis, in which there was a large surplus of women, many of them poor immigrants with little prospect of marriage. Many changes are visible in the 150 years underscrutiny, including the view of prostitution from immorality to trade, and of prostitutes from whores and criminals to paupers. The result is a book that can be read as the history of the Dutch Golden Age from below.

The Routledge History of Sex and the Body provides an overview of the main themes surrounding the history of sexuality from 1500 to the present day. The history of sex and the body is an expanding field in which vibrant debate on, for instance, the history of homosexuality, is developing. This book examines the current scholarship and looks towards future directions across the field. The volume is divided into fourteen thematic chapters, which are split into two chronological sections 1500 – 1750 and 1750 to present day. Focusing on the history of sexuality and the body in the West but also interactions with a broader globe, these thematic chapters survey the major areas of debate and discussion. Covering themes such as science, identity, the gaze, courtship, reproduction, sexual violence and the importance of race, the volume offers a comprehensive view of the history of sex and the body. The book concludes with an afterword in which the reader is invited to consider some of the ‘tensions, problems and areas deserving further scrutiny’. Including contributors renowned in their field of expertise, this ground-breaking collection is essential reading for all those interested in the history of sexuality and the body.

Urban power and politics are topics of abiding interest for students of the city. This exciting collection of essays explores how Europe’s cities have been governed across the last 500 years. Taken as a whole, it provides a unique historical overview of urban politics in early modern and modern Europe. At the same time, it guides the reader through the variety of ways in which power and governance are currently understood by historians and new directions in the subject. The essays are wide-ranging, covering Europe from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean, Russia to Ireland, between 1500 and the twentieth century. Each chapter employs a specific case-study to illuminate a way of examining how power worked in regard to topics such as women, popular culture or urban elites. A variety of approaches are deployed, including the study of ritual and performance, morality and conduct, governmentality and the state, infrastructure and the individual. Reflecting the state of the art in European urban history, the book is essential reading for anyone interested in the study of urban politics and government. It represents a fresh take on a rich subject and will stimulate a new generation of historical studies of power and the city.

Susanah Shaw Romney locates the foundations of the early modern Dutch empire in interpersonal transactions among women and men. As West India Company ships began sailing westward in the early seventeenth century, soldiers, sailors, and settlers drew on kin and social relationships to function within an Atlantic economy and the nascent colony of New Netherland. In the greater Hudson Valley, Dutch newcomers, Native American residents, and enslaved Africans wove a series of intimate networks that reached from the West India Company slave house on Manhattan, to the Haudenosaunee longhouses along the Mohawk River, to the inns and alleys of maritime Amsterdam. Using vivid stories culled from Dutch-language archives, Romney brings to the fore the essential role of women in forming and securing these relationships, and she reveals how a dense web of these intimate networks created imperial structures from the ground up. These structures were equally dependent on male and female labor and rested on small- and large-scale economic exchanges between people from all backgrounds. This work pioneers a new understanding of the development of early modern empire as arising out of personal ties.

By drawing on a broad range of disciplinary and cross-disciplinary expertise, this study addresses the history of emotions in relation to cross-cultural movement, exchange, contact, and changing connections in the later medieval and early modern periods. All essays in this volume focus on the performance and negotiation of identity in situations of cultural contact, with particular emphasis on emotional practices. They cover a wide range of thematic and disciplinary areas and are organized around the primary sources on which they are based. The edited volume brings together two major areas in contemporary humanities: the study of how emotions were understood, expressed, and performed in shaping premodern transcultural relations, and the study of premodern cultural movements, contacts, exchanges, and understandings as emotionally charged encounters. In discussing these hitherto separated historiographies together, this study sheds new light on the role of emotions within Europe and amongst non-Europeans and Europeans between 1100 and 1800. The discussion of emotions in a wide range of sources including letters, images, material culture, travel writing, and literary accounts makes Matters of Engagement an invaluable source for both scholars and students concerned with the history of premodern emotions.

Selling Sex in the City offers a worldwide analysis of prostitution since 1600. It analyses more than 20 cities with an important sex industry and compares policies and social trends, coercion and agency, but also prostitutes' working and living conditions.

Examination of the motif of the prodigal son as treated in early modern drama, from Shakespeare to Beaumont and Fletcher.

This is the first Handbook of the Reformations to include global Protestantism, and the most comprehensive Handbook on the development of Protestant practices which has been published so far. The volume brings together international scholars in the fields of theology, intellectual thought, and social and cultural history. Contributions focus on key themes, such as Martin Luther or the Swiss reformations, offering an up-to-date perspective on current scholarly debates, but they also address many new themes at the cutting edge of scholarship, with particularly emphasis on the history of emotions, the history of knowledge, and global history. This new approach opens up fresh perspectives onto important questions: how did Protestant ways of conceiving the divine shape everyday life, ideas of the feminine or masculine, commercial practices, politics, notions of temporality, or violence? The aim of this Handbook is to bring to life the vitality of Reformation ideas. In these ways, the Handbook stresses that the Protestant Reformations in all their variety, and with their important "radical" wings, must be understood as one of the lasting long-term historical transformations which changed Europe and, subsequently, significant parts of the world.

The early American legal system permeated the lives of colonists and reflected their sense of what was right and wrong, honorable and dishonorable, moral and immoral. In a compelling book full of the extraordinary stories of ordinary people, Elaine Forman Crane reveals the ways in which early Americans clashed with or conformed to the social norms established by the law. As trials throughout the country reveal, alleged malefactors such as witches, wife beaters, and whores, as well as debtors, rapists, and fornicators, were as much a part of the social landscape as farmers, merchants, and ministers. Ordinary people "made" law by establishing and enforcing informal rules of conduct. Codified by a handshake or over a mug of ale, such agreements became custom and custom became "law." Furthermore, by submitting to formal laws initiated from above, common folk legitimized a government that depended on popular consent to rule with authority. In this book we meet Marretie Joris, a New Amsterdam entrepreneur who sues Gabriel de Haes for calling her a whore; peer cautiously at Christian Stevenson, a Bermudian witch as bad "as any in the world;" and learn that Hannah Dyre feared to be alone with her husband—and subsequently died after a beating. We travel with Comfort Taylor as she crosses Narragansett Bay with Cuff, an enslaved ferry captain, whom she accuses of attempted rape, and watch as Samuel Banister pulls the trigger of a gun that kills the sheriff's deputy who tried to evict Banister from his home. And finally, we consider the promiscuous Marylanders Thomas Harris and Ann Goldsborough, who parented four illegitimate children, ran afoul of inheritance laws, and resolved matters only with the assistance of a ghost. Through the six trials she skillfully reconstructs here, Crane offers a surprising new look at how early American society defined and punished aberrant behavior, even as it defined itself through its legal system.