Because he had the courage to make his passionate protest against a worldwide terror, Castellios feud with Calvin must remain everlastingly memorable Stefan Zweig saw sixteenth-century Geneva as a place gripped by heresy-hunting fanaticism and raging ideologies of violence. A world in which free-thinking humanists too often foresaw, and failed to protest, the disasters that draconian leaders would bring upon Europe. Theologian and writer Sebastian Castellio, however, did condemn the burning of heretics as murder and advocated for religious tolerance, at great personal cost. Written in 1936 when Zweig himself had just fled the rise of Nazism, The Right to Heresy is the story of Castellios feud with Calvinist doctrine, and an urgent polemic on individual sacrifices made, throughout history, in resistance to authoritarianism.
From rumours of lost Amazonian cities of gold to the silver running through the mountains of Bolivia, hopes for dazzling wealth fuelled the imperial fantasies of the Tudors and Stuarts. But while stories of treasure ships and privateers like Walter Raleigh have become entrenched in national myths - what did Elizabethans actually know about Mexico, the Amazon rainforest, or the Chesapeake? How did Indigenous people and knowledge enter the art, fashion, and literature of Shakespeares time - and at what cost?A Golden World illuminates how the Americas became a visible and material presence in English culture, through a range of unexpected objects: from tobacco leaves strewn in playhouses to a boy wearing a pearl earring. Award-winning historian Lauren Working presents an altogether new history of the golden age of 16th century England, that considers the desire for power, land and resources in the first era of colonization, alongside the craft and labour of those in the Americas who contributed to the English Renaissance as we know it.
Women in the Middle Ages led fascinating and often wildly differing everyday lives, depending on their social class and family situation. Yet their wealth of experience has long been obscured and overshadowed by the experiences of men, with history books often relegating women to a single, catchall chapter, as if their lives formed a unified story.While a number of medieval women have claimed biographers attention, they tend to be the exceptional figures who broke the mould. What, then, of the countless others who were not exceptional and who did not blaze a new trail? How did their family lives and the constraints imposed upon them influence the ways in which they lived, worked, rejoiced, grieved and shaped their world?The Family Lives of Medieval Women turns the spotlight on these women and examines how the concept of family impacted every aspect of their existence, whatever their social class. It draws us into bustling towns and rural villages, into courts and castles, to meet secular women of every standing and learn about their lived experiences. For the first time, the full spectrum of the female familial experience is considered, illuminating the lives of medieval women with the depth, nuance and humanity they have always deserved.