This essay focuses on provincial libel cases between private individuals tried at the court of Star Chamber during early seventeenth century. Libelling saw personal scandals creatively couched in verses, visual symbols, or mock-ceremonies, and read, sung, posted modern communities. identifies a range ‘manners’ libel, compares libellous ‘Stage plaie’ to set mock-proclamations ‘book’ playing card...

The early modern emphasis on tradition is perhaps clearest in the history of women during this period, as at the core of each culture was an ingrained patriarchy dating back thousands of years. In the West, for example, attitudes towards women were shaped by three strains of ancient European tradition: first, Judeo-Christian belief, which characterized women as either saintly, like the Virgin M...

Abstract The early modern fairy is a long ignored transgender figure. This article presents transhistoricist analysis of how range “transgender” concepts manifest in the literary imagination—instabilities, transformations, ambiguities, or indeterminacies sex and gender—through representation fairies supernatural. It focuses on Ariel Shakespeare's Tempest, Duessa Spenser's Faerie Queene, Jocastu...

This paper studies the evolutions of tax morale in Spain in the post-Franco era. Tax morale, defined as the intrinsic motivation to pay taxes, might be a key determinant of the actual degree of tax compliance in a country. But despite its potential significance, most studies in the previous literature have treated tax morale as an exogenous residual. In contrast to the previous tax compliance l...

Casebooks are the richest sources that we have for encounters between early modern medical practitioners and their patients. This article compares astrological and medical records across two centuries, focused on England, and charts developments in the ways in which practitioners kept records and reflected on their practices. Astrologers had a long history of working from particular moments, st...

The evidence of the preceding sections makes it clear that the Greek language underwent considerable development and change from the time Greek speakers first entered the Balkans in the 2nd millennium BC up through the Hellenistic era. However, it is important to realize that languages are like living organisms, in that they continually change and evolve; thus, Greek did not stop at the form it...

In this article, Ramy Youssef compares historically varying structures and semantics of world political status competition. Early modern rankings that represent the royal titles, or states, respectively, serve as empirical material. It is shown competition in early period can neither semantically nor structurally be distinguished from conflicts, whereas politics framed a distinct social relatio...

Imagine this scenario: Picasso, an innovator of early twentieth-century modern art, is sitting in his studio in France in the 1950s. He has just received unsettling news from Spain. General Franco, the autocratic dictator long despised by Picasso, has given a nationally broadcast speech in which he praised the artist effusively. This bulletin alone, while distasteful, is not what is troubling h...