This chapter proposes that early modern women essayists invoked anger to negotiate new modes of publicity in the nascent public sphere. By reading the writings of Jane Anger, Rachel Speght, and Margaret Cavendish alongside the history of humanist education, it shows that anger’s original object was not misogyny writ large, but the rhetorical training that limited women’s access to privileged protocols of speaking and writing. By the end of the early modern period, it argues, anger dissipates as the rise of salon conversation and letter writing expand the field in which literacy can be displayed, weakening rhetoric’s grip on the republic of letters.

The Introduction sets out the study’s main claims and methodological approach and explains the wide use in this study of the term ’mimetic ethical exercises’. In the process, it explains the distinction drawn in this study between ethics and religious morality. Finally, the Introduction addresses the question of genre and theatricality when studying early modern examples of English revenge plays and explains what is unique about the plays selected for analysis.

This chapter offers a historical power analysis from the Saxons to the end of Pitt the Younger’s premiership. In the liminal premiership, the ‘key’ minister/advisor behind the monarch, or Oliver Cromwell during the republic, had serious power, but cannot be considered a prime minister as their power was wholly dependent on the monarch, and the complex machinations of court politics. The important innovation is how the role of ‘lead’ minister developed, with the monarch’s agreement, into the more independent ‘prime’ minister. We contend that only with Robert Walpole’s accession to the office did the power of prime minister become apparent, the primary reason being the monarch’s (George I) reliance on Walpole to control Parliament for spending and the protection of the monarch’s power. However, it was only with Pitt the Younger’s premiership, which truly established more formal parts of the office – particularly the Treasury, the state/economy and the Cabinet – that we see the beginnings of the modern office we know today.

This chapter looks at what the Geniza archives tell us about Cairo’s community’s relationship with the Nile. Since its discovery by scholars in the late nineteenth century, this large and unique corpus of medieval and early modern manuscripts has allowed scholars to access part of the quotidian experience of Cairo’s – and to a wider degree Egypt’s – Jewish communities over centuries. It also documents their integration within transnational and diasporic webs that, just like Egypt’s agricultural surpluses, extended to Palestine and the wider Mediterranean. As is shown, the letters preserved in the Geniza complement, and at times disrupt, literary evidence. They notably do so by evoking a medieval world in which real disaster was perhaps never far away, and where the Nile, its waters, floods and promises or denial of sustenance, were always in view.

Cartography can help us understand how European knowledge of the topography and toponymy of the Delta has evolved over the centuries; however, we must be aware of the intellectual, social, religious and economic conditions under which maps were produced. Their content is far from exclusively geographic and the same map could show many levels of miscellaneous knowledge. Often, no European traveller had ever seen the cities drawn on the map. Consequently, before the nineteenth century, maps of Egypt and the Delta were unstable and contradictory – different maps expressed different Deltas, different representations of the world. The maps discussed in this chapter will paint a picture – a necessarily uncertain, shifting and composite picture – of knowledge acquired on the north of Egypt. This chapter will hopefully be a useful tool for understanding the evolution of European knowledge of the Delta and the research conducted in different places. By providing a list of the main documents, both cartographic and textual, relevant to the evolution of the cartography of the Delta, I hope to make place-specific research possible for those who wish it. It will also allow us to better understand what a thirteenth- or eighteenth-century map can say and not say.

Anke Charton takes the backstory of the canario, a baroque court dance, as an example to consider mixed methods in historiographic work. Marginalized knowledges, in particular, benefit from such an approach. Performance practices that have left few conventional traces behind can be explored more thoroughly if those traces are queried from different perspectives: reading archival sources against the grain, drawing on positionality, and engaging multiple temporal frameworks. The case of the canario illustrates the additional challenge – true for much of early modern Western theatre history – of working with a later, superimposed narrative that obscures an earlier, less-documented practice.

Japan between 1573 and 1651 underwent massive political and social transformation. The warlord Oda Nobunaga began the process of reunifying the archipelago after nearly a century of civil war, a process that was completed by his junior ally Toyotomi Hideyoshi. More conflict, both domestic and international, led to a third warlord, Tokugawa Ieyasu, positioning himself and his family as the new dynasty of military leaders who ruled a thoroughly pacified Japan beginning in 1603. His son, the second shogun Tokugawa Hidetada, and grandson, the third shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu, successively overcame diverse barriers to Tokugawa hegemony and incrementally established the early modern system that is often anachronistically assumed to have begun with Ieyasu. Their emphasis on pageantry, political immobility, strict control of borders, persecution of independent religion, and the constant threat of violence defined Tokugawa rule and allowed a fragile peace to persist until the mid-nineteenth century.

Rising literacy, urbanization, and leisure time in early modern Japan led to increasing popular interaction with politics. This chapter, after confirming the basic political apparatus of the Tokugawa state, demonstrates how the governance carried out within that apparatus interacted with increasingly vibrant expressions of political opinion from outside the state. From erudite Confucian analysis to popular riot and lewd graffiti, this chapter argues that public political opinion and action both influenced and at times was courted by the shogunal government. Political discussions in salon and popular culture outside the state introduced key new political ideas which transformed the ideal of governance in Japan from a minimalist concept of military domination and agricultural facilitation to a much more comprehensive vision of general welfare and development.

The Introduction sets the scene for a reassessment of the transformative reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII (1485–1547). It addresses recent treatments of this period as the threshold between the late-medieval and early modern worlds, associated only with the growth of monarchical power. As this book reveals, a formalised system for dispensing royal justice emerged under the first two Tudor monarchs. The engagements between sovereign and subjects it facilitated provide insight into how a vulnerable regime was legitimised. Analysis of this point of contact in the following chapters proceeds through three frameworks. First is the administrative-history approach central to mid-twentieth-century scholarship on this period, which this study revives but also revises. Second is the emphasis on litigation to the Crown as a means of state–society cohesion in histories of the Elizabethan and Stuart ages, projected into earlier decades and given greater practical definition in this book. Third is the overlooked presence of contention within royal justice, given full assessment in the present study and crucial to understanding why this jurisdiction was dissolved in 1641.

This Conclusion resituates the book’s reconstruction of the early Tudor Court of Requests within the broader scope of late medieval and early modern history. Royal justice was a constant, and constantly controversial, element of English government across these periods. Social demand for more flexible and authoritative dispute resolution, combined with the political expediency of displaying good governance in turbulent times, led successive regimes to further routinise the existing practices of justice-giving in the royal household. Here the rise of the new royal justice system is taken to its conclusion, with the dissolution of this jurisdiction on the eve of Civil War, in 1641. This episode epitomises the complex relationship between principles and practices that has been charted across this book. Returning to the three themes raised in the Introduction, the book concludes with some reflections on the value of interweaving political, social, and legal histories together: for strengthening both institutional and socio-legal studies, and for qualifying existing narratives about litigation as a pillar of state-formation.

This chapter traces the modern reception of the Sophists from their rediscovery in the Latin West to the first edition of Hermann Diels’ Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (1903). Its focus is the Sophists’ uncertain place in the historiography of Greek philosophy, in relation both to the “Presocratics” and to Socrates and the Socratic tradition. The “Sophists” emerge as an historiographical category in the late eighteenth century and become pivotal in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s (1770–1831) systematic account of philosophy’s development. Eduard Zeller (1814–1908), his key successor, revises but also reinforces the still dominant Hegelian narrative. The chapter also discusses two outsiders to the German historiographical tradition, George Grote (1794–1871) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), who challenge the Sophists’ assimilation to progressivist views of Greek philosophy, but from radically different perspectives.