In medieval and early modern Europe, marriage treaties were a perennial feature of the diplomatic landscape. In After Lavinia, John Watkins traces the history of the practice, focusing on the unusually close relationship between diplomacy and literary production in Western Europe from antiquity through the seventeenth...

Hilde Lindemann Nelson focuses on the stories of groups of people-including Gypsies, mothers, nurses, and transsexuals-whose identities have been defined by those with the power to speak for them and to constrain the scope of their actions. By placing...

This lively and learned book traces the history of the concept of evil and its personification as the Devil from ancient times to the period of the New Testament and across cultures and civilizations.

Our lives are increasingly on display in public, but the ethical issues involved in presenting such revelations remain largely unexamined. How can life writing do good, and how can it cause harm? The eleven essays here explore such questions.

Family, Sex, and Faith is the first systematic examination probing what the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) teaches and how believers respond to its messages regarding issues such as marriage, divorce, contraception, abortion, husband/wife relations, and LGBT .

Historians of early modern Europe have long stressed how new practices of diplomacy that emerged during the period transformed European politics. Fictions of Embassy is the first book to examine the cultural implications of the rise of modern...