Products and services
When Maria de la Concepción boarded the ship out of Lisbon bound for Brazil, she never could have anticipated her eventual challenges. After providing an enslaved woman in Mexico with a love potion, Concepción was brought before the inquisition on sorcery charges in 1668. Two hundred and fifty years later, the extended Estevanovich family faced […]
Read MoreWhen Michel de Montaigne asked his famous question, “What do I know? (Qui sçay-je?)” in the longest of his essays, “An Apology for Raymond Sebond,” what he was asking was whether he could know God’s will with certainty, especially as it applied to the argument made by some Protestant and Catholic polemicists and even some […]
Read More
Buying furniture from IKEA often feels like a metaphor for European integration. The pieces arrive separately, the instructions are never quite as straightforward as they seem, and assembling the final product requires patience, compromise, and occasional frustration. The European Union has often been built in much the same way-not according to a single grand design, […]
Read More
A society’s true measure of success is its capacity to deal with failure. In the mid–seventeenth century, this is just what we can observe in the city of Amsterdam, at the time one of the world’s prime commercial hubs. In the early modern Dutch Republic, a set of legal, cultural, and institutional innovations resulted in […]
Read MoreWhen historians write about Jews in the Soviet Union during Stalin’s final years, the story is often framed almost entirely through repression. The destruction of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, the campaign against “cosmopolitans,” and the Doctors’ Plot have come to define what many scholars describe as the darkest chapter of Soviet Jewish history. My book, […]
Read More
On 10 May 1570, at the chateau of Dieppe in Normandy, a cloth-merchant was interrogated about the contents of a basket he was carrying, including thirty notes and letters ‘concealed in a bed of straw under cheeses’. This chance interception piqued my curiosity about the wider context of this episode, from where and to where, […]
Read More
General audiences are accustomed to imagining medieval culinary practices through those of the elites — in shows, films, and novels, where little attention is given to the habits of common people. Perhaps as a contrast to the material wealth of aristocrats, society tends to picture ordinary individuals from the Middle Ages as dirty and uncivilised, […]
Read More
‘The powerful ruler is today unable to steer the press in his directions simply through his will. Words of command echo as empty calls in the empire of typesetting and rotation machines,’ observed the Fränkischer Kurier on 14 July 1906. When media celebrities-turned-politicians Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky bring us live reality TV from the […]
Read MoreKeep up with the latest from Cambridge University Press on our social media accounts.
