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What is a ‘Companion’ for?

Professor Sir John Elliott is surely the most distinguished Anglophone historian of early modern Spain and its empire; and his mastery of that topic has enabled him to make an equally distinguished contribution to our understanding of Europe as a whole between the 15th and 18th centuries.

In Britain today, alcohol is a topic of concern to the government, media, and academics alike. The papers tell of ‘Binge Britain’, and academics inform us that there is a new kind of drinking and intoxication that attracts young people to our city centres.

There can surely have been few other books in Asian Studies and certainly not in South East Asian Studies in recent years that have been as widely anticipated as James C. Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Southeast Asia (Yale University Press, 2009).

Jonathan Spangler’s study of the Lorraine dynasty in France (and occasionally outside the kingdom) is an ambitious undertaking.

David Rollison has written a remarkable work of social and political history: vertiginously ambitious, A Commonwealth of the People showcases England’s constitutional and economic development from the 11th to the 17th century within world histories of nationalism, democratization, and globalization. ‘My subject’, he writes, ‘is the emergence of a “civilization”’ (p. 16).

Large encyclopaedias linked to online subscription websites which are continually updated seem fashionable today, whether in the high powered form of the Dictionary of National Biography in the UK or more commercialised enterprises like Wiley-Blackwell’s International Encyclopaedia of Revolution and Protest.

The Rituals and Rhetoric of Queenship; Medieval to Early Modern is a collection of papers which originated in a conference held at Canterbury Christ Church University in August 2006.

Wounds, Flesh, and Metaphor in Seventeenth-Century England is a wide-ranging study that examines the metaphor of woundedness within and across political, legal, religious and literary texts.

What can we know about late-medieval, pre-Reformation English parliaments? Previous to this book, only a few secondary scatterings. The English Parliaments of Henry VII 1485–1504, therefore, pulls this topic together, gives synthesis to such scattered references, and then thoroughly researches and documents extant bits and pieces from contemporary primary evidence.