Acclaimed writer and historian Noel Malcolm presents his sensational discovery of a new work by Thomas Hobbes: a propaganda pamphlet on behalf of the Habsburg side in the Thirty Years' War, translated by Hobbes from a Latin original. Malcolm's book explores a fascinating episode in 17th century history.

Acclaimed writer and historian Noel Malcolm presents his sensational discovery of a new work by Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679): a propaganda pamphlet on behalf of the Habsburg side in the Thirty Years' War, translated by Hobbes from a Latin original. Malcolm's book explores a fascinating episode in seventeenth-century history, illuminating both the practice of early modern propaganda and the theory of "reason of state".

The Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) remains a puzzling and complex subject for students and scholars alike. This is hardly surprising since it is often contested among historians whether it is actually appropriate to speak of a single war or a series of conflicts. Similarly emphasis is also put on the different motives for going to war, as conflicting religious and political interests were involved. This research companion brings together leading scholars in the field to synthesize the range of existing research on the war, which is still fragmented and divided along national historical lines, and to further explore the complexities of the conflict using an innovative comparative approach. The companion is designed to provide scholars and graduate students with a comprehensive and authoritative overview of research on one of the most destructive conflicts in European history.

London's News Press shows that seventeenth-century England was very much part of a European-wide news community. The book presents a new print history that looks across Europe and the interconnecting political and religious groups with international networks. It tells the story of which printers and publishers were engaged in the earliest, illicit publications, their sources and connections in Germany as well as the Netherlands, and the way legitimacy was achieved. These were the earliest printed periodical news publications. Periodicity and its implications for trade and customers is explored as well as the roles of publishers and editors. The period saw a much bigger circulation of news than had ever been experienced before. The book also describes the lively nature of relationships that ensued between news networkers (editors, writers and readers along the interconnecting chains). The subject is topical. Our understanding of reading and communications is undergoing major changes through the introduction of the internet and the real time transmission of moving pictures. James I and Charles I faced new media and an unprecedented growth in informed public opinion fuelled by a flow of information that was essentially beyond the reach of government control. So there are parallels with the contemporary struggle to adapt, and there is a corresponding growth in the publication of history books reflecting upon the origins of the public sphere and the development of public opinion. JAYNE E. E. BOYS is an independent scholar who lives in Suffolk.

Public Offices, Personal Demands presents a novel perspective on European politics in the seventeenth-century. Its focus lies on the Dutch Republic, that surprising anomaly, often described as a miracle or enigma, admired by many during this age. This collection of essays explores one of the most fundamental questions of seventeenth-century governance: what makes a person capable for office? Contemporary viewpoints are discussed by a range of scholars from different historical disciplines. As this volume shows, debates about capability and office-holding were by no means restricted to political theorists. Scientists, citizens and merchants all discussed these matters in a similar vein. Nor was this heated discussion about who was fit govern a typically Dutch phenomenon. Because of its multifaceted and international approach, this book will appeal to both scholars and students in the fields of cultural and social history, the history of political thought, the history of early modern politics, and the history of science.

This historically embedded treatment of theoretical debates about prerogative and reason of state spans over four centuries of constitutional development. Commencing with the English Civil War and the constitutional theories of Hobbes and the Republicans, it moves through eighteenth-century arguments over jealousy of trade and commercial reason of state to early imperial concerns and the nineteenth-century debate on the legislative empire, to martial law and twentieth-century articulations of the state at the end of empire. It concludes with reflections on the contemporary post-imperial security state. The book synthesises a wealth of theoretical and empirical literature that allows a link to be made between the development of constitutional ideas and global realpolitik. It exposes the relationship between internal and external pressures and designs in the making of the modern constitutional polity and explores the relationship between law, politics and economics in a way that remains rare in constitutional scholarship.