Kensington Palace is now most famous as the former home of Diana, Princess of Wales, but the palace's glory days came between 1714 and 1760, during the reigns of George I and II . In the eighteenth century, this palace was a world of skulduggery, intrigue, politicking, etiquette, wigs, and beauty spots, where fans whistled open like switchblades and unusual people were kept as curiosities. Lucy Worsley's The Courtiers charts the trajectory of the fantastically quarrelsome Hanovers and the last great gasp of British court life. Structured around the paintings of courtiers and servants that line the walls of the King's Staircase of Kensington Palace-paintings you can see at the palace today-The Courtiers goes behind closed doors to meet a pushy young painter, a maid of honor with a secret marriage, a vice chamberlain with many vices, a bedchamber woman with a violent husband, two aging royal mistresses, and many more. The result is an indelible portrait of court life leading up to the famous reign of George III , and a feast for both Anglophiles and lovers of history and royalty.

First Enoch is an ancient Judean work that inaugurated the genre of apocalypse. Chapters 1-36 tell the story of the descent of angels called "Watchers" from heaven to earth to marry human women before the time of the flood, the chaos that ensued, and God's response. They also relate the journeying of the righteous scribe Enoch through the cosmos, guided by angels. Heaven, including the place and those who dwell there (God, the angels, and Enoch), plays a central role in the narrative. But how should heaven be understood? Existing scholarship, which presupposes "Judaism" as the appropriate framework, views the Enochic heaven as reflecting the temple in Jerusalem, with God's house replicating its architecture and the angels and Enoch functioning like priests. Yet recent research shows the Judeans constituted an ethnic group, and this view encourages a fresh examination of 1 Enoch 1-36. The actual model for heaven proves to be a king in his court surrounded by his courtiers. The major textual features are explicable in this perspective, whereas the temple-and-priests model is unconvincing. The author was a member of a nontemple, scribal group in Judea that possessed distinctive astronomical knowledge, promoted Enoch as its exemplar, and was involved in the wider sociopolitical world of their time.

Courtiers of the Marble Palace explores how law clerks are hired and utilized by United States Supreme Court justices.

"This collection of essays reveals the Ming court as an arena of competition and negotiation, where a large cast of actors pursued individual and corporate ends, personal agency shaped protocol and style, and diverse people, goods, and tastes converged. Rather than observing an immutable set of traditions, court culture underwent frequent reinterpretation and rearticulation, processes driven by immediate personal imperatives, mediated through social, political, and cultural interaction.The essays address several common themes. First, they rethink previous notions of imperial isolation, instead stressing the court’s myriad ties both to local Beijing society and to the empire as a whole. Second, the court was far from monolithic or static. Palace women, monks, craftsmen, educators, moralists, warriors, eunuchs, foreign envoys, and others strove to advance their interests and forge advantageous relations with the emperor and one another. Finally, these case studies illustrate the importance of individual agency. The founder’s legacy may have formed the warp of court practices and tastes, but the weft varied considerably. Reflecting the complexity of the court, the essays represent a variety of perspectives and disciplines—from intellectual, cultural, military, and political to art history and musicology."

"The Courtiers Anatomists" is about dead bodies and live animals in Louis XIV s Paris. By exploring the practice of seventeenth-century anatomy, Anita Guerrini reveals how animals were central to collecting, describing, and classifyingnatural historyand how anatomy and natural history were linked through animal dissection and vivisection. She looks at the early modern animal project, and particularly at Joseph-Guichard Duverney and Claude Perrault, in the context of the court, the city of Paris, and burgeoning audiences for natural history. The Academy and the King s Garden were the two main sites in Paris for the performance of natural history, and much of the Scientific Revolution in France played itself out in these two public institutions. Fascinating stories are culled in "The Courtiers Anatomists" to explore the relationships between empiricism and theory, human and animal, the origins of the natural history museum and modern science, and the relationship between science and other cultural activities including art, music, and literature. This book will be warmly welcomed by historians of science, medicine, and France, as well as by early modernists and many others in the growing field of animal studies."