Donald L. Brake quantifies the legacy of this remarkable tome's unique place in history. The 1611 King James Version is the cornerstone and linchpin for all subsequent English translations. He vividly portrays the quality of this seventeenth-century translation as that of precision, enchantment, and passion of a sacred book that has shaped human history for more than two thousand years. He recounts details that emphasize its use of a metric style and rhythm generating a lyrical masterpiece with a compelling resonance for public reading. The KJV's mastery of English expression and its seemingly endless staying power is unparalleled among modern versions. Using thorough comparisons of editions and versions, the author has researched the KJV with the goal of an honest and reasoned approach to the ever-debated value of the popular, but outdated Authorized Version. Brake's study prompted him to do a worldwide census of surviving 1611 "He" Bibles (identified from Ruth 3:15: ". . . and he went into the city."). His purpose was to establish a pedigree of sorts by recording for each copy an exhaustive description eliminating much of the risk of confusion in identifying the nearly 200 extant copies. He cautions that the value of any original KJV depends on a positive identification of authenticity. Brake's work confirms the premise that the literary merits and conscientious translation of a seventeenth-century book has profound twenty-first century relevance.

This book focuses on why the diffusion of the political theology of royal wisdom created “Solomonic” princes with intellectual interests all around the medieval West and how these learned rulers changed the face of Western Europe through their policies and the cultural power of medieval monarchy. Princely wisdom narratives have been seen simply as a tool of royal propaganda in the Middle Ages but these narratives were much more than propaganda, being rather a coherent ideology which transformed princely courts, shaped mentalities, and influenced key political decisions. This cultural power of medieval monarchy was channelled mainly through princely patronage of learning and the arts, but the rise of administrative monarchy and its bureaucracy are equally related to these policies. This can only be understood through a cultural approach to the history of medieval politics, that is, a history of the relationship between knowledge and power in the Middle Ages, a topic much analyzed regarding the medieval church but sometimes neglected in the princely sphere. This volume is a study that supplies an important comparative study of the reception in princely courts of a key aspect of European medieval civilization: The ideal of Christian sapiential rulership and its corollary, rationality in government. This volume is essential reading for students and scholars interested in understanding the medieval roots of the cultural process which gave rise to the modern state.

This science fiction novel explores the solar systems of Core, Tharcaniah, Karphaxi, and Shagra.

On the history, themes, genres, manufacture and decoration of Malay manuscripts from Indonesia and Malaysia, based on the collection of the Centre for Malay Manuscripts of the National Library of Malaysia.

This fascinating new look at the artistic legacy of the Tudors reveals the dynasty’s enduring influence on the arts of Renaissance England and beyond. Ruling successively from 1485 through 1603, the five Tudor monarchs brought seismic changes to England that reverberated throughout Europe. They used the arts to legitimize and glorify their tumultuous rule, from Henry VII’s bloody rise to power, through Henry VIII’s breach with the Roman Catholic Church, to the reign of the “Virgin Queen” Elizabeth I. With incisive scholarship and sumptuous new photography, this book explores the extreme politics and outsize personalities of the Tudors, and how they used art in their diplomacy at home and abroad. Tudor courts were truly cosmopolitan, attracting top artists and artisans from across Europe. At the same time, the Tudors nurtured local talent and gave rise to a distinctly English aesthetic, one that is forever connected to the myth and visual legacy of their dynasty. The Tudors reveals the true history behind a family that has long captured the public imagination, bringing to life their extravagant and politically precarious world through the exquisite paintings, lush textiles, gleaming metalwork, and countless luxury objects that adorned their spectacular courts.

This book is a landmark study of Shakespeare’s politics as revealed in his later History Plays. It offers the first ever survey of anti-monarchism in Western literature, history and philosophy, tracked from Hesiod and Homer through to contemporaries of Shakespeare such as George Buchanan and the authors of the Mirror for Magistrates, thus demonstrating that anxiety over monarchic power, and contemptuous demolitions of kingship as a disastrously irrational institution, formed an important and irremovable body of reflection in prestigious Western writing. Overturning the widespread assumption that "Elizabethans believed in divine right monarchy", it exposits the anti-monarchic critique built into Shakespeare’s Histories and Marlowe’s Massacre at Paris, in five chapters of close literary critical readings, paying innovative attention to performance values. Part Two focuses Queen Elizabeth’s principal challenger for national rule: the Earl of Essex, England’s most popular man. It demonstrates from detailed readings that, far from being an admirer of the war-crazed, unstable, bi-polar Essex, as is regularly asserted, Shakespeare launched in Richard II and Henry IV a campaign to puncture the reputation of the great earl, exposing him as a Machiavel seeking Elizabeth’s throne. Shakespeare emerges as a humane and clear-sighted critic of the follies intrinsic to dynastic monarchy: yet hostile, likewise, to the rash militarist, Essex, who would fling England into permanent war against Spain. Founded on an unprecedented and wide-ranging study of anti-monarchist thought, this book presents a significant contribution to Shakespeare and Marlowe criticism, studies of Tudor England, and the history of ideas.