History - Modern - 17th Century

A highly influential figure in the Age of Enlightenment in England and France, whose works helped inspire the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, John Locke was one of the most important political theorists in Western history. In The Second Treatise of Government,...

Europe in 1618 was riven between Protestants and Catholics, Bourbon and Hapsburg--as well as empires, kingdoms, and countless principalities. After angry Protestants tossed three representatives of the Holy Roman Empire out the window of the royal castle in Prague, world war spread from Bohemia...

A deadly continental struggle, the Thirty Years War devastated seventeenth-century Europe, killing nearly a quarter of all Germans and laying waste to towns and countryside alike. Peter Wilson offers the first new history in a generation of a horrifying conflict that transformed the map...

An award-winning historian's examination of impossible events at the dawn of modernity and of their enduring significance "Historically rich and superbly written."--David J. Davis, Wall Street Journal Shortlisted for the International Society for Science and Religion Book Prize Accounts of seemingly impossible phenomena abounded...

An award-winning historian's examination of impossible events at the dawn of modernity and of their enduring significance "Historically rich and superbly written."--David J. Davis, Wall Street Journal Shortlisted for the International Society for Science and Religion Book Prize Accounts of seemingly impossible phenomena abounded...

"This is the most authoritative and highly literate account of these pernicious people that I have ever read."--Patrick O'Brian "[A] wonderfully entertaining history of pirates and piracy . . . a rip-roaring read . . . fascinating and unexpected."--Men's Journal This rollicking account of...

A revelatory account of sexual nonconformity and radical religious dissent in Renaissance Italy, drawing on never-before-studied Inquisition trials. Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, a series of highly controversial Inquisition trials took place throughout the Italian peninsula. The defendants were all accused of the...