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In this book, Jennifer Evans presents a detailed and stimulating insight into a thus far neglected area of medical treatment in early modern England. She shows comprehensively that aphrodisiacs wer...

This article explores the ambiguities of corruption in the context of two early modern cities: Amsterdam and Hamburg. Both cities were, in the parlance of the time, republics and both were self-governing. In each city, as in early modern polities more generally, corruption was a fraught issue. Indeed, its very meaning defies easy definition. Nineteenth-century perceptions of "corruption" have greatly influenced the ways in which historians have located and spoken about corruption often to the detriment of grasping its contemporary significance. Even in cities such as Amsterdam and Hamburg, which had much in common, politics and therefore also corruption, differed. This close study of Amsterdam and Hamburg does not necessarily produce the material for a global model to understand corruption in the early modern world, or even in early modern "republics" more generally. Instead, it proposes a flexible framework that commands an approach rather than sets conclusions or offers predictability. It is furthermore a method predicated on a meticulous probing of peculiar circumstances, local practices, unique structures, and even personalities for as long as government remained (mostly) dependent on decisions made in individual cases and on individual events. In situations where the discrete existence of "private" and "public" goods and needs remained inchoate at best, and politicking remained highly individualized, modern definitions of corruption, forcefully shaped as they are by nineteenth-century historiography, can only lead us astray and cause us to miss or misinterpret their true historical value.

This article offers a series of personal reflections on the value of diplomatic sources for researching several types of history, and urges early modernists to consider the many uses to which such documentation can be put. It evaluates the richness of interactions between diplomatic history on the one hand, and social and cultural history on the other, and examines the significant contributions the ‘new diplomatic history’ has made in challenging conventional periodizations, expanding the reach of diplomatic history outside its usual Western home, and fruitfully complicating the idea of what diplomacy is and who is affected by it. A range of specific examples drawn from work in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century German and other European archives illustrates the many scholarly advantages diplomatic sources present. The article considers in depth the types of documents available, the ways to access them, and the tools necessary for exploiting them. It explores how scholar can—and should—use diplomatic sources to write several different kinds of histories, including histories of economic life, social relationships, cultural practices, and medicine, to list just a few.

This article focuses on the Free Imperial City of Hamburg in the eighteenth century. It analyzes how government structures and social welfare policies coped with a variety of social, economic, and political challenges in these years.The article argues that the traditional values of voluntarism in government were strained by these challenges and had to be rethought and reworked but were never jettisoned until much later, perhaps not until the middle of the nineteenth century. The article focuses on the structures of government and on various social welfare institutions, in particular, parish relief, almshouses, hospitals, and outdoor relief.

The Merchant Republics analyzes the ways in which three major economic powerhouses - Amsterdam, Antwerp and Hamburg - developed dual identities as 'communities of commerce' and as republics over the course of the long eighteenth century (c.1648–1790). In addition to discussing the qualities that made these three cities alike, this volume also considers the very real differences that derived from their dissimilar histories, political structures, economic fates and cultural expectations. While all valued both their republicanism and their merchant identities, each presented a different face to the world and each made the transition from an early modern republic to a modern city in a different manner.