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History - Early Modern (c. 1450-1750) — page 4
227 public-domain history - early modern (c. 1450-1750) books, summarised. Page 4 of 5.
The First Discovery of Australia and New Guinea: Being The Narrative of Portuguese and Spanish Discoveries in the Australasian Regions, between the Years 1492-1606, with Descriptions of their Old Charts
George Collingridge
European mariners spent over a century mapping the Southern Ocean, unknowingly encircling Australia while chasing trade routes and sacred gold.
The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation
Richard Hakluyt
Determined sailors, ruthless merchants, and royal envoys push beyond the horizon into frozen, uncharted realms, carving out lucrative trade networks through sheer resilience and cold-blooded diplomacy.
The Confutatio Pontificia
Unknown
A stern imperial response lays down the doctrinal boundary lines between Catholic tradition and Protestant reform in the high-stakes arena of sixteenth-century Europe.
Of Ghostes and Spirites, Walking by Night: And of Straunge Noyses, Crackes, and Sundrie Forewarnings, Which Commonly Happen Before the Death of Men: Great Slaughters, and Alterations of Kingdoms
Ludwig Lavater
Whether spirits are spectral remnants of the dead or merely deceptions of the senses, they demand not our fear, but our vigilance against superstition. This inquiry serves as a reasoned defense of the rational mind against the creeping shadows of supernatural dread.
Mystics of the Renaissance and their relation to modern thought, including Meister Eckhart, Tauler, Paracelsus, Jacob Boehme, Giordano Bruno, and others
Rudolf Steiner
Human consciousness is not a byproduct of biology but a gateway to a universal reality; through self-knowledge, the individual can transcend the division between the inner self and the external world.
History of the Kingdom of Siam and of the revolutions that have caused the overthrow of the empire, up to A.D. 1770
F. H. (François Henri) Turpin
The rise and fall of the Ayutthaya Kingdom is chronicled through the lens of a tumultuous eighteenth-century perspective. This narrative captures the dramatic collapse of a once-great empire under the weight of internal betrayals and external Burmese invasion.
Mr. Ray's travels, Vol. 2
John Ray
A botanist and his companions navigate the treacherous landscapes of the Ottoman East, seeking both the medicinal secrets of desert flora and a way home through a world of suspicion and shifting political tides.
A voyage to Guinea, Brasil and the West Indies
John Atkins
A Royal Navy surgeon takes to the sea in 1721, recording the currents, coastlines, and human cruelties of the transatlantic trade with an uncommonly sharp and questioning eye.
Spanish Prisons: The Inquisition at Home and Abroad, Prisons Past and Present
Arthur Griffiths
Shadows stretch from medieval dungeons to modern penal colonies, tracking how state power enforces obedience through fear.
Travels to Tana and Persia
Giosofat Barbaro
Venetian envoys brave trackless steppes and warring Eastern empires to forge fragile alliances against the Ottoman Turks.
![Cover of Catholic Churchmen in Science [First Series]: Sketches of the Lives of Catholic Ecclesiastics Who Were Among the Great Founders in Science](https://cdn.myebooksbuy.com/c/catholic-churchmen-in-science-first-series-sketches-of-the-lives-of.webp)
Catholic Churchmen in Science [First Series]: Sketches of the Lives of Catholic Ecclesiastics Who Were Among the Great Founders in Science
James J. (James Joseph) Walsh
HOOK This collection of biographical sketches challenges the popular assumption that religious faith and rigorous scientific inquiry are inherently at odds, highlighting the significant contributions of Catholic ecclesiastics to the foundation of modern science.
Grounds of Natural Philosophy: Divided into Thirteen Parts: The Second Edition, much altered from the First, which went under the Name of Philosophical and Physical Opinions
Newcastle, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of
This expansive work of seventeenth-century natural philosophy functions as a private, meditative laboratory where the movements of the mind and the physical world are analyzed with startling, personal intensity.
Spanish and Portuguese South America during the Colonial Period
Robert Grant Watson
This historical chronicle maps the rise, collision, and transformation of colonial powers in South America. It serves as a meticulous, expansive record of how European ambition carved the continent’s modern foundations.
The ascendancy of France, 1598-1715
Henry Offley Wakeman
In seventeenth-century Europe, the ideal of a unified Christian commonwealth disintegrates into raw statecraft, where dynamic monarchs and calculating ministers treat whole provinces like counters on a diplomat's table.
The Old Yellow Book: Source of Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book
Unknown
A bloody seventeenth-century Roman murder trial steps off the dusty page as a tangle of self-serving testimonies, desperate legal briefs, and tragic human misery.
Travels into North America, Volume 2 (of 3)
Pehr Kalm
This mid-eighteenth-century travelogue offers a rare, ground-level survey of colonial American life, observing everything from the habits of local birds to the rugged, inventive survival of frontier homesteaders.
A Vindication of the Presbyteriall-Government and Ministry
Ministers and Elders of the London Provinciall Assembly
The Presbyterian ministry of London asserts that their form of church government is not a human invention, but a divine mandate essential for the purity and order of the Christian faith.
A narrative of travels in northern Africa in the years 1818, 19, and 20
G. F. (George Francis) Lyon
A stark, meticulous record of a British mission’s desperate push into the heart of Northern Africa, this account captures the harrowing physical toll and cultural friction of early nineteenth-century desert exploration.
The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898
Unknown
This collection of historical documents offers a raw, unvarnished look at the mechanics of colonial administration in the early seventeenth-century Philippines. It captures the frantic daily reality of an empire struggling to maintain order across vast, unforgiving distances.
Euphorion - Vol. I: Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the Renaissance
Vernon Lee
A tragic mismatch between intellectual splendor and moral corruption defined the Italian Renaissance, yielding an art that was serene and a reality that was monstrous.
Narrative of a Voyage to the West Indies and Mexico in the Years 1599-1602
Samuel de Champlain
The world of the late sixteenth century unfolds through the eyes of a young, observant traveler mapping the riches and brutality of the Spanish-controlled Americas. This foundational account documents a shifting geopolitical landscape, capturing both the wonder of new lands and the stark realities of colonial conquest.
Knights of Malta, 1523-1798
Reuben Cohen
The Knights of Malta offers a sober, scholarly examination of the rise and fall of the Order of St. John, tracing its trajectory from a displaced monastic brotherhood to a sovereign Mediterranean power and, finally, to its ignominious dissolution.
The interpretation of dreams and moles, with other curious matters, relating to love and courtship
Anonymous
A glimpse into a past where the flight of a bird or the shape of a mole could dictate the course of a life, revealing the anxieties and hopes of an era.
A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794, through Holland and the Western Frontier of Germany, with a Return Down the Rhine, Vol. 2 (of 2): To Which Are Added Observations during a Tour to the Lakes of Lancashire, Westmoreland, and Cumberland
Ann Ward Radcliffe
A landscape painter's eye meets a novelist's sharp observer of human politics in this grand sweep across war-torn eighteenth-century Europe and England's quiet, dramatic northern mountains.
A Brief History of Printing. Part II: The Economic History of Printing
Frederick W. (Frederick William) Hamilton
This historical survey examines the economic evolution of the printing industry from 1450 to 1789, detailing the struggle between institutional control, emerging markets, and the labor force.
Lille Before and During the War
Pneu Michelin (Firm)
This historical guidebook serves as a stark, on-the-ground record of a French city’s transformation from a cultural hub to a zone of occupation, bombardment, and systematic destruction during the First World War.
Il nipotismo di Roma, or, The History of the Popes Nephews: from the time of Sixtus IV. to the death of the last Pope, Alexander VII
Gregorio Leti
When a new Pope mounts the Roman throne, his family inherits the wealth of the Catholic world, turning spiritual authority into an engine of private fortune.
Travels in Turkey and back to England
Edmund Chishull
Ancient ruins, dusty high roads, and diplomatic pomp meet in a scholar's precise observation of the Levant and Western Europe.
Portuguese portraits
Aubrey F. G. (Aubrey Fitz Gerald) Bell
The annals of a seafaring nation are built from the bones of its explorers, a collection of lives defined by iron will, maritime mastery, and an unyielding devotion to the state. These biographies trace the trajectory of an empire rising from the foam of perilous seas.
Malplaquet
Hilaire Belloc
The Battle of Malplaquet stands as a grim lesson in how a tactical victory can serve as a strategic failure. This account dissects the bloody 1709 clash, revealing why the cost of winning often outweighs the prize.
The reformation in Poland
Paul Fox
A shift in religious thought and political power swept sixteenth-century Europe, but its course in Poland followed a unique path shaped by social and economic realities.
Sir Francis Drake: His Voyage, 1595: Together with the Spanish account of Drake's attack on Puerto Rico
Maynarde, Thomas, active 1595
A English fleet sails west in search of Spanish treasure, only to end in total collapse and the deaths of its celebrated leaders.
The Reign of the Manuscript
Perry Wayland Sinks
Before modern presses democratized reading, written culture survived through centuries of painstaking hand-labor, shifting physical substrates, and isolated institutions that protected fragile manuscripts from total loss.
Elizabethan Drama and Its Mad Folk: The Harness Prize Essay for 1913
E. Allison (Edgar Allison) Peers
Elizabethan drama often treated mental instability as a theatrical commodity. This critical study examines how playwrights from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries depicted madness, moving from superficial comic spectacle to complex psychological portraiture.
Travels into Turkey: Containing the most accurate account of the Turks, and neighbouring nations, their manners, customs, religion, superstition, policy, riches, coins, &c
Ogier Ghislain de Busbecq
A Renaissance ambassador enters the Ottoman Empire at the height of its power, recording the court of Solyman the Great with an eye for administrative merit, political violence, and daily life.
A treatise on the culture of the tobacco plant with the manner in which it is usually cured: Adapted to northern climates, and designed for the use of the landholders of Great-Britain
Jonathan Carver
This practical guide offers a window into the historical quest for agricultural self-sufficiency, framing the cultivation of tobacco not merely as a habit, but as a potential pillar of the British economy during a time of colonial unrest.
The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898
Unknown
Colonial officials, Jesuit missionaries, and royal decree-makers scramble to defend, maintain, and govern a precarious Pacific outpost.
A Dissertation on Horses: Wherein It is Demonstrated, by Matters of Fact, as Well as from the Principles of Philosophy, That Innate Qualities Do Not Exist, and That the Excellence of This Animal is Altogether Mechanical and Not in the Blood
William Osmer
A bold argument against the mystical veneration of pedigree, this work insists that a horse’s speed is the result of observable physical structure, not the hidden influence of ancestral blood.
Remarks upon the solar and the lunar years, the cycle of 19 years, commonly called the golden number, the epact, and a method of finding the time of Easter, as it is now observed in most parts of Europe
Macclesfield, George Parker, Earl of
A precise scientific letter from the mid-eighteenth century, this work provides a rigorous mathematical framework for reconciling the solar and lunar calendars to determine the date of Easter with lasting accuracy.
A Journey in Russia in 1858
Robert Heywood
A Victorian traveler offers a sharp-eyed, candid account of his excursion to St. Petersburg and Moscow in 1858, capturing a Russia caught between imperial grandeur and the looming shadow of social change.
The description and use of the globes and the orrery: To which is prefix'd, by way of introduction, a brief account of the solar system
Joseph Harris
The heavens are not merely a vast, silent expanse, but a precise, rhythmic mechanism that can be mapped, measured, and understood through the elegant application of geometry and light.
The Thirty Years War
Friedrich Schiller
The fire of the Thirty Years' War ignited in the hearts of princes and the desperation of the common people, reshaping the map of Europe through a terrifying collision of faith and raw political ambition. This history endures not merely as a record of battles, but as a masterful, lucid examination of how religious…
Experiments and Observations Tending to Illustrate the Nature and Properties of Electricity: In One Letter to Martin Folkes, Esq
Watson, William, Sir
This early scientific dispatch captures the thrill of discovery at the dawn of electrical research. It offers a firsthand look at how persistent, meticulous experimentation transformed a mysterious "fire" into a subject of rigorous natural philosophy.
Terra Australis Incognita
Pedro Fernandes de Queirós
A persistent mariner petitions the Spanish Crown to colonize a vast, fertile "Fifth Part of the World" he claims to have discovered in the Southern Hemisphere. This account serves as both a navigator’s log and an urgent, desperate plea for royal support.
The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. Volume 19, No. 532, February 4, 1832
Various
An eclectic weekly miscellany from early nineteenth-century London offers readers a vibrant, fast-moving cross-section of popular culture, theatrical gossip, historical lore, literary commentary, and practical scientific curiosity.
Libraries in the Medieval and Renaissance Periods: The Rede Lecture Delivered June 13, 1894
John Willis Clark
The physical evolution of the library, from the humble, chain-bound lecterns of monastic cloisters to the grand, wall-lined repositories of the Renaissance, reveals how humanity has long sought to preserve its most precious intellectual treasures.
Sketches in Egypt
Charles Dana Gibson
** This journey into the heart of the Nile captures the intersection of ancient history and colonial transition. It offers a traveler’s perspective on a land where timeless ruins endure despite the shifting tides of empires.
A boke made by John Fryth, prysoner in the Tower of London: answerynge unto M. Mores letter, which he wrote agaynst the fyrste lytle treatyse that John Fryth made, concernynge the sacramente of the body and bloude of Christ
John Frith
Trapped in the Tower of London while awaiting execution, a condemned reformer fiercely defends his spiritual understanding of the sacrament against the sharp objections of a prominent adversary.