John Elliott – författare

In addition to being the man who coined the term 'the Big Bang', world-renowned astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle also produced a fine body of science fiction. The Andromeda Anthology contains the acclaimed duology A for Andromeda and The Andromeda Breakthrough, co-written with John Elliot. The close-knit group of scientists who work at the new radio telescope are shocked to receive a mysterious signal from the heart of the Andromeda galaxy. Working with mathematician Christine Jones, Dr John Fleming interprets the signal as the instructions to build a super-computer. When the computer begins to relay the information it receives from Andromeda, scientists find themselves possessing knowledge previously unknown to mankind, knowledge that could threaten the security of human life itself.

For Introductory Financial Accounting courses at the MBA level, and for rigorous undergraduate courses. A unique blend of theory, practice, and robust financial statement analysis. Introduction to Financial Accounting describes the most widely accepted accounting theory and practice with an emphasis on using and analyzing the information in financial statements. This text also compares U.S. GAAP to IFRS where relevant.

John Elliott has been a leading researcher, writer and thinker in education for thirty years, and has contributed over twenty books and five hundred articles to the field. This book brings together sixteen of his key writings, drawn together to show the development of his most important ideas and theories and to celebrate his career to date.Starting with a specially written introduction, John Elliott gives an overview of his career and contextualises his selection. The chapters cover:rethinking educational research doing classroom action research pedagogy as form of action research the challenge of action research.This book forms a single easy-access resource for researchers, academics and students who want a introduction to educational theory and an overview of John Elliott's key ideas.

John Elliott has been a leading researcher, writer and thinker in education for thirty years, and has contributed over twenty books and five hundred articles to the field. This book brings together sixteen of his key writings, drawn together to show the development of his most important ideas and theories and to celebrate his career to date.Starting with a specially written introduction, John Elliott gives an overview of his career and contextualises his selection. The chapters cover:rethinking educational research doing classroom action research pedagogy as form of action research the challenge of action research.This book forms a single easy-access resource for researchers, academics and students who want a introduction to educational theory and an overview of John Elliott's key ideas.

This book maps out a new paradigm of teacher education and, by implication, professional education generally. The book opens with two alternative theories of teacher education and training and explains the concepts and assumptions on which they rest including beliefs about the nature and role of education in society. It then proposes a ‘natural science’ paradigm and its implications for establishing a coherent view of teacher education. Subsequent chapters indicate the professional implications of such a model.

Lawrence Stenhouse was one of the most distinguished, original and influential educationalists of his generation. His theories about curriculum, curriculum development, pedagogy, teacher research, and research as a basis for teaching remain compelling and fresh and continue to be a counterpoint to instrumental and technocratic thinking in education. In this book, renowned educationalists describe Stenhouse’s contribution to education, explore the contemporary relevance of his thinking and bring his work and legacy to the attention of a wide range of students, teachers, teacher educators and others involved in education.Stenhouse saw the primary aim of education as the development of individuality through a creative and critical engagement with culture. He was an early advocate of inclusive education and was committed to making available to all pupils an education that was challenging and empowering. For Stenhouse many of the problems of education stemmed not so much from its content as from the terms and conditions under which students were required to access it. Consequently he pioneered an approach to curriculum reform that stressed the quality of the educational process and the values that defined it, as opposed to ‘rational curriculum planning’, which stressed the pre-specification of measureable learning outcomes. Stenhouse devised the curriculum reform movement’s most ambitious strategy, ‘the process model’, and was its principal theorist. His idea of ‘the teacher as researcher’ lay at the heart of this strategy as the means by which the values that define a worthwhile educational process could be progressively realized by teachers in concrete forms of action within their classrooms and schools.What marked out Stenhouse’s unique contribution to the field of curriculum was his distinctive conceptualisation of the relationship between the teacher (authority), the learner (autonomy) and the subject matter (understanding). Founded on his epistemological scepticism and forged in his encounters with expertly discerning teachers who valued and nurtured the intellectual independence of students, Stenhouse acquired an acute appreciation of the ways in which teaching enhances or inhibits, develops or displaces the potential for autonomous thinking of students. He changed the relationship between curriculum theory, educational research and teachers; placing teachers right at the heart of the curriculum development process and the teacher as researcher at the heart of teacher professionalism.

This book maps out a new paradigm of teacher education and, by implication, professional education generally. The book opens with two alternative theories of teacher education and training and explains the concepts and assumptions on which they rest including beliefs about the nature and role of education in society. It then proposes a ‘natural science’ paradigm and its implications for establishing a coherent view of teacher education. Subsequent chapters indicate the professional implications of such a model.

This is an interdisciplinary study of a large Italian estate which belonged to the Medici Grand Dukes of Tuscany. The Medici administrators kept detailed records of the activities of their subjects and these have been used by the author to analyse the demographic, social, economic and political history of the village. The records cover two centuries, which span a harsh economic depression and the 'general crisis' of the seventeenth century. An aim of the book is to gauge the impact of the general European crisis upon a regional society, and to assess the contribution of agrarian economic and social trends towards that crisis. It analyses the broad issues of population change, economic performance and social organization within a rural community, demonstrating how the contractual relationships between landlord and tenant selectively distributed the effects of the economic crisis, and how the strong economic bonds that linked lord and peasant helped to control the dogged resistance for which the people of Altopascio were notorious.

Noble affinities were the essence of power in sixteenth-century France. This is the first book to analyse the development of a noble following during the whole course of the Wars of Religion and the first substantial study of the Guise - the most powerful family of the period - to appear for over a century. The Guise, champions of the catholic cause, were the largest landowners in the province and used Normandy as a base for their support of catholicism in the British Isles. The family exploited religious dissension to build a formidable ultra-catholic party in Normandy which ultimately challenged the monarchy. This study breaks new ground by illuminating the relationship between high politics and popular confessional solidarities, especially the rise of radical catholicism. It exploits new archival sources to consider all groups in political society, reinterpreting court politics and discussing groups usually excluded from the traditional political narrative, such as the peasantry.

The reading public outside Sweden knows little of that country's history, beyond the dramatic and short-lived era in the seventeenth century when Sweden under Gustavus Adolphus became a major European power by her intervention in the Thirty Years War. In the last decades of the seventeenth century another Swedish king, Charles XI, launched a less dramatic but remarkable bid to stabilize and secure Sweden's position as a major power in northern Europe and as master of the Baltic Sea. This project, which is almost unknown to students of history outside Sweden, involved a comprehensive overhaul of the government and institutions of the kingdom, on the basis of establishing Sweden as a model of absolute monarchy. This 1998 book gives an account of what was achieved under the absolutist direction of a distinctly unglamorous, but pious and conscientious ruler.

This 1999 book is a serious study of Henry IV's relationship with the towns of France, and offers an in-depth analysis of a crucial aspect of his craft of kingship. Set in the context of the later Wars of Religion, it examines Henry's achievement in reforging an alliance with the towns by comparing his relationship with Catholic League, royal and Protestant towns. Annette Finley-Croswhite focuses on the symbiosis of three key issues: legitimacy, clientage and absolutism. Henry's pursuit of political legitimacy and his success at winning the support of his urban subjects is traced over the course of his reign. Clientage is examined to show how Henry used patron-client relations to win over the towns and promote acceptance of his rule. By restoring legitimacy to the monarchy, Henry not only ended the religious wars but also strengthened the authority of the crown and laid the foundations of absolutism.

The enthronement of Philip III of Spain (Philip II's son and heir) in 1598 also meant the rise to power of the duke of Lerma, the first of a series of European favourites/prime ministers who influenced greatly politics, government, court culture and the arts during the seventeenth century. This 2000 book analyses the contexts that explain the rise of Lerma, as well as discourses on kingship and favouritism, and governmental and institutional initiatives taken during Philip III's reign (1598-1621) - a key historical period for our understanding of early modern Spain. Although this book focuses on the reign of Philip III, it also addresses broader historiographical matters. How was power exercised in personal monarchies? What discourses were used to justify royal power? How was kingship publicly represented? How was favouritism conceptualized and legitimized? Was the effect of the rise of the favourite/prime minister upon the constitution of personal monarchies and on the political and ideological struggles?

By the time of the Calvinist Reformation, the cities of Holland had established a very long tradition of social provision for the poor in the civic community. Calvinists however intended to care for their own church members, who were by definition 'within the household of faith', through the deaconate, a confessional relief agency. This book examines the relationship between municipal and ecclesiastical relief agencies in the six chief cities of Holland - Dordrecht, Haarlem, Delft, Leiden, Amsterdam and Gouda - from the public establishment of the Reformed Church in 1572 to the aftermath of the Synod of Dort. The author argues that the conflict between charitable organizations reveal competing conceptions of Christian community that came to the fore as a result of the Dutch Reformation. This is the first comparative study of poor relief in Holland, which contributes to our understanding of the Reformation throughout Europe.

It is assumed widely that 'war made the state' in seventeenth-century France. Yet this study of the French army during the ministry of Cardinal Richelieu (1624-42) shows how the expansion of the war effort was not matched by army reform but by a reliance on traditional mechanisms of control. The army imposed a huge burden upon the French population, but far from being an instrument of the emerging absolutist state its demands contributed to weakening Richelieu's hold upon France and heightened levels of political and social tension. This is the first detailed account of the size, organization, recruitment, financing and control of the troops during this formative period of French history. The book also includes a detailed study of foreign policy during Richelieu's ministry, and places the training, deployment and fighting methods of the French army into the context of arguments for military change in early modern Europe. The title was runner up in the History Today Awards 2002.

The Quest for Compromise is an interdisciplinary study of the imperial court in late sixteenth-century Vienna, and a detailed examination of a fascinating moment of religious moderation. Against a backdrop of rising religious and confessional dogmatism, the Emperor Maximilian II (1564-1576) assembled a remarkable cast of courtiers who resisted extremes of both Reformation and Counter-Reformation. This book investigates the rise and fall of an irenic movement through four individuals whose work at the imperial court reflected the ideals of religious compromise and moderation. An Italian artist (Jacopo Strada), a Silesian physician (Johannes Crato), a Dutch librarian (Hugo Blotius) and a German soldier (Lazarus von Schwendi) sought peace and accommodation through a wide range of cultural, intellectual and political activity.

This book presents a social and cultural history of 'dishonourable people' (unehrliche Leute), an outcast group in early modern Germany. Executioners, skinners, grave-diggers, shepherds, barber-surgeons, millers, linen-weavers, sow-gelders, latrine-cleaners, and bailiffs were among the 'dishonourable' by virtue of their trades. This dishonour was either hereditary, often through several generations, or it arose from ritual pollution whereby honourable citizens could become dishonourable by coming into casual contact with members of the outcast group. The dishonourable milieu of the city of Augsburg from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries is reconstructed to show the extent to which dishonour determined the life-chances and self-identity of dishonourable people. The book then investigates how honourable estates interacted with dishonourable people, and how the pollution anxieties of early modern Germans structured social and political relations within honourable society.

This book considers the phenomenon of nation-building before the age of modern nationalism. It focuses on royal (Polish) Prussia - the 'other' Prussia - a province of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth from 1466 to 1772/3, and its major cities Danzig, Thorn and Elbing. As an integral part of the Polish state the Prussian estates took pride in their separate institutions and privileges. Although its urban elites became predominantly Protestant and German-speaking, they formulated a republican identity deliberately hostile to the competing monarchical-dynastic myth in neighbouring ducal Prussia, ruled by the Brandenburg-Hohenzollerns from 1618. After 1700, the Polish crown increasingly antagonized the Prussian burghers by its centralizing policies and its failure to protect the integrity of the Commonwealth's borders. The decline of Poland and the partitions of 1772-93 guaranteed that it was not the tradition of liberty but the Hohenzollern version of Prussian identity that survived into the modern era. Joint winner of the Orbis book prize, The American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies.

In what is sometimes called the age of absolutism, Castilian nobles and commoners, tribunes and towns, were to a considerable degree able to resist and shape royal commands. Whereas there was little open conflict, there was sometimes a surprising degree of autonomy, rights and reciprocity on the part of the king's vassals. This is a study of one such form of resistance: the opposition to military levies. This opposition took place during a period of crisis, during the 1630s and 1640s, when the Crown's need to raise an army came into conflict with a notion of kingship that was far from absolute. From the king's advisory councils to parliament, from city councils and seigneurial estates, to the most humble villages, Castilians had recourse to a wide range of political and juridictional means with which to dispute the king's claims and avoid conscription.

The Swedish invasion of 1655, known to Poles ever since as the 'Swedish deluge', provoked the political and military collapse of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the second-largest state in Europe. Robert Frost examines the reasons for Poland's fall and the conduct of the war by the Polish government, and addresses the crucial question of why, despite widespread recognition of the shortcomings of the political system, subsequent attempts at reform failed. War has long been seen as crucial to the development of more effective systems of government in Europe during the seventeenth century, but studies usually concentrate on states which responded successfully to the challenges. Much can be learned from those that failed, and the paucity of English-language material on this important conflict means that After the Deluge will appeal to a broad audience among historians of Poland, Germany, Scandinavia, Russia, and early modern Europe in general.

This book reveals the workings of a culture that cherished death, and invested its resources in the pursuit of heaven. In sixteenth-century Spain, the social and economic debts of the living were extended to the dead, and society's central paradigms sought to invert perceptions, making death seem better than life itself. This is the first full-length study of this phenomenon. It differs from previous histories of death in two significant ways: in its methodology, which seeks to interweave social history and intellectual/cultural history; and in its geographical and cultural setting (previous studies have focused on France, Italy, and England). As a history of mentalités focused on a subject of universal significance, From Madrid to Purgatory transcends its 'Spanishness' and its time period while being wholly attentive to them.

What was the effect of the Reformation movement on the parishioners of the German countryside? This book examines the reform movement at the level of its implementation - the rural parish. Investigation of the Reformation and the sixteenth-century parish reveals the strength of tradition and custom in village life and how this parish culture obstructed and frustrated the efforts of the Lutheran reformers. The Reformation was not passively adopted by the rural inhabitants. On the contrary, the parishioners manipulated the reform movement to serve their own ends. Parish documentation reveals that the system of parish rule diffused the disciplinary aims of the church and rendered the pastors impotent. A look at parish beliefs suggests that the nature of parish thought worked to undermine the main tenets of the Lutheran faith, and that the legacy of the Reformation was a dialogue between these two realms of experience.

This book provides a radical new interpretation of the aims of the lesser German princes during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries through the example of the duchy of Württemberg. Arguing that the princes' political ambitions were fundamental in shaping the internal development of their territories, the author sheds new light on the political importance of the notorious German 'soldier trade' and its role in international diplomacy. The wider social and political impact of these policies is also investigated in a comparative framework, while traditional interpretations of the dramatic struggle between duke and estates are challenged in a reassessment of the role of early modern representative institutions in German state development. The relationship of these internal political struggles to the different elements of the Holy Roman Empire is revealed, opening up new perspectives on the role of the German states within the imperial structure and revealing the empire as a flawed but functioning political system.

This is a study of early modern government finance in the kingdom of Naples, one of the most important European dominions of the Spanish Empire. Professor Calabria focuses on the period from the mid-sixteenth century to the time of the Thirty Years' War. He connects fiscal developments to larger issues, such as the seventeenth-century crisis, the decline of Italy and Spain, and the economic and social significance of investments in government securities markets in early modern Europe. The Cost of Empire blends quantitative data on economic, fiscal, and financial affairs with non-quantitative material detailing attitudes, economic behaviour, and administrative practices. The quantitative material includes analyses of government budgets from 1550 to 1638 and a computer study of about 4,500 investors and their investments in state securities in the later sixteenth century. The work is unrivalled in the breadth, comprehensiveness, and sophistication of its analysis of an early modern fiscal system.

In the second half of the eighteenth century, Paris was the second largest city in Europe, with a population of some half a million. Contemporary writers described it as anonymous and chaotic, and so it must have seemed to many new arrivals from the provinces. Yet the records of the local police officials, which have remained virtually untouched for two hundred years, reveal a world which was far from anonymous, where most people went about their daily affairs in streets and shops where not only the places but also the faces were familiar. From the mass of individual disputes and incidents reported to the police in each quarter there emerges a picture of a structured, largely self-regulating local community based first and foremost on neighbourhood ties. This study explores the way that such communities functioned and were maintained, and in the process touches on many aspects of life in eighteenth-century Paris.

The essays in this volume place the history of ideas and of literature in early modern France within their social context. They include the author's pioneering and authoritative analyses as well as particular studies of popular revolts. An extensive introduction contrasts the author's methods with other recent approaches, including those of the annaliste school. The stress throughout these essays is on change and discontinuity rather than stability and tradition. Few historians have Professor Salmon's expertise in both intellectual and social history. This volume brings the two together in a manner that shows a lucid, well-crafted exposition of their intricate and overlapping relations.

This is the first book to attempt a comprehensive analysis of the state of Spain's naval forces in the years following the defeat of the Great Armada in 1588 and during the seventeenth century. This was a period in which all of Europe's maritime powers were attaching increasing importance to naval warfare in their bid to topple Spain and to seize the rich pickings of her vast empire. The book is not, however, about naval battles and tactics. It is a study of the political, social, economic and technological conditions that influenced the character and performance of the Spanish navy. Based on hitherto untapped material in national and local Spanish archives, the book's findings throw new light on the conservation of Spain's timber resources, naval funding, recruitment and the status of the Spanish seaman.

One of the most striking features of late medieval and early modern German was the countless feuds carried out by nobles. A constant threat to law and order, these feuds have commonly been regarded as a manifestation of the decline - economic and otherwise - of the nobility. This study shows that the nobility was not in crisis at this time. Nor were feuds merely banditry by another name. Rather, they were the result of an interplay between two fundamental processes: princely state-building, and social stratification among the nobility. Offering a new paradigm for understanding the German nobility, this book argues that the development of the state made proximity to princes the single most decisive factor in determining the fortune of a family. The result was a violent competition among the nobility over resources which were crucial to the princes. Feuds played a central role in this struggle that eventually led to the formation of an elite of noble families on whose power and wealth the princely state depended.

The Flanders armada, took shape in response to the use of seapower by the Dutch rebels, and evolved into the most effective unit in Spain's defence establishment. In combination with its privateering auxiliaries, this elite striking force dominated the North Sea for some twenty years (1625-45), and campaigned also in the Mediterranean and Atlantic theatres of war. Yet its contribution to the tenacious survival of Spanish hegemony has never before been assessed. A narrative of the armada's fighting record over the century of its meaningful existence is presented with constant reference to the strategic-logistical context and analysis of policymaking in Madrid. Attention is paid to the political significance of maritime policy, and particularly the relationship between Madrid and its subordinate headquarters in Brussels; the infrastructure of the armada; the ships themselves, above all the revolutionary but elusive 'frigate'; the social hierarchy of crews and commanders; and details of administration and financing.

Historians have long ignored the military aspect of the wars of religion which raged in France during the late sixteenth century, dismissing the conflicts as aimless or hopelessly confused. In contrast, this meticulously researched analysis of the royal army and its operations during the early civil wars brings warfare back to the centre of the picture. James B. Wood explains the reasons for the initial failure of the monarchy to defeat the Huguenots, and examines how that failure prolonged the conflict. He argues that the nature and outcome of the civil wars can only be explained by the fusion of religious rebellion and incomplete military revolution. This study makes an important contribution to the history of military forces, warfare and society, and will be of great interest to those engaged in the debate over the 'Military Revolution' in early modern Europe.