Discover the life and legacy of one of history's most powerful rulers in this biography of Philip II. As King of Spain, Portugal, Naples, and Sicily, Philip led his empire to new heights of influence and power, earning him the title of "The Prudent." But his reign was also marked by a highly leveraged financial policy that led to state defaults and the declaration of independence by the Dutch Republic. Despite his devout Catholicism, he faced numerous military defeats against Protestant England, including the famous defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. This book is an illuminating portrait of a complex and ambitious ruler whose impact on history is still felt today.

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In this groundbreaking book, Nina Lamal provides a compelling account of Italian information and communication on the Revolt in the Low Countries, casting an entirely new light on the keen Italian interest and involvement in this protracted conflict.

An abundantly illustrated narrative that draws from the history of art, science, technology, artificial intelligence, psychology, religion, and conservation in telling the extraordinary story of a Renaissance robot that prays. This volume tells the singular story of an uncanny, rare object at the cusp of art and science: a 450-year-old automaton known as “the monk.” The walking, gesticulating figure of a friar, in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, is among the earliest extant ancestors of the self-propelled robot. According to legend connected to the court of Philip II of Spain, the monk represents a portrait of Diego de Alcalá, a humble Franciscan lay brother whose holy corpse was said to be agent to the miraculous cure of Spain’s crown prince as he lay dying in 1562. In tracking the origins of the monk and its legend, the authors visited archives, libraries, and museums across the United States and Europe, probing the paradox of a mechanical object performing an apparently spiritual act. They identified seven kindred automata from the same period, which, they argue, form a paradigmatic class of walking “prime movers,” unprecedented in their combination of visual and functional realism. While most of the literature on automata focuses on the Enlightenment, this enthralling narrative journeys back to the late Renaissance, when clockwork machinery was entirely new, foretelling the evolution of artificial life to come.