Search

Historians have traditionally seen guilds as local-minded associations whose interests and jurisdictions rarely strayed far beyond the outer walls of the town or city to which they belonged. However, just as few crafts did not rely in some way upon the world beyond the town walls, whether for labour, technology, raw materials, or markets, few guilds lacked mechanisms and procedures – apprenticeship, quality control, price regulation, and so on – designed in part to mediate their needs with this ‘outside’ world. In this chapter we explore a development in London guilds' concern with the rest of the country that has received little attention from historians: the establishment and operation of nationwide jurisdictions and monopolies by a number of metropolitan guilds. National jurisdictions were unusual. For the most part in England, as in the rest of Europe, the jurisdictions of craft guilds stopped at the town or city's gate or extended only a few miles into its immediate suburbs and hinterland. It is not surprising then that nationwide guild jurisdictions in England have tended to be ignored or dismissed, at best relegated to the footnotes of company histories. The few examples that are better known tend to be those that were most intimately associated with the financial problems and opportunism – even corruption – of the crown. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobility of Pre-modern Skilled Workers For a long time historians systematically underestimated the mobility of workers in pre-industrial Europe, on the assumption that individuals before nineteenth-century industrialisation and urbanisation were essentially place-bound. Social historians inspired by modernisation theory described the transition to modern society in terms of a radical increase in mobility – an argument that required establishing a counterpoint in terms of a spatially ‘stable’ and ‘immobile’ pre-modern society. As a survey from the 1970s put it, ‘there is widespread agreement that industrialisation, at least in Europe, caused an extraordinary spatial and occupational mobilisation, thereby marking a decisive break with static preindustrial society’. As Steve Hochstadt noted a few years later, ‘general works on economic history, family life, and social structure still describe preindustrial society as rooted…. Premodern Germans are still described as immobile in most general demographic studies. Even city populations are considered exceptionally stable…. Only with industrialization did German society become mobile’. Although this view still finds some support, it was already becoming clear that migration was a ‘normal and structural element of human societies throughout history’. This revisionism soon extended to pre-modern Europe to include journeymen, as researchers discovered that a market for specialised labour had already begun to develop in the later Middle Ages, particularly in connection with the rise of organised tramping (Gesellenwanderung). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As economic institutions, craft guilds have been judged unfavourably at least from the late eighteenth century onwards. In the view of the enlightened elites pressing for liberal reforms, craft guilds presented an obstacle to economic growth and welfare. In the course of the nineteenth century, both liberal and radical economists considered craft guilds as a paradigmatic institution of a pre-capitalist economy, while writers of the German historical school, such as Werner Sombart, viewed craft guilds as a materialisation of a typical pre-modern economic spirit. Prominent among the arguments put forward by eighteenth-century philosophes and nineteenth-century economists figures the supposition that craft guilds served mainly as cartels for the appropriation of monopoly rents for its members. At the same time, craft guilds are said to have resisted the transition from simple commodity production to more complex production regimes, which increased the control of entrepreneurs over production and enhanced productivity by applying new technology. Recent scholarship has begun to re-evaluate the economic effects of late medieval and early modern craft guilds. First, it has been argued that craft guilds prevented market failure (adverse selection) in long-distance trade. Bales of textiles, in particular, were characterised by considerable asymmetry of information, in the sense that a buyer would have had to assess quality by unrolling and inspecting each bale, which would require a lot of time. Since long-distance merchants, local retailers, and consumers might all need to assess quality individually, information costs were unavoidably inflated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the ‘Wooden Age’ nearly everything involved wood at some point in its production. There was no iron without charcoal or wood for pit-props and pickaxe handles, no glass or soap without potash, no transport of anything above a minimal bulk without carts, sledges, wagons and rivercraft. The previous three chapters have identified the kinds of wood that people needed, the uses to which woodland was generally put, and the manner in which such flows were regulated. This chapter will develop these themes further, with two areas particularly in mind. One is the spatial distribution of the production and consumption of wood, the form of exchange involved, and the identification of what ecologists would call ‘sources’ (points of origin) and ‘sinks’ (points of consumption) of the resource. Tracing these patterns over time will allow us to address questions of the nature of economic development, and the causes of landscape and environmental change. Understanding these processes, however, requires more than the mapping of material flows. It is also essential to comprehend how people thought about such movements and exchanges in a world strongly shaped by both institutional imperatives, and a straightforward fear of suffering, illness and mortality. In the cold winter of 1743, for example, the ducal authorities attempted to enforce the mandatory limit of two ‘wood days’ for cutting and collection in the Vorstwald of Bietigheim. But the snow lay deep on the ground that December, and local authorities objected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If Spener was frequently caught between prudence and the desire to tap sources of religious vitality on the one hand, and what could in practice be kept within the bounds of the Protestant establishments on the other, the problem was even more acute for his protégé and disciple, August Hermann Francke (1663–1727). For at an early stage an ecclesiastical career was closed to Francke, partly because he was more open to radical and spiritualistic influences; and although, unlike the radical separatists, Francke wanted the ‘true’ church of the faithful to retain its connexion with the establishment, he was more concerned with the pursuit of Christian perfection than with church reform. Much of his life's work was devoted to the support of Protestants in Moscow and Siberia, Silesia and Bohemia, who had no established church system to cling to. Moreover, the great institutions at Halle which came to provide a badge of evangelical orthodoxy as far away as Newcastle-upon-Tyne, South Wales and Georgia were not institutions of church or state, but an application, at the time unique, of the principle of contract to the work of the kingdom of God. So long as Francke was able to retain the sympathy of the Hohenzollern monarchy, as his son and successor, Gotthilf August Francke, was not, he had in a sense a little more elbow-room than was ever available to Spener. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By 1580 Europe's confessional boundaries were essentially fixed. The British kingdoms of England and Scotland were secure under the control of Protestant monarchs; in France a Calvinist minority was entrenched, but it was clear the nation would never be converted. In the Netherlands the Protestant north would never be recovered by Spain; the southern provinces would gradually assume a distinct Catholic identity. In Germany the oldest Lutheran states were now entering their third generation since the adoption of a Protestant church order. The Scandinavian kingdoms had also settled to life with a Lutheran state church. Only in eastern Europe would the tides shift in a significant manner, as the Habsburg victories of the 1620s allowed the suppression of the previously dominant Protestant estates of Hungary and Bohemia. That was for the future. For the moment the reality of a confessionally divided Europe was a generally accepted fact of European life and politics. It would be wrong, however, to believe that this relative stability, so clear in retrospect, had calmed the passions raised by the first Reformation conflicts. On the contrary, relations between the faiths remained fractious and unstable, coloured above all by fear. On the Protestant side, this was understandable enough. In 1580 memories of the terrible massacres of Paris (1572) and Antwerp (1576) were still fresh, a reminder of Catholic perfidy, and the imminent danger that hard-won freedoms could still be dashed away. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What did it mean to be German in, say, 1780 and how had this changed by about 1900? Any attempt to answer this question has to engage with two different kinds of debate about the nature of national identity in Europe between the French Revolution and the First World War. As has so often been remarked, the period between 1789 and 1914 – often known as ‘the long nineteenth century’ – was the great age of nationalism. Opening with the French Revolutionaries' ‘invention’ of the nation in the 1790s and closing with the mass nationalist agitation that accompanied the outbreak of the First World War, the nineteenth century witnessed Europe's transition from a continent of undemocratic, dynastic, territorial states to a Europe in which the nation-state, governed through representative institutions, was emerging as the predominant form of political organisation. These changes went hand in hand with socio-economic and cultural modernisation: demographic growth, industrialisation, urbanisation, secularisation, the growth of literacy, increased geographical and social mobility and so on. Some theorists of nationalism, such as Ernest Gellner, Eric Hobsbawm, Benedict Anderson and John Breuilly, have seen these two phenomena as interdependent in different ways. Others, such as Adrian Hastings and Liah Greenfeld, have questioned the extent to which nationalism was an essentially modern phenomenon, arguing instead that it emerged in different cultural and political communities at different times and in different ways. Which of these schools of thought best reflects the German experience? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘Judged purely by its success in creating a nation-state, German history has to be deemed a failure until the nineteenth century.’ This familiar view of the historical relationship between power and the German nation gains added significance from the context in which it here appears: in a recent introduction to the political development of late medieval Europe. The book's co-authors do, it is true, distance themselves at once from such a narrow perspective. But taken on its own, it seems to encapsulate a piece of well-established common ground among historians of pre-modern and modern Germany – and particularly those writing within the broad Anglophone historiographical tradition. Generally speaking, historians of the modern and the pre-modern nation have been hampered by a failure to pay enough regard to each other's findings and approaches. In the case of Germany, however, the problem has traditionally been, in a way, almost an opposite one, with loosely framed grand narratives and vague, sometimes unvoiced, assumptions and connections being traded freely back and forth between students of different epochs of the German past. Not uncommonly, medievalists have fashioned their accounts with at least half an eye on events far distant in time. Modernists seem at first glance less encumbered, with their bold insistence on the German nation's quintessential modernity. Some are even at pains to declare that there is nothing to say on their subject before, at earliest, the closing years of the eighteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Something more than discontent and speculative ingenuity is needed in order to invest a political idea with power over the masses of mankind. The long history of ‘the nation’ as a concept and as a name for various sorts of ‘imagined community’ commands much acceptance. But when did the nation first become a fundamental political factor? This is a question which has been, and continues to be, far more sharply contested. A deep rift still separates ‘modernist’ perspectives, which view the political nation as a phenomenon limited to modern societies, from the views of scholars concerned with the pre-industrial world who insist, often vehemently, that nations were central to pre-modern political life also. Yet the engagement of these two broad camps with each other's distinctive viewpoints has often resembled a dialogue of the deaf. All this has favoured the perpetuation of an increasingly repetitive discussion about the origins of nations and nationalism. This unfortunate state of affairs could only be improved, we were convinced, by bringing together specialists in the history of the pre-modern and the modern nation to scrutinise the nation's historical relationship with political power. A number of more specific questions appeared to flow naturally from this theme. When, and under what historical circumstances, did the nation become constitutive, rather than simply descriptive, of state power and legitimacy? Can the nation attain political importance only when mature state institutions exist, requiring participation, as against mere acquiescence, from members of the putative national community? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Louis Bonaparte, Frédéric Moreau, Heathcliff, Catherine, and Alice comprise a characterology for modern times (cf. Benjamin's “series of types” in Arcades, 338). They will migrate from the nineteenth century into the twentieth and delimit a whole range of familiar personalities, from slacker to gangster, from lover to sell-out, from the entrepreneur to flower child. To this set of characters one must also add Marx's narrator in Eighteenth Brumaire. In his case, we see scientific or rational man confronted by a reality that does not deliver the sense that is expected of it. The rationalist will, in turn, be transformed into a number of specific modern subtypes. One is the bureaucrat, a functional agent of that basic Enlightenment rationalism that posits the external world as fundamentally vulnerable to the operations of human reason. All problems, events, and persons, therefore, can be assigned their proper categories for solution. There is nothing more frustrating for this personality-type than that some particular thing resist its proper appointment. Early modernist writers, especially on the continent, were particularly sensitive to the sudden appearance of categorical anomalies within the rationalized state. Franz Kafka's “Metamorphosis,” for example, allegorizes this kind of system puzzle, as does the mysterious process in The Trial. In traditional, premodern society categorical elegance depends on God. Market-driven modernity cuts the heavenly connection and dislodges the categories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Of all the avant-garde groups on the English scene in the early twentieth century, the Bloomsbury Group seems, at first glance, to be anomalous. Bloomsbury has many of the same internal features as other bohemias, yet its peculiar position in English society leaves it less socially marginal or cut off than other groups. Its principal members and associates enjoyed closer ties with the social and political elites in London. This contrasts with the social divide that separates avant-garde groups in continental Europe from the native upper classes. Their more distinct separation is probably best explained by the greater degree of active political radicalism of continental avant-gardes as opposed to their English counterparts. In London, avant-garde groups that numbered foreigners, young men and women from the provinces, and the sons and daughters of recent migrants to England – as in the case of writers and painters from the Jewish community in Whitechapel – did not enjoy Bloomsbury's relatively easy and continuous access to the elites. Mark Gertler's personal difficulties leading to his suicide in 1939 cannot be put down entirely to the class system, but his origins, his “foreignness” as a poor Jew in what was still an insular and anti-Semitic society did not help. His unremitting poverty, his egotism, his social gaffes, and his clinical depression, as Sarah MacDougall has shown, were mainly to blame for his situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Not surprisingly Wyndham Lewis's Tarr is also an unfinished editorial project. Nor can it be said to be complete. Just ask any one of the two-dozen Lewis scholars in the world which of the versions of Tarr is the best or most complete text. Be prepared for a lively response. The first Tarr (there were three “first” Tarrs, all of them different) was a product of the Vorticist period and underwent extensive revision in the late 1920s. It was originally written during the Blast years, from about 1914 to 1916. It began to be serialized in one form in The Egoist on 1 April 1916; it ran until November 1917. This periodical had begun life as The New Freewoman and was still controlled by feminists deeply involved in the suffrage movement. The novel appeared in its first English edition with many revisions in July 1918 from the Egoist Press. It had appeared a few weeks earlier in yet another form from Knopf, the principal publisher of modernist work in New York at the time. As Paul O'Keeffe observes in his Editorial Note to his edition of the novel, these three texts vary substantively (1918, 5). In his reconstruction of the 1918 Knopf text, O'Keeffe, in one of the great editorial achievements of a modernist text, manages to provide, in the apparatus, the means for reconstructing all three originals, although he has chosen to use the Knopf version as his copy text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One does not write what one wants. Nowhere in Marx's works does the character of a world undergoing rapid modernization appear more forcefully delineated than in the three volumes of his magnum opus, the work called Capital, or in its precursor, the Grundrisse. These works are written in the spirit of Enlightenment science and for that reason Marx and orthodox Leftists have always claimed that these texts achieve a specifically scientific authority. Time and a century of post-Enlightenment thought have seen through that language game easily enough. The problem for Marx's “scientific” texts, as I see it, lies in the fact that they cannot grasp entirely some of the effects of the processes they are trying to theorize. They seem, for us today, naively reliant on ways of thinking designed to deal with mechanical systems of change. The elusive variousness, unpredictability, and the fractional autonomies of the social world, the decentered world of human actions, as opposed to all those aspects of existence which can be represented as if they were machines, often evade his grasp. And occasionally we become aware in some of his works of his own niggling anxieties about this. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte is one of those occasions and how he comes to deal with what amounts to the partial breakdown of the interpretative machine helps us to understand how modernism, as both a discourse of art and as the more general cultural discourse of capitalism, comes into being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the very day of its publication in 1848, Wuthering Heights has provoked perplexity and confusion. In a literary scene acclimatized to realism, and to a moral realism which had as its recent history the ethico-religious traditions of allegory, Wuthering Heights came as something of a shock to contemporary readers. It was acknowledged to display “evidences of considerable power,” but was seen on the whole as “wild, confused, disjointed and improbable” (Examiner, 8 Jan. 1848). On 22 January 1848, the Atlas reviewer found “Wuthering Heights … a strange inartistic story.” Lacking in “unity and concentration,” it “is a sprawling story, carrying us, with no mitigation of anguish, through two generations of sufferers – though one presiding evil genius sheds a grim shadow over the whole, and imparts a singleness of malignity to the somewhat disjointed tale. A more natural unnatural story we do not remember to have read.” In the same month, the New Monthly Magazine reviewer found himself unable to refer to anything that could be compared to Brontë's novel. In the end, he could only refer to the world the novel represented as “a perfect misanthropist's heaven.” Many of the American reviews in the spring of 1848 are even more uncomprehending. “We rise from the perusal of Wuthering Heights as if we come fresh from a pest-house. Read Jane Eyre is our advice, but burn Wuthering Heights” (Paterson's Magazine, March 1948). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In New York in 1921, Man Ray made a short film of the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, then forty, shaving her pubic hair. It was shot during the short-lived period of New York Dada and it had art written all over it. Exhibited exclusively to other New York bohémiens, mainly in the Walter and Louise Arensberg circle, it was a typical product of the hothouse culture of early modernism. The luminous starkness of the woman's careworn, but strangely vibrant, body affronted not only conventional morality, but also the conventional aesthetic academicism of, say, Adolph-William Bouguereau's blushing, heavily fleshed but weightless, nudes. At that time, Bouguereau's gravity-defying females appealed particularly to prosperous bankers and business tycoons. Although Man Ray's film is about a not-very-glamorous and aging woman shaving her pubic hair, it is also, and perhaps more importantly, about defining the space between avant-garde culture and ordinary society, what Andreas Huyssens calls the Great Divide between the avant-garde and mass society. In 1921, that distance was still visible. By the end of the twentieth century, it had almost entirely disappeared. Today Dada and ordinary life have more or less converged. Just look around you. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Besides the metaphor of musical logic, as discussed in the previous chapter, the metaphor of a syntax of music was prominently employed by Riemann to describe his idea of how music works. Again, its precise meaning and the interrelation between the two metaphors are anything but clear. It is noticeable that Riemann's early works are oriented by various aspects of language: after his dissertation, Musikalische Logik, he embarked on two projects entitled Musikalische Syntaxis (1877) and Musikalische Grammatik, though the latter manuscript remained unpublished and was destroyed when he could not find a publisher. In some ways, the early works would have appeared like a kind of ‘musicological trivium’, in which linguistic aspects of music are determined. The relation between logic and syntax is addressed in Musikalische Syntaxis: If one insists on drawing analogies, one could roughly compare the … simple [cadential] thesis with the sentence of the simple judgement in language. The subject would be the tonic and the predicate the confirmation through Quint-klänge, Terzklänge, etc. The relationship between language and logic that Riemann presents here is marked by a certain uneasiness: although he seems to be talking about language, the ‘simple judgement’ that he mentioned would suggest that he is primarily thinking about logic. Under this ambivalent notion it becomes impossible to tell whether the ‘subject’ and ‘predicate’ which he defined in the sentence that follows are supposed to be logical or linguistic terms – or rather, Riemann appeared to underline that he considered the two to be indistinguishable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his 1520 manifesto, To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation Concerning the Reform of the Christian Estate, Martin Luther described the law of Germany as a “wilderness” of confusion. Confronted by the masses of “rambling and farfetched” laws that prevailed in his day, Luther threw up his hands in frustration as he sought to map out appropriate legal reforms. He scratched a couple of quick lines about the superiority of civil law to canon law, and of territorial law to imperial law. He spoke of the need to tailor laws to the “gifts and peculiar characteristics” of local polities. But then, uncharacteristically, Luther gave up. He recommended simply that “wise rulers, side by side with Holy Scripture, would be law enough,” and expressed hope that others would give “more thought and attention to the matter.” Luther himself would soon return to the matter of law reform with a vengeance, but for the moment his mind was on more pressing questions – not least the growing perils to his own body and soul occasioned by the papal bull calling for his excommunication. Luther had ample reason to be frustrated in his attempts to take the measure of the German law of his day. In 1520, the German-speaking lands of the Holy Roman Empire had no fewer than 364 registered polities, most with their own local legal systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To learn the true causes, the rises and growths of our late Miseries … had I not gone so far back as I do, I had not reached the Fundamentals … finding those proceedings to have their rise in the year 1618. no man less belov'd, no man more generally condemn'd then was the King; from the time that it became his custom to break Parliaments at home, and either wilfully or weakly betray Protestants abroad … All men inveigh'd against him. INTRODUCTION: REFORMATION POLITICS In the foregoing chapters we have sought to understand two sets of political anxieties. These have close parallels to contemporary religious fears. These, too, were for the survival of an insufficiently reformed domestic institution within the context of a European situation fraught with danger. That the parallel was close is hardly surprising, since religion and politics were intertwined. Elizabethan counsellors managing the war against Spain made no distinction between defending the country's religion and the state. Later John Vicars wrote of a plot ‘for the … utter subverting of the fundamentall laws and principles on which the religion and government of the kingdom were firmly established’. Sir Walter Erle explained in 1629: ‘I dare boldly say, never was there … a more near conjunction between matter of Religion and matter of State in any Kingdom in the world than there is in this Kingdom at this day.’ [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For of Meridians and Parallels Man hath weav'd out a net and this net throwne Upon the Heavens and now they are his owne. Loth to goe up the hill, or labour thus To goe to heaven we make heaven come to us. The Channel is no national boundary. INTRODUCTION How should one structure a large-scale analysis of the seventeenth-century English political experience? Should one do so? Such histories have long been out of fashion. To attempt one is necessarily to step outside one's area of expertise. This is the most complex, the most important and the most violent century of English history. It is equally the most formidable and savage historiographical terrain. Entire historians have disappeared, leaving only a rent garment and the colour of blood in the water to show us where they had been. One point from which to begin is the identification of those features by which our subject is distinguished, in time and place. In this respect it might be suggested that two things above all make seventeenth-century English history unique. The first is the length and depth of its experience of political instability. The second is its astonishing intellectual fertility. These two features were of course connected. It is this combination which distinguishes the seventeenth century within English history, and the experience of seventeenth-century England within Europe. This experience of instability I have called, following contemporary usage, England's troubles: ‘the late troubles’; ‘our lamentable troubles’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Things that love night, Love not such nights as these: The wrathful skies Gallow the very wanderers of the darke And make them keep their Caves: since I was a man Such sheets of Fire, such bursts of horrid Thunder, Such groanes of roaring Winde, and Raine, I never Remember to have heard. Man's Nature cannot carry Th'affliction, nor the feare. INTRODUCTION: BEHIND THE VEIL OF RESTORATION To recover England's troubles it is necessary to re-enter an alien mental world. In this respect, as Robert Darnton reminds us: ‘the most promising moment in research can be the most puzzling. When we run into something that seems unthinkable to us, we may have hit upon a valid point of entry into an alien mentality.’ Our present distance from the perceptions and fears that underlay the troubles is more than simply the effect of the intervening three hundred years. It is politically created: the first and final imperative of restoration was forgetting. The signs of this are everywhere. They are visible, not least, in English incomprehension in the face of the attitudes sustaining the last theatre of the troubles. That Northern Ireland's conflict has its origins in the seventeenth century is well enough understood. What is less frequently pointed out is that in the seventeenth century those troubles were English. It is then that we find the perceptions and language of that anti-hero Ian Paisley (a protestant enclave under encirclement, ‘popery’ whooping around the outside) in the mouths of England's heroes: John Pym, Oliver Cromwell, John Milton, the Earl of Shaftesbury, the Prince of Orange. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

INTRODUCTION The intellectual innovations represented by Grotius' work on history and political theory were eagerly picked up by a wider European public, hungry for just the modern extension of humanist ideas which he seemed to provide. His works were studied closely in France, particularly in the circle round Marin Mersenne to which Hobbes belonged, and I shall give some account of this in Chapter 7. But it was perhaps England which was the main breeding-ground for Grotian and post-Grotian ideas. English society by the early seventeenth century had come to resemble the Dutch society in which Grotius had operated: there, too, a variety of Protestantism uneasily co-existed, though with an established Church whose doctrine was not straightforwardly Calvinist, and there, too, we see clearly the beginnings of a kind of mercantile imperialism (though not yet on anything like the Dutch scale). Two groups of Church men claimed rights over the lay population: one was the hierarchy of the Anglican Church, with an apparatus of Church courts and legal privileges which actually gave them more extensive legal powers than the Dutch Calvinists enjoyed, while the other consisted of those ministers who wanted to convert Anglicanism into a presbyterian form of Church government, and who appealed to Scotland and the post-1619 United Provinces as their models. Both groups were antagonistic to one another, and either one at different times could appear the greater threat to the interests of the lay population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The period known as the ‘Golden Age of Cracow’ covered the first half of the sixteenth century and roughly coincided with the reign of King Zygmunt Stary (Sigismund the Old) from 1506 to 1548. The vigorous development of intellectual life in the city, combined with foreign contacts and a flourishing artistic life was supported by commercial prosperity. This was reflected on a larger scale within Poland, expressing itself in the wealth of the country and a favourable growth in foreign trade. Raw materials such as grain, timber, livestock, hemp, flax and potash led to a lively export trade, especially with the Low Countries and England; the production of raw materials, however, was in the hands of the propertied Polish nobility who were gradually becoming farming entrepreneurs. Here one sees the first hint of looming disaster for Cracow, which helped precipitate the city's decline. Not only in Poland but also in other parts of Eastern Europe, the nobility were taking advantage of the rural origins for raw materials such as grain and wresting control of them from urban merchants; in Poland the nobility decisively asserted its dominance over the towns which led to a steady flow of restrictions on the wealth and authority of such places as Cracow. The city also suffered from external factors; the great geographical discoveries had opened up new sea and ocean trade routes, while the old land routes, on which Cracow was so dependent, gradually diminished in importance. Moreover, following the Union of Poland and Lithuania in 1569, Cracow found itself tucked away in the south-west corner of Poland and had to cede its prime position in Poland to Warsaw. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By the mid-thirteenth century, Cracow found itself in a changing political world; the two great empires, bequeathed to Europe by the early and central Middle Ages for later times, were in disarray. The Eastern Empire, based on Constantinople, was only a shadow of its former self, whilst the Holy Roman Empire lapsed for a time after the death of Frederick II (Hofenstaufen) in 1250. In western Europe, particularly in France, England and Spain, the twelfth and thirteenth centuries had witnessed a growth of stronger royal administration and a general acceptance by the people that hereditary monarchy was an unavoidable part of political life in their lands. This belief was by no means universally accepted throughout Europe; in Scandinavia the monarchies were not powerful, whilst in eastern and central Europe, the princes were encountering resistance among their more influential subjects. Moreover, during the latter part of the Middle Ages the Poles, Hungarians and Czechs were able to develop as sovereign states, unhindered by very powerful neighbours to the east or west. Freedom from such distractions meant the rulers of Poland, Hungary and Bohemia were to become increasingly engaged in a struggle for supremacy among themselves; the prize for such efforts was a chance for unity under a powerful dynasty which alone might save it from the ambitions of German or Russian expansion. In Poland, lack of natural protection had always laid the country open to aggressive neighbours, and forced its medieval rulers to watch carefully the vicissitudes of political units along its eastern and western borders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last four chapters we have examined the search for order in the sixteenth century. Now we turn to the crisis of the seventeenth century, when order gave way to confusion. To understand the crisis in South Germany a number of characteristics of the agrarian order should be kept in mind. Never should one forget the tenuousness and the uncertainty of the social order, the fact that at every turn, when a measure of stability appeared at long last secure, deep and unresolved tensions still lay not far beneath the surface of events. In Hohenlohe the tensions flowed from the new terms of domination that weakened the state after 1610. The Assecuration became an embarrassing liability to the House of Hohenlohe, setting limits to state incomes and, from the point of view of Count Philip Ernst, creating a new sort of chaos in the territory: As we have repeatedly seen, there has been a striking amount of chaos since the establishment of the Landsteuer. Many of the rich are not assessed even half of their worth, not of their fixed property or of their movables. And this has led to considerable trouble and to a decline of our laws. And the poor and those with little property, because of this state of affairs, can avoid their responsibilities only with much greater difficulty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The century which elapsed between the battle of Waterloo and the outbreak of World War I saw changes more profound than in any comparable period in human history. It was one of unprecedented growth: population more than doubled; there was a commensurate growth in agricultural output; industrial production increased tenfold; and Europe's gross product multiplied six times. This growth in economic activity was accompanied by a radical shift in its location, as an older, protoindustrial pattern decayed and was replaced by another which responded to new factors of production and to changing demand. The geography of Europe, when the Napoleonic Wars ended, differed fundamentally from that which saw the lights go out in August 1914. The intervening century was, in the main, one of peace. Most conflicts were short-lived and far from destructive. Many were related to peoples' democratic aspirations or to their demands for independence from the empires which had between them shared much of Europe. But economic growth was, nevertheless, a highly localized phenomenon. Much of the continent remained untouched by progress – industrial, agricultural, or commercial – until late in the century. At the same time, there were areas where growth was rapid and from which the new technology was diffused to other parts of the continent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The statesmen who gathered at Vienna to bring back peace to a war torn continent set themselves to restore the conditions which had prevailed before the wars began. This proved impossible; too many of the changes of the previous decades were irreversible. This was especially the case in Germany, where the number of separate and autonomous political units was reduced from more than three hundred to thirty-nine. The German empire was snuffed out in 1806, without as much as a whimper. In 1815 it was restored, no longer under the auspices of the Austrian Habsburgs, but as the German Confederation, or Bund, dominated by Brandenburg-Prussia (Fig. 10.1). In western Europe, political boundaries were smoothed out, and much of its feudal debris of enclaves and exclaves was tidied up. France lost marginally and, in retrospect, significantly. Much of the Saar coalfield and of the ironworking Sambre Valley were lost respectively to Prussia and the United Netherlands. Savoy and Nice were restored to the Sardinian kingdom, only to be regained in 1860. Fear of renewed French aggression led to the incorporation of the southern Low Countries, previously Austrian, in the United Netherlands, the purpose being to create a powerful buffer to French expansion. This settlement proved to be unacceptable in the southern Low Countries, which in 1831 broke away to form the kingdom of Belgium, its independence and inviolability guaranteed by the powers. Changes were more fundamental in eastern Europe. Napoleon's Grand Duchy of Warsaw, a kind of revived Polish state created from the Prussian and Austrian shares of the Partitions, was given to the Russian tsars in their personal capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By the early fourteenth century the period of medieval economic growth was over; the population of Europe reached its peak at about this time, and the spatial pattern of cities was to develop no farther before the nineteenth century. POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY The political map of Europe had assumed a form which, with minor changes, it was to retain into modern times. Only in the Balkan peninsula, where the Byzantine empire was clinging desperately to its last foothold, were major changes still to come. In most of Europe political control was becoming more centralized, and kingship more absolute. Feudalism, as a mode of government, was weakening, though its outward symbols were as conspicuous as ever. Only in eastern Europe and Russia were feudal relationships tending to strengthen. In the Spanish peninsula the southward advance of the Christian states had reduced the Moorish kingdom of Granada to the Sierra Nevada and neighboring coastlands. To the north, Castile, having absorbed Léon and other petty states, reached from the Biscay coast in the north to the Strait of Gibraltar (Fig. 6.1). It dominated the Meseta, while around its periphery lay Navarre and Gascony, Aragon and Portugal. Only Castile still had a boundary with the Moors and still continued its centuries-old crusade against them. Portugal and Aragon were casting their eyes beyond the seas and were beginning that commercial expansion which was to take them to Asia and the New World. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The centuries from the early ninth to the early fourteenth saw the rise and splendor of medieval civilization. They saw also the emergence of a political organization of the land which underwent little fundamental change before the end of the eighteenth century: an increase in population which stretched to its limits the agricultural resources of Europe, and the development of a pattern of cities, that remained almost unaltered until the Industrial Revolution. Not until the nineteenth century do we encounter again a period of comparable development and change. THE INVASIONS The period began with another wave of invaders from beyond the core areas of western and central Europe. These came from Scandinavia, westward from the fjords of Norway and the plains of Denmark to the British Isles and France, eastward from Sweden to the shores of Russia and overland to the Black Sea (Fig. 5.1). The first of these sea raiders reached the shores of western Europe before the death of Charlemagne; the last landed on those of northern Britain two and a half centuries later. Their raids were but an episode in European history, but they had, locally at least, far-reaching consequences. The sudden explosion of Nordic peoples in the ninth century is as enigmatic as that of the Tartar peoples during previous centuries. It has been attributed to political struggles within Scandinavia, to overpopulation, and to environmental change in this climatically marginal land. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Everyone agrees that the Whigs possessed an impressive political organisation … Yet on the level of detailed information as to the operations of this organisation, the evidence remains scanty. Of course, this organisation did not appear on the surface. Attempting to preserve an impression of spontaneity the Whig press was intentionally vague. The Restoration crisis, from 1678 to 1683, was the second of seventeenthcentury England's three crises of popery and arbitrary government. It was therefore, from the perspective of the historian, linked to both its predecessor of 1638–42 and its successor of 1687–9. What follows is not an attempt to deny any historical links with the latter. Indeed seventeenthcentury England's ‘troubles’ cannot be understood without considering all three crises, and the relationship between them. What will be attempted in the following chapters is the recovery of the perspective on this crisis of contemporaries themselves. Contemporaries, obviously, could not predict the future. They did not hinge their political interpretations upon prophecy. But they could, and they did, remember the past. In the Restoration period they could not forget it. They could be, and to some extent they were, the prisoners of memory. Historians, on the other hand, have been more interested in linking the crisis of 1678–83 with the shape of the future: the future exclusion of James from the throne; the future birth of parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE PROBLEM OF THE MIXED COMMUNITY We have been arguing that as a member of a believing community the Christian holds his faith in fellowship with all the faithful, saying not only ‘I believe’ (credo) but ‘we believe’ (credimus). The conception that it is faith which is central to the Church's apostolicity was not new among the reformers. It was already well developed in the Carolingian period. Christianus of Stavelot, a contemporary of Hincmar of Rheims, says that everyone who believes and confesses the faith with Peter deserves to be called an apostle as much as he. So important is the collective confession of faith by believers that Luther argues that it is this which makes the Church identifiable as a visible community. But it was also apparent to the reformers that the machinery for the collective expression of the faith has not always worked smoothly, either in Councils, or through the offices of those with a responsibility for oversight. Why has there frequently been imperfect consensus, periods of learning from mistakes, and so slow and patchy a growth in understanding? A reason for this to which Augustine could subscribe as readily as a modern commentator is that in the deep structures of decision-making human needs and failings are accepted and allowed for, and the mode of our learning together is in tune with the enabling of our growth in holiness through living together in the faith. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Underlying both the debates about practice and the doctrinal debates on matters of authority lay questions of another order about the authority on which the authoritativeness of any statement about authority is to be judged. These were of particularly acute concern in the sixteenth-century debates, as reformers pressed for reliance upon ‘Scripture alone’. Inseparable from the question of the primacy of Scripture was a complex of difficulties at this level to which sixteenth-century scholars gave a great deal of attention as they struggled to define the way in which Christ is to be made in practice the ground of all truth in Christian believing, and to understand the manner in which that truth might be expressed in the words and experience of the community of his people first and supremely in Scripture, and also in the continuing life of the Church. Problems of authority at this level lie behind all that was said in our opening chapters about the status of the written and intellectual resources on which the sixteenth-century combatants drew in their debates. We have seen how there grew up a tendency to think in terms of a ‘power-struggle’ between the divine gift of Scripture and the rival authorities of human scholarship, human fancy, human reasoning, human opinion, human tradition, and above all a ‘human’ Church authority. Contemporary work on the text of the Bible in Greek and Hebrew challenged such simplifications at innumerable points, and a good many individuals found themselves at times exasperated (Erasmus), or unable to reconcile a scholarly with a partisan position (Eck). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In considering the history of the Habsburg Empire after 1867, it is important to emphasize that the state had in fact three governments. At the top stood the joint Austro-Hungarian administration with the common ministries for foreign affairs, war, and finance. In addition, separate governments existed for Austria and for Hungary. The major unifying figure in this arrangement was Franz Joseph, who was emperor in Austria and king in Hungary. A constitutional monarch throughout his realm, he nevertheless had different powers in each half. In practice, his influence on military affairs and foreign policy was strong, but he could not effectively control domestic events in any part of his domain. A further unifying element was provided by the fact that delegations of sixty members each from the Austrian Reichsrat and the Hungarian parliament met alternately in Vienna and Budapest to handle certain common problems. However, for the majority of the Habsburg population, the decisions of the separate Austrian and Hungarian governments were more important than the work of the joint institutions. It will be remembered that Austria was assigned Bukovina, Dalmatia, and the Slovenian lands; the great majority of the Habsburg Croats, Serbs, and Romanians, however, lived in the Hungarian crownlands (see Map 2). Although this narrative deals primarily with the South Slav and Romanian populations, their specific problems did not dominate the political life of the monarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Looking back on the final years of Austria-Hungary, Field Marshal Conrad von Hötzendorf wrote bleakly in December 1924 that the empire should have followed Franz Josef to the grave in November 1916 instead of struggling on for a further two years. Neither the Monarchy nor its last Emperor, Karl, had been permitted a dignified exit from the European stage. Conrad might have added that this applied also to himself. He remained notoriously embittered that in February 1917 Karl had replaced him as chief of the General Staff, dispatched him to command Habsburg forces in the Tyrol, and then made him the scapegoat for the failed offensive of June 1918. Yet Conrad's frustration under Karl's ‘new regime’ was not purely personal. He resented perhaps even more the weakened status of the Austro-Hungarian military. This had begun months before Franz Josef's death when, with the creation of a joint High Command for the central powers in the aftermath of the disastrous Brusilov offensive, the Austrian High Command (AOK) had been made subordinate to the German military leadership. Conrad spoke caustically at the time of the beginning of a ‘Ludendorff era’. This affront was then compounded by the Habsburg military's growing weakness within the Monarchy itself. From August 1914 the AOK had tried to run a military dictatorship in the Austrian half of the empire, but their effectiveness outside the immediate war zones had been successfully restricted by Count Stürgkh, the Austrian Prime Minister (supported by his Hungarian counterpart, István Tisza, who blocked any military imposition on the kingdom of Hungary). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

CONTINENTAL INFLUENCES: (1) IMMIGRATION Despite the enormous dominance of England in the cultural exchanges between Britain and the continent in the early eighteenth century, the British churches as a whole were subject to important continental influences, influences which helped prepare British opinion for the startling news, sedulously disseminated, of religious upheaval in the American colonies. Just as the revival in the Rhineland and the international activities of the Moravians had helped to bridge the chasm between the Lutheran and Reformed worlds, so too did the British churches. A central position in the propaganda for the revival came to be taken by a group of ministers of the Church of Scotland, John Gillies producing an updated version of the Acts of the Apostles in his Historical Collections of Accounts of Revival; and the British Reformed churches fully and self-consciously shared in those changes of thought and sentiment in the Reformed world which had paved the way for revival in the Lower Rhine, Netherlands and New England. If August Hermann Francke, himself an apostle of reform and renewal rather than revival, had under-pinned the revival movements of the first generation, and the world-wide conflict between his son and Zinzendorf had given shape to the revival movements of the second generation, it was the eccentric English clergyman George Whitefield who established himself as the universal gospel salesman of the next generation, helping to unify both the friends and enemies of revival by focussing the division of spirits upon himself. Britain had of course suffered many similar ideological alarms to her continental neighbours. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Revival in the American colonies shared the characteristics of revival in Europe; friends and enemies alike treated it as a pan-Protestant phenomenon. Jonathan Edwards discerned a distinct stage in the cosmic history of redemption in the reforms of Peter the Great, here regarded as a surrogate Protestant, the success of missions among the Tartars, the American Indians and on the Malabar coast, and of revivals proper in New England and most especially ‘in Germany, through the endeavours of an eminent divine there, August Herman Frank, professor of divinity at Halle in Saxony’. Conservative opponents of the revival also secured a European resonance for their views, and put the synoptic vision of the revivalists to their own use. They perceived ‘a wonderful WANDERING SPIRIT’ which now haunt[s] Moravia, and many other places in the German Empire; has of late been very troublesome in England; and has been seen, felt and heard by thousands in America … honest folks in Scotland … get by its influences such a second-sight, as they can easily see their neighbours' hearts and intentions … Such as have read the records of Germany and England al[l]edge that it was the same [spirit] who guided the incomparable Jacob Behmen in writing his religious jargon and dark nonsense: that possess'd the enthusiasts of Munster. The immigrant Babel in the Middle Colonies, especially Pennsylvania, was certainly immense; it was here that revivalism was first developed, and that there were the greatest concentrations of the Dutch, German and Swiss peoples whose history in Europe has concerned us. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Zinzendorf and the Dutch money which sustained him for so long were among the forces moving the axis of revival westwards, to the Rhineland, the Netherlands and England. In all of these places, however, he was to find revival already in being or in preparation; and in the South-West a shape was given to his activities by conflict, not with Halle, but with another revival, that of the Inspired. And, different as they were, the Moravians and the Inspired were alike helping to bridge the great gulf in the Protestant world between Lutheran and Reformed, and to plant some of Luther's norms of personal piety in new territory. CHURCH AND STATE IN THE WETTERAU The political and confessional organisation of the Lower Rhine and the North-West of the Empire will be treated in the next chapter. At the very gates of that area, however, many of our present themes, persecution and toleration, state-building and the displacement of old religious shibboleths, emigration and religious revival, were sharply focussed in some tiny Reformed principalities north-east of Frankfurt. Here were a group of counts, constitutionally connected in the Empire by membership of the Wetterau bench, the senior bench of counts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ZINZENDORF'S RELATIONS WITH SILESIA AND SALZBURG Zinzendorf's attitude towards the revivals in Silesia and Salzburg was as ambivalent as his attitudes towards most other things. Himself the grandson of an Austrian Protestant émigré, he could not fail to cherish the cause of Protestant survival in the Habsburg lands, even if the peopling of the estate he bought at Berthelsdorf in Upper Lusatia had not depended on it. He was closely connected with the Pietist nobility of Silesia, and also for many years with Steinmetz, the apostle of Teschen. He defended hard-pressed Pietist pastors in Silesia, took up the cause of the Schwenckfelders with the Imperial government, and in 1727 found them a temporary asylum in Herrnhut. But he had a difficult tightrope to walk. He was exposed to plausible charges that he made Silesians (and Upper Lusatians) discontented with their pastors, and, in attacking Steinmetz and his colleagues, the Jesuits made the best of the accusation that he, Scheffer and Schwedler were introducing a new religion into Silesia, not entitled to toleration under the Westphalia settlement. Nor were Zinzendorf's relations with the church and government of Saxony such as to make him desire the hostile attention of that government's patron, the Emperor. The troubles in Moravia which coincided with the great exodus from Salzburg brought on him fresh rebukes from the Emperor, and for years Zinzendorf instructed his sympathisers in Silesia to live quietly and obediently under the authorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

RELIGIOUS POLICY IN BRANDENBURG–PRUSSIA Within the Protestant world and operating upon the common Protestant mind were particular driving centres, areas of special activity which, from the middle of the seventeenth century, moved ever further from the old Protestant heartlands in central Europe. Heidelberg and Hamburg kept some kind of contact with Germans overseas, Reformed and Lutheran; Sweden continued to supply pastoral assistance to the Swedes of the former New Sweden on the Delaware; the Pietist monarchy of Denmark gave its patronage to the celebrated Tranquebar mission: Amsterdam was more important than them all, but gradually yielded the palm to London. The Great Elector's dying words were ‘London and Amsterdam’, a prophecy as precisely fulfilled in the ecclesiastical as in the political sphere. In the non-hierarchical Protestant churches of the continent the link between church and state was normally formed by the court chaplain, and, from 1705 when Queen Anne's consort, Prince George of Denmark, appointed as his chaplain the Pietist Anton Wilhelm Bohme, the Great Elector's successors had a spokesman for their policies at the British court. Their Dutch connexions proved more problematic. In 1613 the Elector Johann Sigismund went over from the Lutheran to the Reformed confession, less, it seems, from the hope of furthering his claims to Reformed territories in the Rhineland, than from genuine admiration for what was then the most dynamic religious confession in Europe. This conversion had far-reaching implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

CHURCH AND STATE IN SALZBURG The most dramatic episode in the story of religious revival, an event which had its repercussions throughout Protestant Europe and America, and taught lessons to the Habsburgs, was the great emigration from Salzburg in the winter of 1731–2. Contemporaries found this an even more ‘surprising work of God’ than Jonathan Edwards found the revival at Northampton, Mass.; but, like that revival, it had roots in the past. Salzburg was both an archdiocese and a principality. It was characteristic of the old Europe that the boundaries of the two jurisdictions did not coincide on the ground and were not always harmoniously exercised by the same person. Thus, for example, for purposes of secular government, most of the Defereggertal was subject to the principality of Salzburg, but part belonged to the Tyrol; in spiritual matters the valley was entirely subject to the archdiocese of Salzburg and belonged to the archdeaconry of Gmünd in Carinthia, a territory for secular purposes subject to the Habsburgs. Wolf Dietrich (archbishop 1587–1611), who was suspected of trying to secularise the principality and fetched up in effect a prisoner of the Pope, had begun with an edict getting rid of the Protestant town councillors of his capital city, and requiring all his subjects to become Catholic or leave the country. This achieved the desired result in and about Salzburg. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE CIRCULATION OF INFORMATION: (1) LETTERS This study of international religious revival in the Protestant world in the eighteenth century may without paradox commence with a postscript, perhaps the most breathless postscript of the century: P.S. As to the churches in Germany, you'll inquire how their discipline is exercised, and particularly the discipline of the Lutheran churches, their worship and government; how the affair of the union between them and the Calvinists stands. All you please to send anent the present state of the Barnavelt and Arminian party and Cocceians in Holland, with the conditions of religion there, will be most acceptable. You will likewise be fond to know the present numbers of the confessors and new converts in France; and, if you have as much time, I would fain know the state and issue of that affair between the Cardinal Noailles and the Bishops who join him anent Father Quesnel's tenets, and the rest of the clergy in France who adhere to the Pope's Bull; and if there be any numbers in France that are in any way breathing after a reformation, as we hear there are. Anything anent the success of the Gospel in the Dutch and English plantations, in the East Indies and the Danish missionaries in Malabar; of the state of the Greek churches … May I expect anything anent the much forgotten Jews in Africa, Asia, or Europe? […] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Towards the end of his reign Selīm I had been preparing for a new offensive, but no one could be sure where the blow might fall. Now, in September 1520, the great sultan was dead. As the news became known in Christendom, men felt that a dark shadow had been banished, an imminent peril suddenly dispelled. Sulaimān, the only son of Selīm, was said to be ill-versed in affairs and of a quiet nature, a prince, therefore, who would be little inclined to war. Seldom has prediction been more rash or doomed to swifter disillusionment. In 1521 Sulaimān marched against Hungary. The campaign had been organised with meticulous care: the beglerbeg of Rumeli moved towards Sabacz, the sultan following with most of his household regiments; the grand vizier Pīrī Pasha, with a strong contingent of janissaries and ample provision of siege guns, made for the main objective, Belgrade, which Mehemmed II had tried but failed to capture in 1456. At the same time the Akinjis rode out in two columns, the one to effect a diversion against Transylvania, the other to devastate the lands between the Sava and the Drava. The fall of Sabacz and Semlin severed the routes leading to the north and west of Belgrade, so that Sulaimān was now free to assail the great fortress. Guns bombarded the walls from an island in the Danube, a fierce assault drove the garrison into the citadel, an Ottoman flotilla, sailing upstream, cut off all relief by water. The end came when dissension broke out between the Hungarians and their Serbian mercenaries, the former wishing to prolong, the latter to abandon the defence. Belgrade surrendered on 29 August 1521. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE ATTACK ON REDBANK The reputation of the Hessian grenadiers is too well known to want an eulogium from my pen. In all times, in all places, in every situation, their conduct and valour have distinguished them. After his unsuccessful thrusts in New Jersey, Howe, intent upon the rebel capital Philadelphia, embarked the best of his troops at Staten Island in the first half of July 1777, and sailed on the 23rd, landing after a protracted voyage at the head of Chesapeake Bay a month later. The embarkation returns of the expedition show Howe's reduced dependence on the mercenaries: of 16, 498 troops only 4, 441 were Hessians. Clinton was left to hold New York and its outposts with Provincials, the bulk of the Germans, and some British. During Howe's campaign the Jäger, particularly Captains Ewald and Wreden, distinguished themselves on numerous occasions and defeated ‘Scotch Willy’ Maxwell's corps at Iron Hill. Throughout the campaign a Jäger piquet of three officers and seventy men marched at the head of the army. But in the two major battles, Brandywine and Germantown, the British did the lion's share of the fighting. Hessian casualties were trifling in each: 6 killed and 24 wounded at Brandywine, 14 wounded at Germantown. One British officer went so far as to write of Brandywine, that the Hessians ‘had not the least share in this victory – having fired neither gun nor musket shot the whole day’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Perhaps no finer example of the paradoxical nature of the politics of household drama can be found than the career of John Heywood. The most consistently courtly of Tudor dramatists, Heywood was also in many ways a thoroughly ‘oppositiona’ playwright, profoundly out of sympathy with the religious reforms of the 1530s and 1540s. Indeed, he came perilously close to dying for his beliefs in 1543, when he was condemned for denying the Royal Supremacy in the aftermath of the Prebendaries Plot. Yet his opposition to royal policy took place, in all but the latter instance, at court and in the royal household where he found employment throughout both the Reformation period and the Marian reaction. And his dissent was expressed, not in factional in fighting or secret conspiracy, but in the more public forum created by the production of courtly drama and the circulation of literary manuscripts. Through these means he made articulate appeals for the continuation of the old order aimed at the courtly community and, in the late 1520s and 1530s, chiefly at Henry VIII himself. Only after the return to protestantism under Elizabeth was he prompted to enter self-imposed exile in 1564, and only then after he had provided at least one dramatic entertainment for the new queen. THE PLAYWRIGHT Heywood was born around 1497, perhaps, as his most recent editors suggest, in Coventry, where he may have begun the association with the Rastell family, and through them with Thomas More, which was to colour his early dramatic career. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

So far, this book has concentrated on a particular society and a particular proto-industry. The worsted industry of the Württemberg Black Forest, as we have seen, arose and survived for more than two centuries in a society characterized by ‘state corporatism’: a symbiotic cooperation between the state and privileged corporate groups. As previous chapters have shown, this institutional framework profoundly affected economic, demographic and social developments in this proto-industrial region between the late sixteenth and the late eighteenth century. What implications, though, do the Württemberg findings have for developments in early modern Europe more widely? Was Württemberg simply an interesting regional exception, and did most other European proto-industries see the growth of capitalist markets, as was claimed in the original theories of proto-industrialization? Or was Württemberg in fact quite typical, and did ‘state corporatism’ predominate in many European societies to the end of the ancien régime, with potentially far-reaching effects on their economic, demographic and social development? To answer these questions, this chapter surveys what is known about the social and institutional framework surrounding proto-industries in early modern Europe as a whole. The original theorists, as we saw in Chapter 3, were agreed that Europe was a ‘traditional’, ‘peasant’ or ‘non-market’ society before proto-industrialization and a ‘capitalist’ or ‘market’ society after protoindustrialization. Traditional non-market institutions – the village community, the seigneurial system, the privileged town, the guild, the merchant company – broke down, and were replaced by unregulated capitalistic markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Long before the first factories, Europe had ceased to be a homogeneous ‘less developed economy’, producing largely for subsistence and trading only in luxuries. From about 1500 on – earlier in some areas, much later in others – it developed into a differentiated patchwork of interdependent regions, specializing in a wide array of agricultural and industrial activities, and trading in mass commodities through a network of towns and cities. This is something of which specialists have long been aware. But in the 1970s a series of publications appeared which focussed on the industrial aspect of regional specialization, christened it ‘proto-industrialization’, and argued that it was an important cause of factory industrialization and the whole transition to capitalism. These ‘theories of proto-industrialization’, as they came to be called, agreed about two things: first, proto-industry was central to the economic development of modern Europe; and second, it transformed demographic as well as economic behaviour. But they disagreed about practically everything else, including the causes of European economic development in the centuries before industrialization. The original version of the theory was put forward, along with the term ‘proto-industrialization’, by Franklin Mendels. Mendels argued that the expansion of rural industry broke down traditional demographic behaviour: in traditional agrarian economies, the marriage rate followed movements in the economy, but in the Flemish proto-industrial region Mendels studied, marriages increased in a ‘good’ year (measured by a high ratio of linen to rye prices), but did not decrease in a ‘bad’ year. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to his own testimony Jacopo Strada was a faithful son of Rome. A week before the death of Emperor Maximilian Strada wrote to Jacopo Dani, secretary of the grand duke of Tuscany, reaffirming his allegiance to the Catholic faith. But Strada's Catholicism was not free from heterodox elements. He was in chronic trouble with the Italian Inquisition. In 1567 this ecclesiastical tribunal linked him to a group of Mantuan women accused of heresy. In 1569 Strada avoided Mantuan and Milanese territory for fear of the Inquisition. Strada was also in contact with the well-known Italian heretics Mino Celsi and Giovanni Bernardino Bonifacio. It may well have been these rumors of heresy which prompted pious Duke Albert of Bavaria to remove him from the Antiquarium project in Munich. Whatever the case may be, by 1581 he was in serious trouble with the Italian church. In that year the Inquisition passed down the order to burn him in effigy in his hometown of Mantua. Despite these problems with the Inquisition he refused to make a clear break with Rome and in fact sought to use the church to advance the fortunes of his sons. In 1568 Paolo was elected chapter member of the Mantuan cathedral notwithstanding his father's questionable reputation. In response to Strada's years of faithful service, Archduke Rudolf recommended Ottavio in 1576 for a canonicate in Germany. It is both surprising and significant, however, that in an era preoccupied with confessional issues Strada exhibited relatively little interest in these matters. Instead he described his home as a place for all kinds of people, a forum for open discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In May 1578 Emperor Rudolf II returned to Vienna to participate in a Corpus Christi procession. It was the first time in fifteen years that a Habsburg emperor had played a major role in this ecclesiastical ceremony. The feast of Corpus Christi was one of the most important festivals of the resurgent Catholic church. Celebrating the doctrine of transubstantiation, the highlight of the festivities was an elaborate procession that included the leading civic and religious leaders of a local municipality. In Vienna this holiday had long been a source of tension between the city's Catholic and Protestant population. In 1549 a Lutheran baker's apprentice had snatched a monstrance from a priest and trampled it under foot. Soldiers apprehended him immediately, chopped off his hands and cut out his tongue. The unfortunate youth was then carted outside the city and burned at the stake. Maximilian was aware of the controversy surrounding the holiday and normally did not participate in the proceedings. Emperor Rudolf did not share his father's reservations, however, and in spring 1578, accompanied by his brothers Ernst and Maximilian, he publicly displayed his allegiance to the church by joining the ecclesiastical procession. The proceedings began smoothly, but when the cavalcade of priests, princes and magistrates turned down the Graben on their way to St. Stephen's Cathedral they encountered an unexpected bustle of activity. At the corner of the Graben and Kohlmarkt a group of farmers had set up booths selling butter, eggs and milk. As the procession passed by, a throng of onlookers surged forward. In the rush to catch a glimpse of the emperor and his retinue they toppled the milk stalls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ten years ago he [Maximilian] said to the bishop of Olomouc, “No sin is more serious than the desire to tyrannize in matters of conscience.” Above all he defended our most sacred religion which is justice in God and the proper worship of Him. While attending the Reichstag in Regensburg an ailing Maximilian died in the early hours of 12 October 1576. The religious strains in central Europe were reflected by a series of conflicting reports of the emperor's death. Rival Protestant and Catholic accounts of Maximilian's final hours quickly circulated throughout the continent. According to Stephen Gerlach two official funeral addresses were written in the emperor's honor. One was composed by Johannes Crato, while the other was drafted by Lambert Gruter, the bishop of Wiener Neustadt. The introductory citations from the two respective orations aptly capture the contrast between the irenic and Counter-Reform factions at the imperial court. The death of Maximilian II offered both parties an opportunity to express their vision of the dynasty. By examining these two dissonant voices, we can more clearly see the antithesis between irenicism and its Counter-Reform rival. Though the funeral ritual employed a broad arsenal of imperial symbols and images and was contingent on a number of factors, the orations were emblematic of two increasingly divergent world views. The events of 1576–1577 illustrate both the weakness of a Habsburg via media and the appeal of a renewed and revitalized Catholic church. After the emperor's death Crato returned home to Breslau, and there three months later he published his eulogy in Maximilian's honor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is significant that the high point of irenicism in Habsburg Vienna corresponded with the reign of Maximilian II (1564–1576), for the most prominent feature of this phenomenon was its confessional neutrality. Maximilian's predecessor, Ferdinand I, though a tolerant ruler in many respects, was a loyal son of the Catholic church. Ferdinand had officially invited the Jesuits to the Austrian lands. Ferdinand's grandson, Rudolf II, was raised by a zealous Catholic mother. He had been educated in Spain at the court of his orthodox cousin, Philip II, and at the beginning of his reign he did indeed support more vigorous policies of Catholic reform. When he succeeded his father in 1576, a papal representative described the new emperor as “most Catholic and very religious.” Maximilian, the adiaphorist, stood in contrast to both his father and son. The enigmatic religious convictions of Maximilian II have puzzled historians since the emperor's death in 1576. A conflicting series of deathbed reports confuse the matter. A papal observer confirmed that Maximilian died an orthodox Catholic while others maintained that the Habsburg remained a crypto-Protestant to his last hour. Though historians have yet to reach a consensus on this issue, there are a few facts that can be agreed upon. From an early age he had a broad exposure to Protestantism. One of his first tutors was the Alsatian Wolfgang Schiefer who taught the young prince at Innsbruck between 1536 and 1538 before it was discovered that he was a Lutheran. Schiefer had studied at Wittenberg and was a friend of Philip Melanchthon, Joachim Camerarius, Ulrich von Hutten and Luther himself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]