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By Terence McIntosh (Chapel Hill, North Carolina University Press, 1997) 317 pp. $34.95 'No shit-hens fly over the town wall.' With this memorable eighteenth-century expression, Walker captured the fundamental antagonism [...]

By Sheilagh Ogilvie (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1997) 513 pp. $80.00 'No shit-hens fly over the town wall.' With this memorable eighteenth-century expression, Walker captured the fundamental antagonism between [...]

'No shit-hens fly over the town wall.' With this memorable eighteenth-century expression, Walker captured the fundamental antagonism between small-town and rural life in early modern Germany.(1) He argued that small [...]

Common people, who experienced the Thirty Years' War outside the arena of power and patronage, saw it as God's punishment and a time for penance. The speculation that the unleashing of God's wrath had already started began with the appearance of the comet of 1618 and Lutheran ministers published pamphlets about God's wrath, encouraging penance. The comet appeared when Lutheran warnings about impending doom had gained ground and political tensions within the Holy Roman Empire had reached a decisive phase resulting in the Thirty Years' War.

More and more issues have come to be included under the rubric 'the social history of the Reformation.' Where once historians focused on the reception of Luther's ideas in an [...]

To the best of my knowledge, this is the first general textbook on the history of mentalities in preindustrial Europe. Up till now, work on the history of mentalities has [...]