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Economic institutions that foster technological innovation and diffusion and enable flexible adaptation to technical change enhance social welfare. In all these respects, early modern craft guilds have not been judged very favourably. It is generally believed that they were devoted to maintaining their members' rents by excluding non-members from the labour market and that they resisted labour-saving technologies. The marginalisation, demise, or abolition of craft guilds was therefore a prerequisite for successful proto-industrial and industrial development. The roughly contemporaneous demise of the craft guilds and rise of industrial manufacturing is seen as conclusive evidence of the restrictive practices and negative welfare effects of craft guilds. While it is certainly true that craft guilds did oppose technical change under specific circumstances, the point is easily overgeneralised. In most parts of continental Europe, the dissolution of guilds from the late eighteenth century on had political rather than industrial motivations, even though abolition was often justified in economic terms. Arguments by economic historians based on the temporal coincidence between the demise of craft guilds and industrial developments hark back to those eighteenth-century debates and rely on highly aggregated evidence. Establishing a direct causal link between the dissolution of guilds and industrialisation without considering decision making at the level of individual craft guilds runs the risk of incurring an ecological fallacy, that is, of making inferences about individual behaviour on the basis of aggregated data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Craft guilds, Adam Smith famously suggested in 1776, are ‘a conspiracy against the public’, and the government should ‘do nothing to facilitate such assemblies, much less to render them necessary’. As in so much other economic thinking, Smith was a trendsetter in this too. Not only were his ideas about guilds shared by some of his late eighteenth-century contemporaries, they seemed to apply almost overnight when French revolutionaries abolished the guilds, first in France (in 1791) and then in much of the rest of continental Europe. For a long time, historians have interpreted the simultaneity of ideas and policies as definitive proof that the guilds had outlived themselves as the gothic remnants of a bygone age and should make way for the modern world of the steam engine and laissez-faire. Guilds, in other words, were seen as part of an economic system that had prevented the European economy from realising its full economic potential. It was, if anything, a demonstration of the validity of this argument, that England was the first European country to lose its guilds – English guilds were supposed to have vanished through some unplanned process starting in the second half of the seventeenth century – and also the first country to industrialise. The negative view of guilds survived for the best part of two centuries in history textbooks and specialised works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The key to understanding the particular ‘peasant dynamic’ of early modern Württemberg is the collective institution that played the greatest role in governing village resources, the commune and its court. While there was little that was ‘immobile’ about this society, it nevertheless appeared little altered in the early eighteenth century from the world of the sixteenth or early seventeenth century. This was true not only of its levels of productivity and agricultural techniques, but equally, as we will see, the social order. A major contributor to this degree of stability was the continued ambition of certain groups within the village to employ collective measures to regulate village life, measures that generally worked in tandem with those promulgated by central government. This world was generated by institutional effort, and the manner in which village institutions managed the resources available to them. Early modern Württemberg was clearly a very unequal society. Property holding conferred institutional power and thus societal development was shaped by particular interests. Nevertheless, communal institutions themselves allowed far wider access among the populace to resources held as communal property than was the case for the resources that were held as private property, access to which was more inequitably distributed. Even if shares in communal property were also ‘inequitably’ apportioned, by an overwintering rule, for example, or allotting wood according to the size of one's property, overall this property system still probably worked to the advantage of the poor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the basis of the foregoing discussion we can now be reasonably satisfied that the production of books in the sixteenth century was deeply shaped by the organization of the market – both the structure of the printing industry, in a series of discrete and quite distinct national markets, and a sophisticated transnational system of distribution and marketing. These industry issues conditioned the book world at all levels: the market in scholarly books, as much as the production and sale of pamphlets. Our purpose now must be to try and locate the book in the culture of persuasion. There can be little doubt that books had a vast and important role to play in shaping the new religious cultures of the sixteenth century. Books were bought in vast quantities, and religious books dominated the market at all levels: at both ends of the spectrum and almost all points in between. From the learned Latin biblical commentaries of Calvin, Brenz and Oecolampadius, to the ‘godly ballad’, with a whole host of Bibles, catechisms, works of devotion and Flugschriften in the middle ranges, the market in religious books dominated the sixteenth-century book world. None doubted their impact in forming opinion – certainly not Luther and his colleagues, who wrote so indefatigably and lavished praise upon the ‘new’ invention; certainly not the Catholic authorities who tried to limit their circulation by censorship and proscription. But in some senses the book has suffered precisely because its influence seems so obvious. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We come, at last, to the book. For many who have addressed this subject, this is indeed to come to the heart of the question, for the book looms large in all explanations of the appeal of the evangelical cause: a view shared, it must be said, by the reformers themselves. To the extent that Protestantism was the religion of the word, the word was made print. Luther and his colleagues rejoiced; the reading public devoured the new literature. There can be little doubt that the book did much to shape the Reformation; it must also be acknowledged that the Reformation did much to reshape the book. Our purpose here must be to acknowledge this role, but also to place it in context. As must by now be clear, the book did not function as anautonomous agency, but within the context created by the intermingling of a whole range of communication media. The world of oral communication impacted on print, just as print presented new possibilities for the development of preaching, drama and song. Print culture also brought its own particular dynamic. The Reformation erupted when the book was already a mature technology, tried and tested after seventy years of experimentation and refinement. Nevertheless this was still a developing industry. The full potential of print as a medium of communication had emerged only gradually as authors and publishers tested its relevance to the world of education, scholarship and government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A Catholic visitor to a Protestant worship service in sixteenth-century Europe would immediately have been struck by stark contrasts to the familiar tradition of his own upbringing. The scale of the physical alterations would obviously vary, depending on whether he had stumbled upon a church cleansed of all images for Calvinist worship, or a Lutheran church, in which the internal fabric might be largely untouched. But it is unlikely, one might surmise, that if the service were in progress, his mind would linger much on architecture and internal decoration: more arresting by far was the essential unfamiliarity of the worship service. For a start, there would only have been one service in progress; in this Protestant church he would not have observed one priest celebrating Mass at the High Altar, while others were engaged in duties in the side chapels. No priests would have been hearing confession; the familiar bustle and variety would have been missing. Rather the attention of the congregation gathered in the nave would have been focused on the pulpit, from which the minister would be conducting the service. If his arrival was unplanned, our Catholic visitor would in all likelihood have first heard the voice of the minister, leading the congregation in prayer, reading from Scripture or preaching. Preaching would obviously have occupied the longest time: probably an inordinate length for someone not inured by long practice. [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]

On Sunday 12 February 1682 three men were to be found sitting in the Black Bull, a tavern situated in Holborn. They were awaiting news of the movements of Thomas Thynne, the noted Whig MP and associate of the Duke of Monmouth. All three were foreigners, Captain Christopher Vratz, alias de Vallicks, a German soldier of fortune, Lieutenant John Stern, a forty-two-year old Swedish mercenary and Charles George Borsky, alias Boratzi, a not very bright Polish manservant. At around six in the evening news came to them that Thynne was out and about in his coach taking the air. On hearing this the three left the tavern and rode up the Strand in the direction of St James's heading for Pall Mall. Thomas Thynne had spent the afternoon talking with the Duke of Monmouth in his coach, and as the evening drew on he dropped the duke off at Hedge Lane, Thynne proposed to conclude his journey with a round of visits in the City. As the coach headed up St James's Street towards the Countess of Northumberland's house it was gloomy enough for the vehicle to need a ‘link man’ with a torch in front to guide the way. At which point the three men on horseback rode up. Stern moved in front of the coach, while Vratz and Borosky came up to the coach itself. Vratz shouted ‘Hold you dog!’ to the driver and as the latter turned, Borosky fired his weapon through the window of the carriage. [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]

POLITICAL AND CONFESSIONAL COMPLEXITY OF THE NORTH-WEST The Moravians traversed the North-West of the Empire between their bases in the Wetterau, in Denmark and in the Netherlands, as busily as the South-West. Everywhere they went they created new interconfessional connexions – the way they passed Wesley from hand to hand all the way from Rotterdam to Herrnhut and back is especially instructive – and also new disputes; but in this area, unlike the South-West, their history is not an organising principle for that of revival as a whole. For the crux of the religious geography of the North-West was that both revival and Pietist renewal suffered great setbacks, and that Lutheran Orthodoxy staged a notable, if brittle, comeback in the great Imperial cities and in some other important territories. There were good reasons (as we have seen) why religious revival set in first in the little Reformed principalities in the Wetterau, and more importantly, though much more slowly, in the larger Reformed communities. To these developments Zinzendorf's aspirations to create a Reformed Tropus based on Herrnhaag were entirely marginal. In the North-West political fragmentation had proceeded further than anywhere else in the Empire; nowhere were the religious faiths tolerated in the Empire more confusingly mixed together, and mingled with other faiths not tolerated (in Frankfurt the Jewish ghetto already made up 25 per cent of the population). [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]

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]

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]

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]

Opposition or affirmation The history of the parties of the religious, national, and regional minorities in Imperial Germany is, in part, a story of a resistance to oppression and struggle against the ruling powers thoroughly comparable to that waged by the Social Democrats. These minority parties represented groups who were at best reluctant participants in the German Empire of 1871 and apprehensive about its future development: the French, Danes, and Poles with different national loyalties, the Hanoverians, conquered and annexed by the Prussians, and, above all, Germany's Roman Catholics, turned into a permanent minority following the exclusion of the Habsburg monarchy from German affairs as a consequence of the war of 1866. The initial decade of the empire's history showed that their fears and apprehensions were thoroughly justified. No sooner was the new empire created than its government began a policy of vigorous harassment and persecution of the Catholic Church, the Kulturkampf. The Jesuits were expelled from Germany, priests arrested by the hundreds, bishops forced to flee the country. Among the predominantly Roman Catholic national minorities in Alsace-Lorraine and Prussian Poland, the struggle between church and state quickly became intermingled with national antagonism and so was carried out with a special bitterness and vehemence. In the face of such policies, the leaders and activists of the minority parties, themselves often men of basically conservative opinions, had no choice but to employ the democratic strategies of popular political agitation via the press, public meetings, and mass membership organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The field of witchcraft studies appears to be holding pace with innovations in scholarly communications just as well as other academic pursuits. The number of international conferences has grown considerably since the 1980s. Their conference volumes offer excellent reference points for acquainting oneself with the latest developments and research in progress throughout Europe and the rest of the world. However, a glance at the catalogue of the Pisan exhibit Bibliotheca Lamiarum or the internationally renowned journal Past and Present give the impression that nationalistic tendencies in scholarship still linger on, indeed may have even hardened in the age of ‘European Unity’. A closer examination of witchcraft studies and their historiography reveals that this was not always the case. Long before the onset of modern conference tourism, an international forum of witchcraft studies thrived and communicated in the former language of learned discourse, Latin. For this traditional intelligentsia, it was a matter of course that Christian Thomasius (1655–1728) analysed a pan-European array of documents for his Dissertatio de origine ac progressu processus inquisitorii contra sagas. Pierre Bayle (1647–1765) constantly referred back to Thomasius' text and John Wagstaff published a commentary on Thomasius, the De crimine magiae, in 1701. And the cosmopolitan character of witchcraft studies did not end with the use of Latin as the lingua franca. Thomasius himself authorised the translation of several of his English treatises into German. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Few historical enterprises have been as intensively historiographical and reflexive in character as the study of witchcraft in early modern Europe. Doubts about the very existence, let alone the character, of the object of study, together with the interdisciplinary nature of the subject, have ensured that the explosion of studies in this field since the 1960s has been accompanied by a regular rethinking of its intellectual parameters and conceptual tools. One of the most important moments in this process was the publication in 1971 of Religion and the Decline of Magic by Keith Thomas. The essays in this book, arising from a conference held in 1991, examine the developments in witchcraft scholarship in the last two decades or so in the light of Thomas' contribution. In part a review of his influence, it also offers both prescriptions and examples for alternative approaches. This introduction begins this process by re-examining the arguments of Religion and the Decline of Magic in the light of subsequent studies (particularly, but not exclusively, in the Englishspeaking world), as a way of exploring the changing nature of witchcraft research. Like any reception study, this chapter will chart an uneasy course between analysis of what Thomas himself was arguing and what has been read into his work. Religion and the Decline of Magic is a large and complex work, in which witchcraft is only one theme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The significance of the crisis of the seventeenth century for the whole of Central Europe is not easily summed up. In some rural areas the years between 1620 and 1660 marked a decisive turning point, a watershed, a final break with the past that confirmed radical changes in the agrarian order. East of the Elbe River a new agrarian order took hold. Powerful landed noble families consolidated their hold on lands laid waste in the war, confiscated freehold properties, built up large estates, or latifundia, and forced peasants into a humiliating form of servitude, often called the second serfdom. In other regions, in the German West particularly, the structures of order, authority, and social control, built up slowly in the sixteenth century, proved far more resilient than one might at first suppose. The demographic crisis may have ended the expansion of population, contributed to a reversal in agricultural prices and wages, and altered the commercial climate for agriculture. But old systems of heritable land tenure, the seigneurial rights of lords, and the village social structure changed little, if at all. In the reconstructed agrarian world of the German West the essential structures of property survived the crisis intact. Scholars have often commented on the remarkable political and social stability that settled over Europe in the late seventeenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The three centuries from the early sixteenth to the end of the Napoleonic Wars saw changes of fundamental importance in the ways in which European peoples viewed themselves, their continent, and the world. When this period began the emperor Charles V had just triumphed over the French at Pavia (1525) and, in the minds of many, was about to restore an empire, both holy and Roman, and to unify Europe. When it ended, the bid for continental dominance by Napoleon had been shattered at Leipzig (1813) and Waterloo (1815), and Europe was set for a century of nationalism and economic growth. A NEW WORLD The changes which were achieved during this period can, for our purposes, be listed and discussed under five heads. First was the concept of nationalism, which was slowly and unevenly taking shape at this time. A nation is a body of people held together by a sense of belonging together. A common language and culture were important bonds. So also were a common historical tradition, the occupation of a well-defined territory, and, often enough, a common enemy. Many a nation has been forged in conflict with another and perhaps more powerful state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Athens I love is not the one that is wronging me now, but that one in which I used to have secure enjoyment of my rights as a citizen. The country that I am attacking does not seem to me to be mine any longer; it is rather that I am trying to recover a country that has ceased to be mine. And the man who really loves his country is not the one who refuses to attack it when he has been unjustly driven from it, but the man whose desire for it is so strong that he will shrink from nothing in his efforts to get back there again. The remarkable career of Algernon Sidney the martyr has been recounted elsewhere. Constructed, Frankenstein-like, from the remnants of a living person, Algernon the ‘stern inflexible patriot’ had a number of qualities true to his original. On the whole however that original was Sidney in death, rather than life. Reinforcing Sidney's stoicisation of himself was a perceptible rigormortis by which this inflexibility was maintained over continents, and centuries. Allied to it was an incorruptibility apparently superior to death itself. In the last decade of the eighteenth century, when public excitement could contain itself no longer, Algernon's grave was opened. ‘Curiosity was excited – the body was very perfect.’ Sidney the patriot-hero was a triumph of the mortician's art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reflecting upon the course of the Reformation in 1557, Heinrich Bullinger, successor to Zwingli and leader of the reformed church in Switzerland from 1532 until 1575, presented a gloomy and pessimistic assessment. God had revealed his truth to the German nation in these times and his people had proved themselves ungrateful. The immediate consequence of this infidelity, Bullinger believed, were the dreadful wars between the Emperor and the Protestants ravaging Europe. France, Germany and Italy were engulfed in battles, and Swiss soldiers, despite the persistent opposition of the reform movement to mercenary service, continued to die on foreign territory. Within the Confederation the Protestant cities of Basle and Berne pursued their protracted quarrels with Calvin's Geneva over matters of doctrine and church polity, whilst the Catholics, strengthened by the Council of Trent, were everywhere resurgent. The despair of the aging reformer at his desk in Zurich accurately reflects the general disappointment among Swiss reformers that the soaring hopes of the first generation had not been fulfilled. The Reformation had not, as Zwingli had originally anticipated, culminated in a unified alliance of evangelical states under the leadership of Zurich. Instead half the Confederation remained defiantly loyal to Catholicism, and even those states which had eventually followed Zurich into the Protestant camp pursued their own models of reform with a stubborn and, at times, cantankerous independence. Any survey of the Reformation in Switzerland should reflect this enduring diversity, a phenomenon which has to some extent been masked by the subsequent success of Zurich and Geneva in impressing their reforming ideals on a wider European movement later in the century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Viewed in retrospect it is in the years immediately after Luther first came to prominence as a theological writer that the Reformation appears most harmoniously and coherently international. Luther's writings certainly excited the interest of a wide international public: even the briefest glance at the contemporary comment on the ‘Luther affair’ leaves little doubt of this. Almost from the first months after Luther had begun to achieve notoriety in Germany, reports from across Europe testify to the intense interest aroused in his character, his writings and his fate. Thus, in May 1519, a Swiss student studying in Paris, Peter Tschudi, could note the avidity with which Luther's works were read in the city; even apparently, according to Luther's other correspondents, at the Sorbonne, later the relentless guardian of doctrinal orthodoxy. In Holland and Flanders meanwhile, much of the intellectual community seemed to have been caught up in the new controversies, as the correspondence of Erasmus bears sufficient testimony. It was probably from the Netherlands that numbers of Luther's works were also transported across the Channel to England, where they are known to have been read about this time. The scale of the intellectual interest in Luther's writings is captured in a famous letter to the reformer by the Swiss publisher Johannes Froben, who in February 1519 was in the process of publishing his second collected edition of Luther's Latin works. Froben wrote to Luther that he had despatched some 600 copies of this collection to France and Spain, and further consignments to England, Italy and the Netherlands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A great deal has already been said about private bills and acts – their character, the distinction between personal and local, and the parliamentary time they occupied. Private acts matter in this analysis because they offered to individuals a definitive settlement of particular problems and thus extended the usefulness of Parliament beyond the concerns of the great agglomerates of Queen, Church and commonwealth. Though they cost money they often saved much higher costs of litigation. As a subdivision of parliamentary legislation, with its own rules and sometimes its own procedures, they appear to be a unique bequest of late-medieval representative institutions; other assemblies of estates and Parliaments enacted measures for similar purposes but did not distinguish them in their general law-making activity as the English Parliament did. It is therefore necessary to provide a brief conspectus of the kind of thing that was done by private act in these seven sessions. Most of the bills promoted for and by individuals caused no difficulties at all, but those for the settling of estate and local concerns could be troublesome because they involved more than one person or interest. It is within these last two categories that one finds a relatively high number of failed bills. RESTITUTION IN BLOOD In the first place, private acts served to restore people to normal legal rights lost through the attainder, by act or at law, of ancestors whose blood, as the phrase went, had become corrupted through condemnation for treason and very occasionally for felony. In theory at least a person through whose veins such corrupted blood flowed stood outside the law: though it could be used against him he could not himself use it or acquire property. Twenty-four acts of restitution passed between 1559 and 1581. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]