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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.

The Thirty Years War produced one of the largest outpourings of supplications and descriptions of misery in response to economic and demographic crisis in European History. This article investigates those descriptions of misery--hitherto either accepted at face value as eyewitness accounts or dismissed as biased exaggerations--as an important source for understanding the social impact of the war. The rhetorical flourishes in the descriptions which have led some to view them as biased, were part of the process of negotiation between subjects and rulers and were subject to the rules of that discourse. The rhetoric drew on language used in supplications before the war, but it escalated and was transformed by the war's impact. It gained its force from the fact that it was linked to events at the local level. The transformation of the rhetoric during the war was the result of how events impinged on the process of negotiation. The rhetoric thus created a social meaning of the war that was shared by both rulers and ruled., 'Anno 1642, all the misery continued just as bad as in the previous year, so that the despair pressed all the harder . . . whoever has not himself seen [...]

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 [...]