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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]

Technological invention and innovation in the pre-industrial economy are still poorly understood. This is partly because of the difficulty in identifying the small-scale and anonymous innovations that dominated technical progress at the time. However, the problem is compounded by several long-standing assumptions about pre-modern manufacture, in particular by the view that from the fifteenth century onwards craft guilds – which provided European urban manufacture with its main institutional framework for over six hundred years – were organised rent seekers that systematically opposed technical innovation. This chapter suggests that the prevailing view of craft guilds misrepresents their principal function and their technological consequences. It begins by analysing the guild structure from the point of view of individual producers and suggests that the primary purpose of craft guilds was to provide adequate skills training through formal apprenticeship. It then argues, from evidence of innovation and resistance to it, that technological invention and innovation were a significant, albeit mostly unintended, effect of the crafts' support for investment in skills. It concludes by briefly addressing the counterfactual question implied by the guilds' critics: if craft guilds were technologically regressive, why was guild-based craft production not out-competed by its major contemporary rival, rural proto-industry? Rather than provide a detailed study of an individual craft or of a constellation of guilds in one town, the focus is on the broad outlines of a system that remained fundamentally unchanged for more than half a millennium. [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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

What marks out the German literature of the period 1100 to 1450 is the emergence and establishment of an autonomous German literary culture in written form, such as had not existed in the previous period. From the late eleventh century onwards it is possible to see a realignment of the relationship between German writings and Latin writings, and between written literature in the vernacular and oral tradition. Let us take just one area as an example. The new German vernacular biblical epic in couplet verse begins in the second half of the eleventh century with the Altdeutsche Genesis (also known as the Vienna Genesis, most likely c. 1060–1100), continues in the twelfth century with the Altdeutsche Exodus (probably c. 1100–30), the biblical poems of Frau Ava (probably d. 1127), the Vorauer Bucher Mosis (The Vorau Books of Moses, probably c. 1130–40), the Anegenge (The beginning, probably 1170–80) and the Kindheit Jesu (The childhood of Christ) by Konrad von FuSesbrunnen (probably c. 1190–1200). These major narrative texts in Middle High German provide a literary context for the Mittelfrankische Reimbibel (The Central Franconian rhymed Bible), an extensive compendium of Old and New Testament matter including stories of the martyrs and early Christian history in German verse (early twelfth-century, only fragments survive); for the Annolied (The song of Anno, c. 1077–81), where for the first time historiographical matters are addressed in German verse; and for the first European vernacular chronicle in verse, the mid-twelfth-century Kaiserchronik (The chronicle of the emperors). We know of no directly comparable traditions of written narrative literature in German before this period - notwithstanding Otfrid and the shorter Old High German poems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This period, which begins before the Reformation and ends with the dawning of the Enlightenment, laid down the foundations of the thought and writing of the modern age and determined the future course of the German-speaking world. Germany in the modern sense did not yet exist, so the territory under discussion is the Holy Roman Empire. We must also remember that in this period most writers moved at will between Latin and German. Not until 1681 do the catalogues for the German book fairs show that more books were being published in German than in Latin. Books and writers before the Reformation Around 1445 in Mainz, Johann Gensfleisch (c. 1400–68), better known as Gutenberg, succeeded in printing with movable metal type. He also used paper, invented in the twelfth century, but only readily available in Germany in the fifteenth. Manuscript and print survived side by side and the boundaries between them remained blurred for a long time. Scriptoria producing multiple copies of manuscripts for sale already existed in the fifteenth century, anticipating the mass-production of the printing press, while books in the early decades were so costly as to constitute luxury items on a par with manuscripts. Books were printed on parchment and manuscripts written on paper. Many early printed books were designed to look like manuscripts, while the manuscript itself survived as a prestige tailormade item for rich, usually courtly patrons. But the book as commodity had come into being and it is no accident that the early centres of printing and publishing were important commercial towns on international trade routes: Mainz, Strasbourg, Basle, Nuremberg, Augsburg, Ulm, Cologne and Leipzig. [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]

When on 1 July 1701 Marlborough left England with William his role was to act as the king's deputy. The dual appointments which he held also reflected a situation in which war against France was highly likely, but not yet inevitable. As ambassador extraordinary he received instructions to negotiate with French and Spanish diplomats at the Hague for a settlement on what by later standards were very generous terms – a French evacuation of the Spanish Netherlands and satisfaction to the Emperor for his claims. His instructions did not spell these out because it was for Marlborough to negotiate them in working out the terms of the Grand Alliance. Secondly, as commander-in-chief of the English and Scottish forces assembling in the Dutch Republic Marlborough was to assume the active role of general which William's failing health made it impossible for him to sustain. However William would still have been in the background, and had he lived longer would certainly have intervened, a serious complication which Marlborough was spared. William's choice of Marlborough, despite their mutual dislike and past antagonisms, was dictated by the king's life-long commitment to subordinate all personal considerations to the mission of containing and reducing the excessive and aggressive power of France. William knew that the recent parliamentary and journalistic onslaughts against the employment of foreign soldiers made it impossible to nominate a Dutch general, such as the experienced Athlone (Ginkel) or the royal favourite Albemarle to whom he had recently given the Garter, still withheld from Marlborough. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Reformation in the cities of the Rhineland and of Switzerland has its own character. Here a whole set of circumstances, geographical, political, cultural, gives a different pace and direction to the impulses of change which worked out differently in the landed principalities of Germany or the unified kingdoms of France and England. By the end of the middle ages, many of the European cities had achieved independence of their temporal or spiritual overlords, and had come to exercise rights of intervention in ecclesiastical affairs which the Reformation extended and accelerated. It counted for much in Switzerland that the diocesan framework bore no relation to the all-important cantonal structure. The balance of internal forces varied from city to city. In Berne there was a persistence of aristocracy, in Strassburg a cathedral chapter and collegiate churches, in Basel a resident bishop, while in Basel also the craft guilds became an instrument of reforming pressure and the presence of a university offered facilities for propaganda which in Zurich and Strassburg devolved upon the parochial clergy. In Switzerland military prowess, prosperity, independence gave stimulus to alertness and selfconfidence. ‘My lords of the council’ in Zurich were accustomed to regulate important affairs and to control events after a different manner from the small town politicians of the Saxon cities. Wackernagel's fine picture of Basel at the beginning of the Reformation, with its great houses, its famous publishers, its artists and scholars, gives due place to the merchants, rich men furnished with ability, who could throng the lectures of Oecolampadius with an intelligent and devout awareness of great issues. [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]