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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]

Benedetto Accolti's second composition as chancellor and his longest work was De bello a christianis contra barbaros gesto pro Christi sepulcro et Iudea recuperandis libri IV, a history of the first crusade. He begins the first book with an account of the rise of Islam and the loss to Christianity of the holy lands, and goes on to recount Peter the Hermit's and Pope Urban II's efforts to launch a crusade, including a version of Urban's famous oration at Clermont in 1095. He then describes the abortive expeditions of Peter the Hermit, Walter the Penniless and Gottschalk, and ends the first book with Bohemond, the Norman prince of Taranto, taking the cross and delivering a long oration to persuade his compatriots to follow his lead. In the second book, after describing the journey to the East of the main crusading armies under Bohemond and Godfrey of Bouillon, Accolti gives an account of the siege and capture of Nicea, whose Moslem governor is portrayed delivering an impassioned oration to rouse his subjects to withstand the Christian onslaught. There then follows a long digression on Baldwin of Bouillon's success in winning a principality in Armenia, and an account of the journey of the main crusading force to Antioch; the second book concludes with an oration by Godfrey to the crusading army before the walls of Antioch. The main event of the third book is the siege and capture of Antioch by the crusaders, after which Accolti describes the unsuccessful attempt by a large Muslim force to recapture the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1924 and 1929, the SA had to be content with playing a minor role on the German political stage. As the reverberations of the Depression hastened the enfeeblement of the moderate parties, the emphasis increasingly focused on the extremes of the Right and the Left. When the election successes of the early thirties gave new importance to the NSDAP, the SA ceased to be a member of the supporting cast and became a major participant. Aided by the prestige that success at the polls gave the party and drawing strength from the economic and political turmoil of the period, the ranks of the SA rapidly swelled from 1930 onward. Those who had from the start regarded the Weimar Republic with suspicion but had been unwilling to join the relatively small Nazi movement in the midtwenties now began to see it as a meaningful alternative to the allegedly moribund moderate parties. The real or potential victims of the Depression offered another source of support. Within two and a half years, the Nürnberg SA grew to more than seven times its pre-Depression strength, numbering twenty-five hundred men by the end of 1932. The growth of the Nürnberg SA during these years was both a cause and a result of the growing polarization of Germany's political spectrum. The more pronounced the radicalization, the more did the SA attract new members. At the same time, the SA became a more frequent and active participant in violent clashes with its opponents, thereby fueling the flames of extremism. The masses of destitute unemployed provided one major reservoir from which the paramilitary organizations of the extreme Left and Right drew strength. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

That the Nazi party did not make its formal debut in Nürnberg until October 1922 could be seen either as historical irony or as yet another confirmation of the frequently ambiguous relationship between Nürnberg and Munich, capital of Bavaria. In Munich, Adolf Hitler had for the past three years busily and effectively transformed the NSDAP from a nearly unknown organization into a party increasingly familiar and disruptive – not the least because of the strong-arm tactics of the stormtroopers who worked in often uneasy alliance with the NSDAP. For nearly as long, the notorious anti-Semite Julius Streicher, local head of a völkisch rival organization, had resisted Hitler's attempts to gain a foothold in Nürnberg. The city whose name would some day become synonymous with the bombast and legalized brutality of Nazism thus initially represented to Hitler a source of opposition in his quest to gain domination over the völkisch movement. Yet Nürnberg and Munich had frequently represented different aspects of German and Bavarian development. Situated about 120 kilometers north of Augsburg and 200 kilometers southeast of Frankfurt on the Main, medieval Nürnberg capitalized on its political importance as a residence of the Hohenstauffens to build up a far-flung network of trade that placed it athwart seven major trading routes linking the city with Antwerp in the northwest, Hamburg in the north, Prague and Breslau to the east, Venice in the south, and Geneva and Lyon to the southwest. The prosperity of its patriciate, which dominated the free imperial city politically until the beginning of the nineteenth century, combined with the productivity of a flourishing artisanate and the artistic genius of such people as Hans Vischer, Veit Stoss, and Albrecht Dürer, made Nürnberg a center of both trade and artistic life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Augsburg was one of the empire's major cities with a population of around 45,000 In 1600. Augsburg's status as a free imperial city had been firmly established since the early fourteenth century. As a sovereign state within the empire, Augsburg had developed an elaborate network of government bureaucracies that regulated life in the city. A brief consideration of Augsburg's constitutional and social structure will help place Unehrlichkeit in context. Augsburg's Stadtrecht, the civic code of 1276, mandated that the city council should include only the “best and wisest,” in other words councilors were to be of patrician estate. An exclusive caste of old families which had grown wealthy in long-distance trade, the patricians formed an urban nobility that jealously guarded its social and political privileges against rising artisanal classes and merchants who had grown rich more recently. The strict code of conduct that Augsburg patricians developed for themselves did not forbid them to engage in long-distance trade, as was the case in some other cities. But by the late middle ages they were for the most part living off income from country estates and were surpassed in economic vigor by new merchants. From the beginning, the patrician city council tried to block attempts by non-patricians to gain political representation by forbidding artisans to form sworn corporations. The civic code explicitly forbade the bakers to form guilds. Merchants and wealthy artisans gained political power commensurate with their new economic standing in the guild revolt of 1368. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the winter of 1654 an unusual wedding took place in the free imperial city of Augsburg. A young fisherman, Andreas Anhauser, married Barbara Leichnam, the daughter of the local skinner. When Andreas had proposed marriage to Barbara in the preceding summer his parents had been aghast at this mismatch. Both Andreas and Barbara came from families that had long resided in Augsburg, but the Anhausers were citizens and prominent members of the fishermen's guild, whereas the Leichnam family had filled the post of urban skinner for three generations. Skinners' work consisted of removing animal carcasses, putting down wild dogs, burying the corpses of suicides in the carrion field, and emptying latrines, among other unsavory tasks. Skinners also assisted the executioner in carrying out a variety of criminal punishments, in particular hangings, the most dishonorable form of execution. The very name of the young bride gave expression to the work her family had performed for generations; her surname Leichnam translates as “corpse.” As skinners, the Leichnam clan belonged to the so-called unehrliche Leute or “dishonorable people,” an outcast group in early modern Germany in which membership was ascribed by birth. The fishermen, by contrast, constituted an ancient and honorable guild. If the young fisherman were to marry into skinners' stock, his wife's dishonor would fall on him, an outrage to both his family and his guild. The Leichnam family was no less opposed to the marriage, perhaps because they knew the young couple would face social ostracism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It was the often caustic Voltaire who penned the famous line, “This agglomeration which was called and which still calls itself the Holy Roman Empire is neither holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.” Voltaire's aphorism has become a tired but popular cliché to the great annoyance of scholars who study this area of central Europe. Many who have cast a hurried glance at the complex bundle of imperial territories have wondered what inner logic kept this decentralized polity functioning for so long in a viable fashion. Thought by many a living anachronism, the Empire confounded its critics as it creaked forward through time displaying a remarkable ability to redefine itself for each new generation. It weathered a whole series of crises that often brought civil war or dynastic struggle to other European states. Our discussion of irenicism begins in one such period of crisis – years of political uncertainty when the Habsburg princes once more sought a new source of unity for the Empire and its estates. The decade 1545 to 1555 was particularly crucial for the emperor. This period began with the Habsburg triumph of the Schmalkaldic War when there seemed to be one last opportunity to reimpose a uniform religious and political settlement on the imperial lands. The Augsburg Interim of 1548 was Charles's final attempt to unite Catholic and Protestant. At the same time he also sought to establish a new confederation of German estates that would serve the Habsburgs as the Swabian League had done in the past. Both projects failed. The 1555 Peace of Augsburg at least temporarily acknowledged the strength of German particularism and the reality of a divided confessional polity. [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]

In January 1669, Anna Ebeler found herself accused of murdering the woman for whom she had worked as a lying-in maid. The means was a bowl of soup. Instead of restoring the young mother's strength, the soup, made of malmsey and brandy in place of Rhine wine, had increased her fever. The mother became delirious but, as the watchers at her deathbed claimed, she was of sound mind when she blamed the lying-in maid for her death. As word spread, other women came forward stating that Ebeler had poisoned their young children too. The child of one had lost its baby flesh and its whole little body had become pitifully thin and dried out. Another's child had been unable to suckle from its mother, even though it was greedy for milk and able to suck vigorously from other women: shortly after, it died in agony. In a third house, an infant had died after its body had suddenly become covered in hot, poisonous pustules and blisters which broke open. The baby's 7-year-old brother suffered from aches and pains caused by sorcery and saw strange visions, his mother suffered from headaches and the whole household started to notice strange growths on their bodies. And a fourth woman found her infant covered with red splotches and blisters, her baby's skin drying out until it could be peeled off like a shirt. The child died most piteously, and its mother's menstruation ceased. [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 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]

If we look back over the campaign to reform the family in the sixteenth century, this basic process was at work: The religious and moral ideals of the family were slowly made to fit the social conditions in the countryside. In the late Middle Ages, many laymen considered the church's ideals of marriage and the family to be a threat to social order, corrosive of marital discipline and morals in the society as a whole. With the Reformation, that began to change. The order that came to family life by the early seventeenth century – the firm rule of peasant elders over village youths – came about once the church and state embraced the ideal of the patriarchal family and then imposed, with the cooperation and help of village elders, as strict a marital discipline as the society would bear. Without this alliance, without solid social support for the patriarchal family in the countryside, any new marital discipline would have been difficult to establish. A similar pattern is evident when we turn to a second, but equally important, aspect of family reform: the effort to grasp the patriarchal family as a set of property relationships. For the state this effort marked a departure from past practice. It grew out of the state's new pastoral mission and its rapidly rising fiscal needs in the middle of the sixteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some events alter a society, dramatically setting it on a new path for decades or generations to come. But many do not. They pass away quickly, their effects merging almost imperceptibly into the stream of other events altering day–today social relationships at a slower but steadier pace. This latter pattern was often the case in the wake of the great peasant uprisings of early modern Europe. For in the countryside the pace of social change was often slow, the structures of everyday life resilient and difficult to change at one blow. The Peasants' War was one such event in the sixteenth century. The revolt, despite the hopes it aroused among the peasantry and the fears it spread among the nobility, marked less of a turning point than is commonly understood. In most lands of South and Central Germany one can detect few sharp breaks with the past in the decades immediately after 1525. For the revolt came and went quickly and left few lasting structural changes in the day–to–day practice of domination and in the social relationships at the heart of the village community. The hurried deliberations in 1526 at the Diet at Speyer on the rebellion and the peasants' grievances, the small treaties concluded in some territories in the late 1520s, the criminalization of resistance to authority clearly spelled out in the imperial law code in 1532, the slow funneling of disputes into the courts, and the heated discussions concerning authority and obedience: All showed the heightened concern among elites about order and domestic security in the years following the revolt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Setting Two days after leaving the imperial city of Frankfurt am Main, just south of the town of Mergentheim a traveler on his way to Augsburg entered one of the most remote rural areas of Renaissance Germany. The important waterways and heavily traveled roads that linked Frankfurt with South Germany's rapidly growing, wealthy, and powerful imperial cities largely bypassed the tiny towns and villages of the Hohenlohe plain in 1500 (see Map 1.1). To reach Öhringen, the largest and most important town in Hohenlohe in 1500, one had first to travel either overland or by boat on the Main River to Wertheim. From there the road to Öhringen led overland on the major north–south axis of South Germany, the Emperor's Highway, up the winding valley of the Tauber River to Mergentheim. But here one had to branch off the main thoroughfare and head south on a smaller road to the tiny market town of Künzelsau on the Kocher River (see Map 1.2). Only then did a road lead on to the small town of Öhringen. Travelers heading east from the imperial city of Wimpfen to Schwäbisch Hall might take the older and more direct route to Öhringen. But in 1500 none of the major roads would take the traveler quickly and easily to this remote part of the German Southwest. [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]

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 reign of Maximilian I (1459–1519) had given the empire much new strength. The emperor, a powerful and dynamic personality, proved capable of taking some decisive decisions. When he maintained his hold over the Tyrol and the Habsburg possessions in Swabia (1488–90) he made sure that the king of the Romans should not be pushed aside to the periphery of the empire. In doing so, he also managed to reactivate the traditional supporters of the crown, especially the Swabians. The Swabian League, founded in 1488, became an important instrument of Habsburg policy in the empire at the same time as it was becoming attractive to the German princes. However, not even Maximilian was able to alter the inmost reality of German constitutional history: king and territories continued to stand side by side. There was no process of centralisation initiated by the king, though the danger that the great men might destroy the Imperial federation was removed by Maximilian's consolidation of his kingship, a process generally given the name of imperial reform. At the Diet of Worms in 1495, important new directions were taken in hand, all of them testifying to the co-existence of king and territories on terms which before this had emerged from a laboriously negotiated compromise. In return for a tax granted by the Diet, the king proclaimed an ‘eternal territorial peace’ directed against the right, claimed by the nobility, to wage private war. This constituted an important step in the consolidation of the empire. The king's Chamber Court was so reformed that it might be able to control conflicts hitherto settled by licensed fighting. [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]

Introduction For the purpose of this chapter, the term ‘medieval’ will be loosely interpreted to mean the period between the close of the classical age in Europe (c. AD 500) and the beginning of the telescopic era. It thus includes the Renaissance. Numerous observations of both solar and lunar eclipses were recorded in Europe during this period, especially after AD 1000. In most cases, the date is accurately reported and the precise place of observation is known. However, with only a few exceptions, times were only crudely estimated to the nearest hour or so. Thus most observations may effectively be regarded as untimed. As discussed in chapter 3, untimed lunar eclipses are of negligible value for the determination of ΔT (unless it is clearly implied that the Moon rose or set eclipsed). Most of this chapter will be devoted to the investigation of solar obscurations in which the Sun was either totally or very largely covered. In section 11.9, a few careful timings of solar eclipses from the early fourteenth century will also be analysed. Finally, in section 11.10, an eighth century report of an occultation of the planet Jupiter by the eclipsed Moon – a very rare event – will be discussed. Historical sources European reports of solar eclipses (as well as lunar obscurations) from the Middle Ages and Renaissance are mainly found in historical works, notably chronicles; only a few observations are reported in astronomical treatises. [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]