History

Between 1666 and 1789, France's Old Regime government used the king's legislative authority to promote marriage and prolific reproduction. This book studies the royal pronatalist law masterminded by Jean‐Baptiste Colbert and follows its implementation in France and New France to show that royal intervention in the realm of family and sexuality was an integral part of the process of state formation in Europe. Even before the establishment of modern demography, political writers recognized that cultivating the kingdom's human resources was essential to building the state's military and economic power. And, they argued, the hierarchical and gendered order of the traditional, monogamous conjugal household was the bedrock of a stable social and political order. For these reasons, the French royal government altered it laws to favor early marriage and to reward men who fathered large families of ten or more legitimate children. The royal government's action signaled that human fertility was no longer a matter of divine control, but a recognized and even legitimate matter for human – and thus political—intervention.

The Ukrainian Cossacks, often compared in historical literature to the pirates of the Mediterranean and the frontiersmen of the American West, constituted one of the largest Cossack hosts in the European steppe borderland. They became famous as ferocious warriors, their fighting skills developed in their religious wars against the Tartars, Turks, Poles, and Russians. By and large the Cossacks were Orthodox Christians, and quite early in their history they adopted a religious ideology in their struggle against those of other faiths. Their acceptance of the Muscovite protectorate in 1654 was also influenced by their religious ideas. This study examines the confessionalisation of religious life in early modern period Ukraine, and shows how Cossack involvement in the religious struggle between Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism helped shape cultural identities not only in the Ukraine but also in Russia and Poland.

This book studies ‘deviant’ women. It presents an account of how women were prosecuted for theft, infanticide, and sexual crimes in early modern Germany, and challenges the assumption that women were treated more leniently than men. The book uses criminal trials to illuminate the social status and conflicts of women living through the Reformation and Thirty Years War, telling, for the first time, the stories of cutpurses, maidservants' dangerous liaisons, and artisans' troubled marriages. It provides a thought-provoking analysis of labeling and sentencing processes, and of the punishments inflicted on those found guilty. Above all, the author engages with the way ‘ordinary’ women experienced authority and sexuality, household and community.

This book is an account of Old Regime Europe that explores the cultural revolution that transformed 18th-century Europe. During this period the court culture exemplified by Louis XIV’s Versailles was pushed from the centre to the margins by the emergence of a new kind of space — the public sphere. The book shows how many of the world’s most important cultural institutions developed in this space: the periodical, the newspaper, the novel, the lending library, the coffee house, the voluntary association, the journalist, and the critic. It was here that public opinion staked its claim to be the ultimate arbiter of culture and politics. For the established order this new force was to prove both a challenge and an opportunity and the book’s comparative study of power and culture shows how regimes sought to keep their balance as the ground moved beneath their feet. In the process the book explains, among other things, why Britain won the ‘Second Hundred Years War’ against France, how Prussia rose to become the dominant power in German-speaking Europe, and why the French monarchy collapsed.

Cultures of Plague discloses a new chapter in the history of medicine. Neither the plague nor the ideas it stimulated were static, fixed in a timeless Galenic vacuum over five centuries, as historians and scientists commonly assume. As plague evolved in its pathology, modes of transmission, and the social characteristics of its victims, so did medical thinking about it. With over 600 plague imprints of the sixteenth century this study highlights the century's most feared and devastating epidemic that threatened Italy top to toe from 1575 to 1578, unleashing an avalanche of plague writing. From erudite definitions, remote causes, cures and recipes, physicians now directed their plague writings to the prince and discovered their most ‘valiant remedies' in public health: strict segregation of the healthy and ill, cleaning streets, latrines, and addressing the long‐term causes of plague—poverty. Those outside the medical profession joined the chorus. Relying on health board statistics and dramatized with eyewitness descriptions of bizarre happenings, human misery, and suffering, they created the structure for the plague classics of the eighteenth century and by tracking the contagion's complex and crooked paths anticipated trends of nineteenth‐century epidemiology. In the heartland of Counter‐Reformation Italy, physicians, along with those outside the profession, questioned the foundations of Galenic and Renaissance medicine, even the role of God. Such developments did not need to await the Protestant‐Paracelsian alliance of seventeenth‐century northern Europe. Instead, creative forces planted by the pandemic of 1575–8 sowed seeds of doubt and unveiled new concerns and ideas within that supposedly most conservative form of medical writing, the plague tract.

One of the largest states in Europe and the greatest of the Protestant powers, Denmark, in the 16th and 17th centuries was at the height of its influence. Embracing Norway, Iceland, portions of southern Sweden, and northern Germany, the Danish monarchy dominated the vital Baltic trade. However, its geopolitical importance far exceeded its modest resources. This book examines the short and perhaps unlikely career of Denmark as the major power of northern Europe, exploring its rise to the forefront of European affairs and its subsequent decline in fortunes following its disastrous involvement in the Thirty Years' War. The book focuses on key issues, from the dynamic role of the Oldenburg monarchy in bringing about Denmark's ‘European integration’, to the impact of the Protestant Reformation on Danish culture. The multi-national character of the Danish monarchy is explored in-depth, in particular how the Oldenburg kings of Denmark sought to establish their authority over their sizable — and oftentimes contentious — Norwegian, Icelandic, and German minorities. Denmark's participation in international politics and commerce is also investigated, along with the power struggle between Denmark and its rival Sweden over Baltic dominion, and the Danes' unique approach to internal governance.

For Ireland, the 17th and 18th centuries were a period marked by war, economic transformation, and the making and remaking of identities. By the 1630s, the era of wars of conquest seemed firmly in the past. But the British civil wars of the mid-17th century fractured both Protestant and Catholic Ireland along lines defined by different combinations of religious and political allegiance. Later, after 1688, Ireland became the battlefield for what was otherwise Britain's bloodless (and so Glorious) Revolution. The 18th century, by contrast, was a period of peace, permitting Ireland to emerge, first as a dynamic actor in the growing Atlantic economy, then as the breadbasket for industrialising Britain. But at the end of the century, against a background of international revolution, new forms of religious and political conflict came together to produce another period of multi-sided conflict. The act of union, hastily introduced in the aftermath of civil war, ensured that Ireland entered the 19th century still divided, but no longer a kingdom.

Despite its small size and population, the Dutch Republic functioned as the hub of world trade, shipping, and finance for nearly two centuries. This is the first detailed account of that hegemony from its sixteenth-century origins to the final collapse of the Dutch trading system in the eighteenth century.

This is the first survey history of Jewish life and culture in early modern Europe to concentrate on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a radically new phase in Jewish history. The book argues that the rapidly expanding Jewish role in political and economic spheres in much of Europe from the 1570s was the first fundamental emancipation of European Jewry.