European Early Modern History

This volume charts the rise and decline of absolutism in Milan from the early fourteenth to the early sixteenth century. The study shows how authority above the law, once the preserve of pope and emperor, was claimed by the ruling Milanese dynasties, the Visconti and the Sforza, and why this privilege was finally abandoned by Francesco II Sforza (d. 1535), the last duke. As new rulers, the Visconti and the Sforza had had to impose their regime by rewarding supporters at the expense of opponents. That process required absolute power (also known as plenitude of power), meaning the capacity to laws and the rights of subjects, including titles to property. The basis for such power reflected the changing status of Milanese rulers, first as signori and then as dukes. Contemporary lawyers were at first prepared to overturn established doctrines in support of the free use of absolute power: even Baldo degli Ubaldi accepted the latest teaching. But eventually lawyers regretted the new approach, reasserting the traditional principle that laws could not be set aside without compelling justification. The Visconti and the Sforza also saw the dangers of absolute power: as legitimate princes they were meant to champion law and justice, not condone arbitrary acts that disregarded basic rights. Black traces the application of plenitude of power in day‐to‐day government, and demonstrates how the rulers of Milan kept pace with the initial acceptance and subsequent rejection by lawyers of the concept of absolute power.

This book contains a collection of essays addressing a number of wide-ranging, interrelated themes spanning over 200 years of the Habsburg Empire. The book is a political, religious, cultural and social history of a broad but often neglected swathe of the European continent. It seeks — against the grain of conventional presentations — to apprehend the era from the late-seventeenth to late-nineteenth century as a whole. Casting light on key aspects of the evolution towards modern statehood in Central Europe, it also dwells on the crises of ancien-regime structures there, in the face of new challenges both at home and abroad. Much attention is devoted to the Austrian or Habsburg lands, especially the interplay of the main territories which comprised them. A further central issue analysed is the evolution of the kingdom of Hungary, from its full acquisition by the Habsburgs at the beginning of the period to the emergence of the dual Austro-Hungarian Monarchy at the end. More than this though, the book examines the individual character of the essay as a genre.

Commonly stigmatized as “bastards” in early modern France, children born out of wedlock were said to have neither kin nor kind, neither family nor nation. In practice, however, many natural parents voluntarily recognized their extramarital offspring and raised them within their households. Because early modern France lacked a uniform code of civil law, the rights and legal disabilities of these children were matters of perennial litigation and debate. The stigmatization of extramarital offspring intensified in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as the sovereign courts curbed the rights that such children had traditionally enjoyed. This bolstered the collective power of the elite lineages at the expense of individual passions. These families were the primary architects and beneficiaries of the development of absolute monarchy in France. However, in the eighteenth century, the growing problem of child abandonment prompted many jurists to reconsider whether the stigmatization of extramarital offspring was truly in the interest of the public and the state. At the same time, natural parents continued to exploit persistent variations in French law to provide favors and advantages to their extramarital offspring. Even as French legal culture increasingly shifted from an adjudicatory toward a more legislative model amid the deepening crisis of the Bourbon monarchy, children born out of wedlock were increasingly destigmatized as “natural children.”

Witches are imaginary creatures. But in Poland as in Europe and its colonies in the early modern period, people imagined their neighbours to be witches, with tragic results. This book tells the story of the imagined Polish witches, showing how ordinary peasant women got caught in webs of suspicion and accusation, finally confessing under torture to the most heinous crimes. Through a close reading of accusations and confessions, the book also shows how witches imagined themselves and their own religious lives. Paradoxically, the tales they tell of infanticide and host desecration reveal to us a culture of deep Catholic piety, while the stories they tell of diabolical sex and the treasure-bringing ghosts of unbaptized babies uncover a complex folklore at the margins of Christian orthodoxy. Caught between the devil and the host, the self‐imagined Polish witches reflect the religion of their place and time, even as they stand accused of subverting and betraying that religion. Through the dark glass of witchcraft the book attempts to explore the religious lives of early modern women and men: their gender attitudes, their Christian faith and folk cosmology, their prayers and spells, their adoration of Christ incarnate in the transubstantiated Eucharist and their relations with goblin-like house demons and ghosts.

What role did women play in the pre-industrial European economy? This book tackles this question using a body of new evidence. By examining women's activities in a particular pre-industrial economy — the early modern German territory of Württemberg — it questions mono-causal explanations that ascribe women's economic position to reproductive biology, technology, or cultural beliefs. Instead, it shows that social institutions play the key role. Markets expanded in Europe between 1600 and 1800, creating economic opportunities for both women and men, but they were circumscribed by strong ‘social networks’ — local communities, craft guilds, merchant guilds, and church courts — supported by the growing early modern state. These corporative bodies generated a ‘social capital’ of shared norms and collective sanctions that benefitted insiders but harmed outsiders. This book illuminates the ‘dark side’ of social capital by showing how collective norms can stifle innovation and growth by perpetuating the privileges of powerful interest groups and by preventing weaker economic agents — such as women, migrants, and minorities — from participating fully in the economy. It offers comparisons between women's position in different developing economies, historical and modern. Finally, it proposes a new methodology for combining qualitative and quantitative evidence to cast light on ‘invisible’ economic agents such as women and the poor who are often pushed into the black market informal sector by formal sector institutions.

The rise of civilised conduct and behaviour has long been considered as one of the major factors in the transformation from medieval to modern society. Thinkers and historians alike argue that violence progressively declined as men learned to control their emotions. The feud is a phenomenon associated with backward societies, and in the West duelling codified behaviour and channelled aggression into ritualised combats that satisfied honour without the shedding of blood. French manners and codes of civility laid the foundations of civilised Western values. But as this original work of archival research shows, we continue to romanticise violence in the era of the swashbuckling swordsman. In France, thousands of men died in duels in which the rules of the game were regularly flouted. Many duels were in fact mini-battles and must be seen not as a replacement of the blood feud, but as a continuation of vengeance in a much bloodier form. This book outlines the nature of feuding in France and its intensification in the wake of the Protestant Reformation, civil war, and dynastic weakness, and considers the solutions proposed by thinkers from Michel de Montaigne to Thomas Hobbes. The creation of the largest standing army in Europe since the Romans was one such solution, but the militarisation of society, a model adopted throughout Europe, reveals the darker side of the civilising process.

This is the first book to examine one of Europe's largest Protestant communities in Hungary and Transylvania. It highlights the place of the Hungarian Reformed church in the international Calvinist world, and reveals the impact of Calvinism on Hungarian politics and society. Calvinism attracted strong support in Hungary and Transylvania, where one of the largest Reformed churches was established by the early seventeenth century. Understanding of the Hungarian Reformed church remains the most significant missing element in the analysis of European Calvinism. The Hungarian Reformed church survived on narrow ground between the Habsburgs and Turks, thanks to support from Transylvanian princes and local nobles. They worked with Reformed clergy to maintain contact with western co-religionists, to combat confessional rivals, to improve standards of education and to impose moral discipline. However, there were also tensions within the church over further reforms of public worship and church government, and over the impact of puritanism. This book examines the development of the Hungarian church within the international Calvinist community, and the impact of Calvinism on Hungarian politics and society.

Mining the diaries, memoirs and poems written by Catholics in the sixteenth-century Low Countries, this book explores how Catholics experienced religious and political change in the generations between Erasmus and Rubens. The general aim of the book is to demonstrate that by problematizing the relationship between clerics and laypeople, we can gain a better insight in the changing fortunes of the Catholic Church. The Revolt that ripped apart the sixteenth-century Netherlands came at the expense of a civil war, that eventually became a war of religion. This book revolves around two questions. The first concerns the passive way in which Catholics responded to Calvinist aggression in the early decades of the conflict; the second aim is to account for the very active support that laypeople in the Southern Netherlands, after 1585, began to show for a Catholic revival. The book argues that both phenomena can be explained by way in which the clergy interacted with the laity. Initially, clerics tried to contain the Reformation by presenting it as an internal problem, in which lay people should not become involved. This attitude changed around 1580. Traditional Christians began to radicalise and identify themselves as Catholics, while in Catholic exile centres, new relationships were forged between laypeople and clerics, who at last acknowledged the need to involve the laity. After 1585, priests and politicians in the Habsburg Netherlands devised a religious way for believers to ‘do their bit’ to end the war. In the process, this sealed the division of the Netherlands.