Early Modern Europe: From Crisis to Stability

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Philip Benedict, Myron P. Gutmann
University of Delaware Press, 2005 - History - 318 pages
Fifty years after the beginning of the debate about the "general crisis of the seventeenth century," and thirty years after theodore K. Rabb's reformulation of it as the "European struggle for stability." this volume returns to the fundamental questions raised by the long-running discussion: What continent-wide patterns of change can be discerned in European history across the centuries from the Renaissance to the French Revolution? What were the causes of the revolts that rocked so many countries between 1640 and 1660? Did fundamental changes occur in the relationship between politics and religion? Politics and military technology? Politics and the structures of intellectual authority?
 

Contents

Introduction
11
A Bibliography
25
A Debate without End
31
New Perspectives on the Bohemian Crisis of the Seventeenth Century
52
Loyalty and Revolt in the Spanish Monarchy
80
The Nordic Perspective
100
Religion and Politics in the European Struggle for Stability 15001700
120
The Crisis of Confidence in Witchcraft and the Crisis of Authority
139
The Company of the Holy Sacrament and the Struggle for Stability in Early Modern France
168
Original Sin the Struggle for Stability and the Rise of Moral Individualism in Late SeventeenthCentury England
197
The European City Hall as Political and Cultural Space 15001750
234
Military Technology and the Struggle for Stability 15001700
259
Bibliography
278
Contributors
307
Index
309
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