Government In Reformation Europe 1520 1560

"The developments in government considered in this volume affected not only the institutions and mechanics of administration, but the policies that were executed and the personnel who implemented them. Nor were they confined to the three great monarchies of England, France and Spain, but were to a greater or lesser degree important also for the Netherlands, the principalities of Germany and Italy, and Sweden, Russian and other countries. The similarities and differences between countries in this sphere were only in part determined by whether they were Catholic or Protestant, large or small states. Catholic rulers like the kings of Spain or the dukes of Bavaria were sometimes just as inclined as their Protestant fellows to seize the wealth of the Church and control its administration, while small or hitherto relatively backward states like Sweden and the duchy of Prussian occasionally set the pace in some aspects of government." [Introduction].

To explain a text, according to Rodriguez, is to locate it precisley at a real historical conjuncture, to situate it ideologically. This insistence on the historicity of literature saved Rodriguez from the fate that, from the late 1970s onward, overtook many Althusserians. The latter, unable to historicise and therefore transcend the key category of the subject, refused to rank 'real art' among the ideologies, as a result of which their concept of literary 'production' remained locked in a Kantian- and therefore eminently bourgeois- problematic. For Rodriguez, in contrast, ideology could not be the discourse of the subject, for the simple reason that the subject was itself an historical category, whose origins were to be found in animism, the ideology of the bourgeoisie during its early, mercantilist phase. As an emergent ideology, animism stood in contradiction to substantialism, its dominant counterpart under feudalism, that manifestly had no place for a 'free subject'. The analysis of these conflictual ideologies, during the protracted transition in Spain from feudalism to capitalism, constitutes the kernel of Theory and History of Ideological Production. University of Granada.

Looking at a neglected period in the social history of modernization, David Levine investigates the centuries that followed the year 1000, when a new kind of society emerged in Europe. New commercial routines, new forms of agriculture, new methods of information technology, and increased population densities all played a role in the prolonged transition away from antiquity and toward modernity. At the Dawn of Modernity highlights both "top-down" and "bottom-up" changes that characterized the social experience of early modernization. In the former category are the Gregorian Reformation, the imposition of feudalism, and the development of centralizing state formations. Of equal importance to Levine's portrait of the emerging social order are the bottom-up demographic relations that structured everyday life, because the making of the modern world, in his view, also began in the decisions made by countless men and women regarding their families and circumstances. Levine ends his story with the cataclysm unleashed by the Black Death in 1348, which brought three centuries of growth to a grim end.

The Handbook of European History 1400-1600 brings together the best scholarship into an array of topical chapters that present current knowledge and thinking in ways useful to the specialist and accessible to students and to the educated non-specialist. Forty-one leading scholars in this field of history present the state of knowledge about the grand themes, main controversies and fruitful directions for research of European history in this era. Volume 1 (Structures and Assertions) described the people, lands, religions and political structures which define the setting for this historical period. Volume 2 (Visions, Programs, Outcomes) covers the early stages of the process by which newly established confessional structures began to work their way among the populace.

Since its first appearance in 1991, The European Reformation has offered a clear, integrated, and coherent analysis and explanation of how Christianity in Western and Central Europe from Iceland to Hungary, from the Baltic to the Pyrenees splintered into separate Protestant and Catholic identities and movements. Catholic Christianity at the end of the Middle Ages was not at all a uniformly 'decadent' or corrupt institution: it showed clear signs of cultural vigour and inventiveness. However, it was vulnerable to a particular kind of criticism, if ever its claims to mediate the grace of God to believers were challenged. Martin Luther proposed a radically new insight into how God forgives human sin. In this new theological vision, rituals did not 'purify' people; priests did not need to be set apart from the ordinary community; the church needed no longer to be an international body. For a critical 'Reformation moment', this idea caught fire in the spiritual, political, and community life of much of Europe. Lay people seized hold of the instruments of spiritual authority, and transformed religion into something simpler, more local, more rooted in their own community. So were born the many cultures, liturgies, musical traditions and prayer lives of the countries of Protestant Europe. This new edition embraces and responds to developments in scholarship over the past twenty years. Substantially re-written and updated, with both a thorough revision of the text and fully updated references and bibliography, it nevertheless preserves the distinctive features of the original, including its clearly thought-out integration of theological ideas and political cultures, helping to bridge the gap between theological and social history, and the use of helpful charts and tables that made the original so easy to use.

Between the religious massacres, conflicts and martyrdoms that characterised much of Reformation Europe, there seems little room for a consideration of the concept of moderation. Yet it was precisely because of this extremism that many Europeans, both individuals and regimes, were forced into positions of moderation as they found themselves caught in the confessional crossfire. This is not to suggest that such people refused to take sides, but rather that they were unwilling or unable to conform fully to emerging confessional orthodoxies. By conducting an investigation into the idea of 'moderation', this volume raises intriguing concepts and offers a fuller understanding of the pressures that shaped the confessional landscape of Reformation Europe. A number of essays present case studies examining 'moderates' who existed uneasily in the space between coercion and persuasion in Britain, France and the Holy Roman Empire. Others look more broadly at local and national attempts at conciliation, and at the way the rhetoric of moderation was manipulated during confessional conflict. These are all drawn together with a substantial introduction and analytical conclusion, which not only tie the volume together, but which also pose wider conceptual and methodological questions about the meaning of moderation.

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw many ambitious European rulers develop permanent armies and navies. War and the State in Early Modern Europe examines this military change as a central part of the political, social and economic transformation of early modern Europe. This important study exposes the economic structures necessary for supporting permanent military organisations across Europe. Large armed forces could not develop successfully without various interest groups who needed protection and were willing to pay for it. Arguing that early fiscal-military states were in fact protection-selling enterprises, the author focuses on: * Spain, the Dutch Republic and Sweden * the role of local elites * the political and organisational aspects of this new military development