Protestant Resistance In Counterreformation Austria

Protestant Resistance in Counterreformation Austria examines Austrian Protestants who actively resisted the Habsburg Counterreformation in the early seventeenth century. While a determined few decided early on that only military means could combat the growing pressure to conform, many more did not reach that conclusion until they had been forced into exile. Since the climax of their activism coincided with the Swedish intervention in the Thirty Years' War, the study also analyzes contemporary Swedish policy and the resulting Austro-Swedish interrelationship. Thus, a history of state and religion in the early modern Habsburg Monarchy evolves into a prime example of histoire croisée, of historical experiences and traditions that transcend political borders. The book does not only explore the historical conflict itself, however, but also uses it as a case study on societal recollection. Austrian nation-building, which tenuously commenced in the interwar era but was fully implemented after the restoration of Austrian statehood in 1945, was anchored in a conservative ideological tradition with strong sympathies for the Habsburg legacy. This ideological perspective also influenced the assessment of the confessional period. The modern representation of early modern conflicts reveals the selectivity of historical memory.

This case study of the causes of the Thirty Years' War suggests an alternative framework to that of Absolutism, and views statebuilding as an interactive bargaining process that can engender challenges to political authority. It shows how selective court patronage changed the cultural habits of nobles in education, manners, and tastes, but failed to transform religious identities, which were intimately tied to noble interests. Instead, the confessionalization of patronage deepened divisions within the elite, providing multiple incentives for the formation of an anti-Habsburg alliance among Protestants in 1620.

This book deals with a turning-point in European history: the dramatic struggle between the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation, and between princely rulers and landed nobles in sixteenth and seventeenth-century central and eastern Europe. It brings together the results of the latest research by leading scholars from North America and Europe and it throws new light on the victory of the Church and the rulers over Protestantism and the nobility which had such profound long-term consequences.

The changes associated with reformed Catholicism in the decades around 1600, and how they affected men and women, can only be understood by looking at the interactions between politics and social and religious requirements on a local level. This study, first of all, sketches the Austrian rural territory that will be analyzed. Next, the local administrative disputes are outlined. The third chapter looks closely at one monastery estate, while chapter four details the administrators responsible for the implementation of policies. The concluding chapter concentrates on the experiences of women. Religious, cultural, and women’s historians, interested in rural social transformations in the early modern period, will find this an important book. The political landscape, which stretched from the Council of Trent to the bodies of pregnant girls, proved to be exceedingly complex. This local study of the Counter-Reformation makes use of a variety of previously unexamined, archival sources.

This book studies the connections between the political reform of the Holy Roman Empire and the German lands around 1500 and the sixteenth-century religious reformations, both Protestant and Catholic. It argues that the character of the political changes (dispersed sovereignty, local autonomy) prevented both a general reformation of the Church before 1520 and a national reformation thereafter. The resulting settlement maintained the public peace through politically structured religious communities (confessions), thereby avoiding further religious strife and fixing the confessions into the Empire's constitution. The Germans' emergence into the modern era as a people having two national religions was the reformation's principal legacy to modern Germany.

In 1955 Louis Hartz published a volume titled The Liberal Tradition in America, in which he argued that liberalism was the one and only American tradition. Since then scholars of New Left and neoconservative persuasion have offered an alternative account based on the notion that the civic notions of antiquity continued to dominate political thought in modern times. Against this revisionist view the argument of From Classical to Modern Liberalism is that we need to study America in comparative perspective, and if we do so we shall discover that republicanism in the modern world was distinctively modern, drawing upon ideas of natural rights, consent, and social contract. Rather than a struggle between liberalism and republicanism, we should speak about liberal republicanism. Rather than republicanism versus liberalism, we should address liberalism versus illiberalism, the true issue of our age.

In the seventeenth century, riots, rebellions, and revolts flared around Europe. Concerned about their internal stability, many states responded by closely observing the violent upheavals that plagued their neighbors. Rebellion and Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe investigates how in this struggle for intelligence about internal discord, diplomats emerged as key information brokers and interpreters of Europe’s tumultuous political landscape. The contributions in this volume uncover how diplomatic actors interacted with rulers, opposition leaders, informers, media entrepreneurs, and different audiences in their efforts to understand, communicate, and draw lessons from the insurrections in their time. Rebellion and Diplomacy also examines how diplomats actively tried to shape the course of internal conflicts by managing the dissemination of news, supporting political factions at their court of residence, and even instigating violence. Covering different European regions from the Iberian Peninsula to Scandinavia and from the British Isles to the Carpathian Basin, the book will appeal to all students and researchers interested in early modern diplomacy, politics, and news cultures.

Voices in the Legal Archives in the French Colonial World: "The King is Listening" offers, through the contribution of thirteen original chapters, a sustained analysis of judicial practices and litigation during the first era of French overseas expansion. The overall goal of this volume is to elaborate a more sophisticated "social history of colonialism" by focusing largely on the eighteenth century, extending roughly from 1700 until the conclusion of the Age of Revolutions in the 1830s. By critically examining legal practices and litigation in the French colonial world, in both its Atlantic and Oceanic extensions, this volume of essays has sought to interrogate the naturalized equation between law and empire, an idea premised on the idea of law as a set of doctrines and codified procedures originating in the metropolis and then transmitted to the colonies. This book advances new approaches and methods in writing a history of the French empire, one which views state authority as more unstable and contested. Voices in the Legal Archives proposes to remedy the under-theorized state of France’s first colonial empire, as opposed to its post-1830 imperial expressions empire, which have garnered far more scholarly attention. This book will appeal to scholars of French history and the comparative history of European empires and colonialism.