J. Dewald – Europe. 1450 to 1789. Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World (6 Volumes)

Автор: J. Dewald
Название книги: Europe. 1450 to 1789. Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World (6 Volumes)
Формат: PDF
Жанр: История Европы
Страницы: 733+538+606+563+600+337
Качество: Изначально компьютерное, E-book

This detailed set explores European history from 1450-1789, from the print revolution to the French Revolution. The set's 1,082 articles, written by eminent scholars, cover major topics in art, government and education as well as providing biographical entries on key figures of the period. In addition, the set covers topics specific to the era, such as apocalypticism, guilds, food riots, royal mistresses and lovers, the Spanish inquisition, Utopia and others. Each volume includes an eight-page color insert. Features include approximately 575 black-and-white photographs, 60 maps, a year-by-year chronology, a topical outline, and a comprehensive index.

Tables of contents. Each volume contains a table of contents for the entire
Encyclopedia. Volume 1 has a single listing of all volumes’ contents. Volumes 2
through 6 contain “Contents of This Volume” followed by “Contents of Other
Volumes.”
Maps of Europe. The front of each volume contains a set of maps showing
Europe’s political divisions at six important stages from 1453 to 1795.
Alphabetical arrangement. Entries are arranged in alphabetical order.
Biographical articles are generally listed by the subject’s last name (with some
exceptions, e.g., Leonardo da Vinci).
Royalty and foreign names. In most cases, the names of rulers of French,
German, and Spanish rulers have been anglicized. Thus, Francis, not François;
Charles, not Carlos. Monarchs of the same name are listed first by their country,
and then numerically. Thus, Henry VII and Henry VIII of England precede
Henry II of France.
Measurements appear in the English system according to United States usage,
though they are often followed by metric equivalents in parentheses. Following
are approximate metric equivalents for the most common units:
1 foot = 30 centimeters
1 mile = 1.6 kilometers
1 acre = 0.4 hectares
1 square mile = 2.6 square kilometers
1 pound = 0.45 kilograms
1 gallon = 3.8 liters
Cross-references. At the end of each article is a list of related articles for further
study. Readers may also consult the table of contents and the index for titles and
keywords of interest.
Bibliography. Each article contains a list of sources for further reading, usually
divided into Primary Sources and Secondary Sources.
Systematic outline of contents. After the last article in volume 6 is an outline
that provides a general overview of the conceptual scheme of the Encyclopedia,
listing the title of each entry
Directory of contributors. Following the systematic outline of contents is a listing,
in alphabetical order, of all contributors to the Encyclopedia, with affiliation
and the titles of his or her article(s).
Index. Volume 6 concludes with a comprehensive, alphabetically arranged index
covering all articles, as well as prominent figures, geographical names, events,
institutions, publications, works of art, and all major concepts that are discussed
in volumes 1 through 6.

Between 1450 and 1789, Europe witnessed some of the most dramatic events of
its history. These years included Europeans’ first encounter with the Americas,
the invention of printing, and the first widespread use of gunpowder in warfare.
Ideas about the natural world shifted dramatically, and assumptions about the
divine order and the purposes of human life underwent wrenching challenges.
The period was marked by political revolutions, and it ended with the great
French Revolution of 1789. How people lived and related to one another also
changed, more subtly but with momentous consequences. The period included
moments of terrible violence, as in the French Wars of Religion and the German
Thirty Years’ War, but it also must be counted among the most creative in the
human record. What Europeans did and thought during those years continues to
shape our twenty-first-century world.
Europe 1450 to 1789: Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World offers an accessible
account of this complicated, crucial phase of European history. Some 450
biographical articles present such leading figures of the period as Peter the Great,
Galileo, Rembrandt, Louis XIV, Shakespeare, and Madame de Pompadour, discussing
both their lives and the significance of their achievements; other articles
summarize the period’s wars, revolutions, and other notable events. But this
Encyclopedia gives as much attention to broad processes as to specific facts. Major
articles explore topics like medicine, monarchy, agriculture, the Enlightenment,
and the military, and others provide overviews of individual national histories. We
have also sought to examine basic mechanisms of early modern life, with articles
explicating the workings of business, family, religious practice, and a variety of
related topics.
In addressing these questions, the Encyclopedia defines Europe broadly, giving
extensive attention to Russia, eastern Europe, and the Ottoman Empire, as
well as to western Europe. We have sought to make clear the multiplicity of European
cultures and social arrangements in these years, the fact that Europe
included Muslims, Jews, and Orthodox Christians, as well as Protestants and
Catholics. Despite the geographical distances and cultural animosities that set
these groups apart from one another, contacts among them were frequent and
fruitful. Early modern men and women moved far more often and over greater
distances than historians once believed, and they brought with them products,
beliefs, and practices. Similarly, the Encyclopedia places European experiences within a context of
world history. No events of the period mattered more than those that changed
Europe’s relations with other regions of the globe. In 1450, Europeans and
Americans had no idea of one another’s existence, and only intermittent exchanges
linked Europe with Asia and Africa. By the late eighteenth century, European
imperial regimes dominated the Americas and parts of Asia and Africa, and intense
commercial activity bound much of the world together in the first global economy.
In eighteenth-century Europe even the poor regularly bought fabrics and tea
from Asia and sugar, coffee, and tobacco from the Americas; and they benefited
from the forced labor of African slaves, who produced colonial goods cheaply.
Partly because Asia, Africa, and the Americas had acquired such importance for the
European economy, eighteenth-century European wars included combat in the
Caribbean, India, and North America, as well as in Europe itself. The first global
economy was accompanied by the world’s first experience of global warfare.
Already in the eighteenth century, Europeans debated among themselves the
costs and benefits of this globalization. They knew that as they visited other parts
of the globe, they brought with them vicious new forms of colonial exploitation
and new diseases; in the Americas they caused what may have been the worst population
disaster in human history. But the European impact on the rest of the
world was not only destructive. For better and for worse, Europe exported its
culture as well as its power and microbes, spreading its military techniques, livestock,
and churches, and leaving Europe and the rest of the world inextricably
entangled. Europeans imported culture as well—hesitantly in the sixteenth century,
enthusiastically in the eighteenth. By this time, the varied social arrangements
that they encountered elsewhere in the world had become a standing
challenge to their assessment of their own civilization and an encouragement to
radical social thought. This Encyclopedia explores these complex changes in a
series of major articles on relations between Europe and other regions of the
world. Unavoidably, a history of Europe during these years is also an examination
of the “early modern world.”
Only since World War II have historians regularly used the term “early modern”
to describe these centuries of European history. They have used this new term in
part to replace the more traditional division of the period into Renaissance,
Reformation, and Enlightenment, and in part to supplement these older concepts.
With these other chronological labels available, it may be asked, why have
historians added “early modern” to their vocabulary? One reason is that the term
has allowed them to draw attention to unities across these different periods, and
to see the slow processes of change that extended from the fifteenth to the eighteenth
centuries. More important, however, this change in historians’ terminology
reflects changes in the subject matter of their researches. Such terms as
Renaissance, Reformation, and Enlightenment refer most directly to cultural history,
and all three terms imply cultural progress. Both “Renaissance” (meaning
literally ‘rebirth’) and “Enlightenment” were coined during the early modern
period itself, to express contemporary intellectuals’ belief that they had revived
European culture after long periods of darkness. In recent years, however, historians
have increasingly asked how ordinary Europeans lived and thought. This
interest in ordinary people and ordinary doings has led to the development of
entirely new fields of study, such as women’s history and the history of popular
culture, and it has brought new interpretations to long-established fields of
inquiry. Military historians have given new attention to the experiences of ordi- nary soldiers, thus changing our understanding of how battles were won and lost;
intellectual historians have explored the career ambitions that moved the great
thinkers of the period, and in some cases understanding these social contexts has
changed our interpretations of even its loftiest ideas.
These new topics and new approaches to old topics have not fitted well with
inherited chronological categories. European women, some historians have
argued, simply did not have a Renaissance, excluded as they were from many of
the cultural institutions of the age; and their freedoms actually diminished after
1500. Likewise, European peasants—in most regions, 90 percent of the population—
were little touched by either Renaissance or Enlightenment. The religious
changes brought on by the Reformations did affect these ordinary Europeans,
but often in ways that surprised and angered religious leaders like Martin Luther.
For these and many similar groups, it has proved helpful to view the period
through the wide-angle lens of an early modern period, extending from the crises
of the late Middle Ages to the French Revolution of 1789. These groups are
mainly bystanders in the narratives of cultural renewal suggested by such terms as
“Renaissance,” with its focus on intellectuals and artists, but they are central players
in a history of the early modern period.
This new terminology, however, also raises its own new and difficult questions.
The late John Hale, a distinguished historian of the Renaissance, once
complained that the concept of an early modern period is bland and neutral, lacking
the interpretive clarity of such terms as Renaissance and Enlightenment. In
fact, ambiguity is built into the phrase. It points both to the elements of modernity
that can be seen emerging during these years and to the contemporaneous
persistence of medieval values and ways of living; to speak of “early modernity”
is to suggest the hesitations and complexities of historical progress. Evaluating
these two sides of the period, setting its modernities against its forms of backwardness,
has been a central theme of research and one that emerges repeatedly
in the articles that follow. With regard to some topics, addressing this question
involves comparing different regions of Europe. Historians have spoken of the
seventeenth-century Netherlands, for instance, as “the first modern economy,”
whereas parts of rural France during the same years had changed little since the
Middle Ages. But ambiguity also reigned within individual minds during the early
modern period. The sixteenth-century French politician and philosopher Jean
Bodin counts among the founders of modern political and economic theory—
but he also wrote a tract on the dangers of witchcraft, urging the authorities to
take violent measures to stamp out this satanic threat. Making sense of this interplay
between medieval and modern ideas remains a central task of early modern
studies and is one of the attractions that the period has had for those who study
it. Early modern people seem at once very like us and very different from us.
Early modern Europe has attracted an enormous amount of scholarly attention
since World War II, completely transforming our understanding of the period.
Much of this abundant research has still not been made accessible to nonspecialists,
and bridging the gap between researchers and nonspecialist readers is one of
the main tasks that we have set for ourselves in bringing together the Encyclopedia.
Articles have been written with the assumption that many readers will have
no background knowledge about the period, and authors have avoided technical
language, obscure allusions, and narrow scholarly debates. A chronology of the
period opens the book, allowing readers to situate people, cultural achievements and events in relation to one another; and a detailed index is designed to make it
easy for readers to locate articles on specific topics. Numerous maps offer further
guidance, and about five hundred illustrations provide some sense of how the
world looked to men and women of the time.
But historical study is as much about interpreting facts as assembling them,
and this Encyclopedia is meant to be a guide to interpretations as well as a summary
of what happened. The articles here supply concise summaries of current
scholarly views on the problems they address—appropriately, because many of
our authors have played leading roles in creating current scholarly views. Given
the importance of interpretation to historical research, readers should not expect
bland uniformity of opinion in these articles. Our authors come from many different
countries and a variety of academic disciplines. Not surprisingly, they
emphasize different aspects of the problems they address, and they bring different
interpretations to the same sets of facts. Readers may thus encounter differences
of emphasis among the articles here, but they also will receive guidance and
encouragement in exploring alternative views through the Encyclopedia’s system
of cross-references. Articles on monarchy, absolutism, divine right, and state and
bureaucracy, for instance, present the views of four different authors on topics
that overlap, but each article refers readers to the others.
Here then are our hopes for this book: Readers will find in it reliable information
about the most important people and events of an important historical
era, and they will also find examples of sophisticated historical interpretation, presented
in direct, nontechnical language. They will encounter the thoughts of distinguished
scholars writing about basic questions, in some cases disagreeing, but
together producing a richer, larger description of the period than any single
scholar could offer. Ultimately, they will encounter some of the reality of early
modern lives—complex, distant, yet also deeply connected to ourselves.
Early modern intellectuals often described themselves as members of a Republic of
Letters, an intellectual community that spread across national and confessional
boundaries. That community rested mainly on correspondence and books; many
of its members never met face to face, yet they viewed themselves as close friends
and allies. Editing this Encyclopedia has made me aware how fully alive the
Republic of Letters remains in today’s world. It has been a particular honor to collaborate
with the members of the editorial board, distinguished scholars whose
work I have long admired and who have put enormous effort into the project. It
has been an equal pleasure to work with the authors who have contributed articles,
some of them old friends, many more encountered only through their writings
or through the recommendation of other scholars. At Scribners Mark
LaFlaur, Frank Menchaca, Georgia Maas, Carol Schwartz, Joann Cerrito, Kelly
Baiseley, and John Fitzpatrick made the project possible, and made working on it
enjoyable as well; and the project also owes a great deal to the contributions of
Stephen Wagley, Timothy DeWerff, and Patricia Marino. The dedication acknowledges
the intellectual influence of four leading scholars of the period, whose thinking
continues to shape the development of early modern studies both in America
and in the world at large, and whose kindness has touched many of us in the field.
JONATHAN DEWALD