Early Modern Europe, 1450–1789

Citation

Wiesner-Hanks, M. E. (2022). Early Modern Europe, 1450–1789 (3rd ed.). Cambridge University Press. Cambridge History of Europe.

Chapter Summary

The third edition (594 pages; first edition 2006, second 2013) covers European history from the invention of the printing press to the French Revolution. After an Introduction, it is built in two parts on the same thematic pattern. Part I opens with a survey of Europe around 1450 and then has six chapters for 1450–1600 on individuals in society, politics and power, cultural and intellectual life, religion, economics and the environment, and Europe in the world; Part II repeats the six themes for 1600–1789 and ends with a short epilogue. Every chapter closes with a chapter summary, discussion questions, further reading and a list of primary sources, and the book carries 33 source boxes, methods-and-debates boxes, 15 maps, four tables of rulers and many illustrations. The publisher lists as new or expanded in this edition environmental history; consumer culture, food and fashion; Europe and the world; changing ideas of difference, hierarchy, blood and race; and global religious and trade networks. Online resources accompany the book.

Introduction

Explains the structure of the book and discusses the sources available for early modern history, with its own summary, questions and reading lists.

Chapter 1: Europe in the World of 1450

A starting cross-section that previews every later theme: travel beyond Europe, individuals in society, politics and power, cultural and intellectual life, religious institutions and practices, and economics and the environment. A source box gives Pius II's call for a crusade against the Turks.

Chapter 2: Individuals in Society, 1450–1600

Social history organised around the body and the life cycle: childhood and youth, sexuality, marriage, widowhood and old age, death, and family, kin and community networks. Methods boxes discuss the meaning of illness and the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure.

Chapter 3: Politics and Power, 1450–1600

Military technology, standing armies and navies, taxes, bureaucracies and marriage politics, followed by a regional survey: the British Isles, France, Spain and Portugal, the Holy Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, eastern and northern Europe and Italy, and power at the local level.

Chapter 4: Cultural and Intellectual Life, 1450–1600

Schools and education, political theory (with a box asking whether Machiavelli was Machiavellian), humanism, vernacular literature and drama, and music and art.

Chapter 5: Religious Reform and Consolidation, 1450–1600

The early Reformation, the Reformation in England, the radical Reformation, the social effects of reform, the religious wars, Calvinism, the Catholic Reformation and the later religious wars.

Chapter 6: Economics and the Environment, 1450–1600

Capitalism, economic theory and population growth; rural society and the contrast between wealth polarisation in the western countryside and neo-serfdom and slavery in eastern Europe; mining; cloth and cod; banking; urban life; and poverty and crime.

Chapter 7: Europe in the World, 1450–1600

Mediterranean and Indian Ocean connections, Chinese and Portuguese voyages, Columbus and later voyagers, Europeans in Asia, Africa and the Americas, the Columbian exchange, and difference and hierarchy. A part summary for 1450–1600 follows.

Chapter 8: Individuals in Society, 1600–1789

The body again, now social, writing, inner, studied, treated, reproducing and deviant: orders and classes, letters and diaries, emotions, anatomy and medicine, public health, childbirth and contraception, and sex crimes. Boxes discuss the "civilizing process" and the "emotional turn".

Chapter 9: Politics and Power, 1600–1789

Absolutism in theory and practice and warfare and alliances (with a box on the "crisis of the seventeenth century"), then France, Spain and Portugal, the British Isles, the Dutch Republic, the Ottoman Empire, the Habsburg lands, Brandenburg-Prussia, Sweden and Poland, Russia, and the enlightened rulers.

Chapter 10: Cultural and Intellectual Life, 1600–1789

Learned societies, salons and newspapers; science from ancient authorities to new methods, the revolution in astronomy and Newtonian mathematics; Enlightenment ideas of reason, property and natural rights and their limits; and literature, art, architecture, music and dance.

Chapter 11: Religious Consolidation and Renewal, 1600–1789

Protestant state churches, church and state in Catholicism, spiritualism and pietism, Moravians and Methodists, gender in Western Christianity, Eastern Orthodoxy, witchcraft, Judaism and Islam.

Chapter 12: Economics and the Environment, 1600–1789

Agricultural change and rural protest, population growth, proto-industry and guilds, mechanised textile production, industrialisation, and credit, banking and money.

Chapter 13: Europe in the World, 1600–1789

Exploration; trade and colonies in the Indian Ocean, the Caribbean and the Atlantic; colonies, difference and race; and the effects of colonialism, followed by the epilogue.

Key Concepts

Part I: 1450–1600

• Life cycle: the stages of life, from childhood to death, used to organise social history.
• Dynastic and marital politics: state-building through armies, taxes and marriage alliances.
• Humanism: the educational and intellectual movement built on classical learning.
• Reformations: the early, English, radical and Catholic reformations and the wars that followed.
• Neo-serfdom: the tightening of peasant bondage in eastern Europe while western rural society polarised.
• Columbian exchange: the transfer of plants, animals, diseases and people between hemispheres.

Part II: 1600–1789

• Absolutism: the theory and practice of monarchs claiming undivided authority.
• Scientific Revolution: the move from ancient authorities to new methods, astronomy and mathematics.
• Enlightenment and natural rights: new arguments about reason and rights, and who was excluded from them.
• Proto-industry and industrialisation: rural manufacturing, mechanised textiles and the early stages of industry.
• Colonies and race: how colonial slavery and trade reshaped ideas of difference.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• Parallel thematic structure. Each part runs through the same six themes, so a reader can follow, for example, religion from the early Reformation (Chapter 5) to pietism and Methodism (Chapter 11) or the economy from cloth and cod (Chapter 6) to industrialisation (Chapter 12), and compare the two halves of the period directly.
• Social and gender history throughout. The publisher stresses the integration of gender, class, regional and ethnic difference, and the table of contents bears it out: two chapters are built around the body and the life cycle, and the religious chapter includes gender in Western Christianity.
• Whole of Europe and its world. Eastern Europe, the Ottoman Empire, Russia and Orthodoxy have their own sections, and three chapters place Europe in a global setting.
• Built to be taught. Chapter summaries, questions, further reading and primary-source lists in every chapter, source extracts from Luther and Erasmus to the Code Noir, and boxes on historians' debates (the Weber thesis, changing views of Columbus, Atlantic history) introduce students to sources and historiography as well as events.

Limitations

• Length. At almost 600 pages it is a substantial textbook, and most one-semester courses will need to select chapters.
• Thematic splitting of events. Because political narrative sits in two regional chapters (Chapters 3 and 9), the Reformation in a separate religious chapter, and economic change in another, readers can lose a sense of how events in a particular country fitted together; the tables of rulers and the maps help.
• Ends at 1789. The French Revolution is the end point rather than a subject, and industrialisation is followed only to its early stages.

Where It Fits in the Course

This is the main survey textbook in the early-modern list. Peter Marshall's The Reformation: A Very Short Introduction is a brief introduction to the religious upheavals that Chapters 5 and 11 cover; read it before or alongside them for an overview. Carlos Eire's Reformations is a long narrative history of the Protestant, Catholic and radical reformations, and Euan Cameron's The European Reformation is a scholarly synthesis of sixteenth-century reform; either deepens Chapter 5 considerably.

Beat Kümin's edited The European World 1500–1800 is a thematic textbook by a team of specialists covering much the same period; it works as a second perspective on the same themes, and students can compare how the two books treat a topic. Geoffrey Parker's Global Crisis is a large global study of the seventeenth-century crisis linking climate to war and rebellion, and develops the debate flagged in Chapter 9 and the environmental history of Chapter 12.

How to Use This Book

The book assumes no prior study of early modern history and suits first- and second-year undergraduates in history and students in literature, religion or politics who need context for the period.

A suggested plan:

• Start with the Introduction, for the book's structure and its discussion of sources, and Chapter 1.
• For a chronological course, read Part I and then Part II in order.
• For a thematic course, read paired chapters together: 2 and 8 (society), 3 and 9 (politics), 4 and 10 (culture and science), 5 and 11 (religion), 6 and 12 (economy), 7 and 13 (Europe in the world).
• For a semester on one half of the period, take Chapter 1 and Part I, or Part II with the part summary at the end of Chapter 7 for background.

Use the apparatus. Read each source box as a short exercise in interpreting evidence, attempt the end-of-chapter questions before seminars, and use the methods-and-debates boxes as starting points for essays on historiography. Keep the maps and tables of rulers to hand when reading the political chapters, and use the further-reading and primary-source lists to move on to Eire, Cameron or Parker.