Courage and Griefilluminates in a nuanced fashion Sweden's involvement in Europe's destructive Thirty Years' War (1618-48). Focusing on the various roles women performed in the bloody and extended ...conflict, Mary Elizabeth Ailes analyzes how methods of warfare and Swedish society were changing in profound ways. This study considers the experiences of unmarried camp followers and officers' wives as well as peasant women who remained in the countryside during times of conflict and upheaval.Women contributed to the war effort in a variety of ways. On campaign they provided support services to armies in the field. On the home front they helped to minimize disruptions incurred within their frayed communities. As increasing numbers of men left to fight overseas, women took over local economic activities and defended their families' interests. Such activities significantly altered the fabric of Swedish society.Examining women's wartime experiences in the Thirty Years' War enhances our understanding of women's roles in society, the nature of female power and authority, and the opportunities and hardships that warfare brought to women's lives.
Military Revolution and the Thirty Years War 1618–1648 investigates change and decline in military institutions during a period of protracted and destructive European warfare. Conceptual background ...is provided by the Military Revolution thesis, which argues that changes in military technology and tactics drove revolutionary transformation in the way states organised and waged war in the early modern era. This transformation of military institutions became evident during the long and destructive Thirty Years War in 1618–1648. The outcome of the Military Revolution was the centralised fiscal-military state that possessed a strong claim to the monopoly of violence within its territorial boundaries. The book examines how the Thirty Years War accelerated and even initiated transformation in four military institutions that defined land warfare: feudal cavalry services, militias, regular armies, and war commissariats. The regional scope of the investigation covers the Holy Roman Empire, France, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Denmark, and the Dutch Republic. The book combines military-historical inquiry with ancillary sciences of sociology and economics. It argues that the Military Revolution of the Thirty Years War stimulated institutions capable of increased complexification and specialisation while curtailing those that were locked in stasis and immutability. The institutional legacy of the Thirty Years War was the emergence of complex military organisations that are characteristic to the modern society and its self-renewing social subsystems. Previous scholarship on the Military Revolution has concentrated on military technicalities and the wider process of early modern state formation. This book proposes an alternative way of viewing early modern military transformations from the perspectives of institutions and systems. System-analytical survey of change and decline in the military institutions of the Thirty Years War introduces qualifications to the Military Revolution theory and offers a novel way of conceptualising early modern military history.
Variations in building activity reflect demographic, economic and social change during history. Tens of thousands of wooden constructions in Europe have been dendrochronologically dated in recent ...decades. We use the annually precise evidence from a unique dataset of 49 640 tree felling dates of historical constructions to reconstruct temporal changes in building activity between 1250 and 1699 CE across a large part of western and central Europe largely corresponding to the former Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. Comparison with annual records of 9772 plague outbreaks shows that construction activity was significantly negatively correlated to the number of plague outbreaks, with the greatest decrease in construction following the larger outbreaks by three to four years after the start of the epidemics. Preceding the Black Death (1346–1353 CE) by five decades and the Great Famine (1315–1322 CE) by two decades, a significant decline in construction activity at c. 1300 CE is indicative of a societal crisis, associated with population stagnation or decline. Another dramatic decline in building activity coincides with the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648 CE) and confirms the devastating nature of this conflict. While construction activity was significantly lower during periods of high grain prices, no statistically robust relationship between the number of felling dates and past temperature or hydroclimate variations is found. This study demonstrates the value of dendrochronological felling dates as an indicator for times of crisis and prosperity during periods when documentary evidence is limited.
•Reconstructing European building activity 1250–1699 CE from 49 640 tree felling dates.•Lower building activity coincided with more plague outbreaks and higher grain prices.•Reduced building activity during the Late Medieval Crisis (c. 1300–1415 CE).•Unprecedented decline in European building activity during the Thirty Years' War.
The nineteenth century witnessed the birth of German nationalism and the unification of Germany as a powerful nation-state. In this era the reading public's obsession with the most destructive and ...divisive war in its history-the Thirty Years' War-resurrected old animosities and sparked a violent, century-long debate over the origins and aftermath of the war. The core of this bitter argument was a clash between Protestant and Catholic historians over the cultural criteria determining authentic German identity and the territorial and political form of the future German nation.
This groundbreaking study of modern Germany's morbid fascination with the war explores the ideological uses of history writing, commemoration, and collective remembrance to show how the passionate argument over the "meaning" of the Thirty Years' War shaped Germans' conception of their nation. The first book in the extensive literature on German history writing to examine how modern German historians reinterpreted a specific event to define national identity and legitimate political and ideological agendas,The Thirty Years' War and German Memory in the Nineteenth Centuryis a bold intellectual history of the confluence of history writing, religion, culture, and politics in nineteenth-century Germany.
In this new account of the emergence of a distinctive territorial state in early modern Germany, Robert von Friedeburg examines how the modern notion of state does not rest on the experience of a ...bureaucratic state-apparatus. It emerged to stabilize monarchy from dynastic insecurity and constrain it to protect the rule of law, subjects, and their lives and property. Against this background, Lutheran and neo-Aristotelian notions on the spiritual and material welfare of subjects dominating German debate interacted with Western European arguments against 'despotism' to protect the lives and property of subjects. The combined result of this interaction under the impact of the Thirty Years War was Seckendorff's Der Deutsche Fürstenstaat (1656), constraining the evil machinations of princes and organizing the detailed administration of life in the tradition of German Policey, and which founded a specifically German notion of the modern state as comprehensive provision of services to its subjects.
Comenius at 350 Sam Dvorak; Mark Petrasko; Lucy Poulson
Central Europe (Minneapolis, Minn.),
12/2021, Letnik:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
In the fall of 2020, students in an introductory Czech language at Harvard University performed a virtual play, Comenius at 350, about the life and works of Jan Amos Comenius. This special digital ...project includes a link to the virtual play itself and a report that discusses the origins and development of the concept of the play, how Comenius’s works were adapted for the play, the production process itself, and how students overcame the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic to develop this celebration of Comenius’s life and works.
The balance-of-power idea became a crucial concept in the discourse of international affairs by the mid-seventeenth century. Nonetheless, the concept of balance of power was not even explicitly ...referenced in the Peace of Westphalia (1648). Instead, the legal principles of status quo ante and uti possidetis reigned supreme. Even though the balance-of-power principle was not mentioned in the Peace of Westphalia, it was often referenced during the negotiations and its implicit presence or practical balance of power was evident in the treaties trying to reach stability in the inter-state system. Several alliances, concluded mostly against France and Louis XIV in the second half of the seventeenth century, implied the balance of power and, more specifically, the balance of sea power. The paper argues that the balancing process became less theoretical and more pragmatic as evidenced by interactive alliance treaties that established reciprocal responsibilities and numerical equilibrium. By the Peace of Utrecht (1713), the balance of power or the balance of Europe became a leading principle and it was referenced repeatedly in the treaties in different languages. The paper traces the balance-of-power idea from the diplomatic background to the diplomatic foreground as the idea moved from natural law to positive law.
Review of Stuart Marriage Diplomacy: Dynastic Politics in their European Context, 1604-1630. Edited by Valentina Caldari and Sara J. Wolfson. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2018. ISBN 978-1-78327-143-6. xviii ...+ 367 pp. £75.
PDF
