The Penguin History of Europe . Volume V

This is a weighty book with a big thesis: that the period usually demarcated by the indulgence affair and the Peace of Westphalia saw the demise of the (western) Christendom ‘project’ and the emergence of a ‘projection’ called Europe; in other words, the transformation of a belief community into a geographical notion. Over the course of one-and-a-half centuries, preoccupations with sovereignty and reasons of state superseded the medieval ideal of a unified Christian commonwealth (p. 567), a process driven by confessional fragmentation, dynastic rivalries and contemporary impressions that inhabitants of this continent were ‘superior’ to those they encountered in other parts of the globe. The author, Mark Greengrass, embarks on a most impressive survey, taking us from Portugal to the gates of Moscow and from Ireland to the Ottoman territories in the Balkans. Hardly a theme is left untouched: gender relations, peasant serfdom, silver imports, print culture and natural philosophy are discussed as authoritatively as the German Reformation (in which Luther played the part of a ‘super-catalyst’; p. 320), England’s descent into civil war (where, in November 1640, MPs convened ‘in an atmosphere of national crisis in the aftermath of a Parliament which had been summarily dismissed, its grievances unheard, to pay for a war which the king had lost, and for a cause which the majority of the Commons did not believe in, and which they associated with a ... regime in which they had no trust’; p. 657) or the devastating military campaigns ravaging much of the Holy Roman Empire in the early 1600s. New emphases abound: Calvinism, despite its strict moral messages, was not all about repression; in comparative perspective, Geneva’s matrimonial legislation can appear ‘practical-minded and liberal’ (p. 368). The roots of the Thirty Years War should not be sought in the Hradschin Palace, where the Bohemian rising began in 1618, but in the emphatic recatholicisation campaign of the Habsburgs in Styria two decades earlier. The language is clear and engaging, if at times dense. In terms of structure, the argument broadly proceeds from the socio-economic via the intellectual/cultural to the political, while moving the reader gently forward in time. The division into chapters is not always entirely transparent, but understanding of their rich contents is facilitated by maps, genealogies, a full index and two colour sections with thirty-eight illustrations (although the latter might have been more extensively addressed in the text). At times, the sheer complexity of factors affecting so many heterogeneous contexts can only be summarised in the most general of terms: ‘The relationship between Christianity and kingship changed’ (p. 525)

Ancient history · Commonwealth · Economic history · Empire · Peasant · Political science · Spanish Civil War · History · Law · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity