To kill someone purely in order to be sentenced to death and then to die at the hands of the executioner Such murders were alarmingly frequent in eighteenth-century Lutheran Europe. The book traces the complex motives behind these crimes - an investigation that leads not only to the Pietist interest in saving the souls of those sentenced to death but also into some of the central elements of Lutheran soteriology and the idea of capital punishment as being divinely ordained. The murders prompted special legislation and challenged the religious basis of the death penalty, and the killings and...

This study of the Catholic Prince-Bishopric of Bamberg and its largely Protestant aristocracy tells the complicated story of Lutheran nobles and their relatives in the Catholic Church and their struggle to cooperate in the Reformation era.

Looking at a series of Swiss political debates, this book offers a case study of a revolutionary transformation to a rights-based society and political culture. Based on a tradition of political innovation and experimentation, Swiss citizens recalibrated their understanding of liberty and republicanism from 1750 to 1848. The resulting hybrid political culture centered around republican ideas, changing understandings of liberty and self-rule. Drawing from the public political debates in three characteristic cantons, A Laboratory of Liberty places the Swiss transformation into a European...

In European Cities in the Modern Era, 1850-1914 Friedrich Lenger analyses the demographic and economic preconditions of European urbanization, compares the extent to which Europe's cities were characterized by heterogeneity with respect to the social, national and religious composition of its population and asks in which way differences resulting from this heterogeneity were resolved either peacefully or violently. Using this general perspective and extending the scope by including Eastern and Southern Europe the dominant view of Europe's prewar cities as islands of modernity is...

Queen Liberty traces the history of an idea that lay at the foundation of political thought in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and at the same time a certain political myth that formed a core element of Polish noble culture. Anna Grześkowiak-Krwawicz seeks to trace the evolution of the ideal of "golden liberty" from the state's creation in the sixteenth century through to the distinctive degeneration of the idea and attempts at resuscitating it in the eighteenth century. She highlights what was different or even odd about the Polish concepts, as well as how they dovetailed...

This book presents a collection of twelve seminal essays by Czech historians on the history of the Czech lands from the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, which originally appeared in Czech publications as articles and book chapters and are translated here for the first time in English. The essays address a broad range of topics, including politics, religion, demography, everyday life, crime, and rural and urban society. By bringing to English-speaking readers the rich history and historical writing of the Czech lands through the lens of Czech historians, the book seeks to expand...

Up to now, historical research has treated violence mainly with reference to war, murder or massacre. Francisca Loetz argues for a new, complementary approach to history of violence as an interpersonal form of social action experienced as unacceptable behavior and aiming to subjugate the victim in everyday life. Analyzing cases of what the sources call "sexual assault" and "sexual abuse" in the city state of Zurich between 1500 and 1850, Loetz discusses fundamental methodological problems such as: how can violence be defined as a concept? What makes violence what it is in a given society? Why...

In Big Swords, Jesuits, and Bondelswarts, John S. Lowry demonstrates that anti-imperialist resistance movements overseas significantly shaped the course of Wilhelmine domestic politics between 1897 and 1906. In 1898 and 1900, for example, the consequences of Chinese, Cuban, and Samoan resistance permitted Berlin to steer two large naval laws through the Reichstag by enabling the government to garner critical votes from the Catholic Center Party through pro-Catholic gestures overseas, rather than via repeal of the Anti-Jesuit Law at home. By contrast, after 1903 costly uprisings...

This biography of the musician Franz Liszt contributes to our understanding of national identity formation and its interaction with cosmopolitanism. Liszt exemplified the nineteenth-century quest for subjective definition and fulfillment. Seeking to gain agency, authority, and community, Liszt experimented with various subject positions from which to forward his goals. The stances he selected, anchored in ideas about nation, religion, and art, allowed him to retain his cosmopolitan sensibility while making specific aesthetic and creative claims. Quinn's analysis of Liszt's correspondence and...

Topographies of Tolerance and Intolerance challenges the narrative of a simple progression of tolerance and the establishment of confessional identity during the early modern period. These essays explore the lived experiences of religious plurality, providing insights into the developments and drawbacks of religious coexistence in this turbulent period. The essays examine three main groups of actors—the laity, parish clergy, and unacknowledged religious minorities—in pre- and post-Westphalian Europe. Throughout this period, the laity navigated their own often-fluid religious beliefs, the...