This book address a number of interrelated themes over two hundred years and more in the political, religious, cultural, and social history of a broad but often neglected swathe of the European continent. It seeks - against the grain of conventional presentations - to apprehend the era from the later seventeenth to the later nineteenth century as a whole, and to demonstrate continuities, as well as casting light on key aspects of the evolution towards modern statehood and national awareness in Central Europe, and the crises of ancien-regime strucutres there in the face of new challenges at...