This volume provides the first comprehensive treatment of regicide in Britain and Europe from the Middle Ages to 1800 (1300-1800). Using case studies of physical assaults on kings and on members of royal families, major changes and continuities in the meaning and nature of monarchy across periods and societies are brought to light. The volume ranges from Gothic kingship to the transformation of monarchy within the emerging modern constitutional context of the American and French Revolutions. The introduction and the contributions of fifteen leading senior scholars from England, Scotland,...

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...

The introduction and the contributions of fifteen leading senior scholars from England, Scotland, France, the Netherlands and Germany provide cutting edge research on the changing relationship between monarchy and society in medieval and early modern Europe.

A new account of the intellectual debates that created the German notion of the 'modern state' under the Thirty Years War.

A decisive contribution to the long-running debate about the dynamics of state formation and elite transformation in early modern Europe.