Early Modern European Civilization and Its Political and Cultural Dynamism

by Schilling, Heinz

• ISBN13: 9781584657002
• ISBN10: 1584657006
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-05-30
• Publisher: Brandeis Univ

Summary

Based on a series of lectures given at the Historical Society of Israel in 2006, this volume offers a rare opportunity for English language readers to appreciate the groundbreaking work of historian Heinz Schilling. As Schilling argues here, the emergence of the European state system was a direct result of the rise of regionally dominant religious beliefs and the resultant formation of national identities. This is not only an introduction to his paradigmatic concept of "confessionalization" and the emergence of the state system in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; it is also an effort to understand the impact of migration and the role of religious minorities as agents of economic, social, and cultural change during this period. The book concludes with a tantalizing discussion of the way in which secular authority did not arise exclusive from religion but was often inspired by the inherent dualism of the Latinate culture, characterized by a long-held separation between the spiritual and secular powers. The very fundamentalisms that fed the inferno of the Thirty Years War were only brought to heel by the very nature of European religious authority. Schilling uses his discussion of the confessionalization concept and the rise of the state system as a model of historical typology that will serve to ease historians' embrace of post-national, post-European, and global historiography.

Author Biography

HEINZ SCHILLING holds the chair in Early Modern European History at the History Department of Humboldt University in Berlin. He is a member of the Berlin Brandenburgische (former Prussian), the British, the Royal Dutch, and the European Academy of Sciences; Laureatus 2002 of the Dutch Heinecken Prize in History; President of the Verein fuer Reformationsgeschichte, and European Managing Editor of the Archive for Reformation History. He is the author of numerous books and articles.

Table of Contents

Foreword	p. vii
Introduction: The History of Europe between National and Global Challenge	p. 1
The Confessionalization of European Churches and Societies-an Engine for Modernizing and for Social and Cultural Change	p. 11
The Religious Profile of Latin Europe	p. 13
Confessionalization and the Acceleration of Social Change around 1600	p. 17
Confessionalization and Secularization	p. 28
Migration and Minorities	p. 33
The Early Modern Confessional Migration - a Typological Approach	p. 35
The Early Migration from the Habsburg Territories of the Netherlands and Iberia: Chronology, Motives, Numbers, Places, and Conditions of Settlement	p. 41
The Reaction of the Calvinist and Sephardic Migrants to Religious and Social Segregation	p. 49
A Dialectic of Traditionalism and Progress - Considerations on Long-term Economic and Cultural Consequences	p. 52
The European Crisis of the Early Seventeenth Century and the Birth of an International State System	p. 65
Religion and Early Modern State Power - Preliminary Reflections	p. 67
The Crisis of the Early Seventeenth Century	p. 70
From Confrontation to Compromise and Peace - Overcoming Confessional Fundamentalism	p. 78
The New Stability of a Secular Order of Autonomous States	p. 84
Notes	p. 87
Index	p. 115
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