Shaping History

by Te Brake, Wayne; Brake, Wayne Ph. Te; Brake, Wayne Te

• ISBN13: 9780520213180
• ISBN10: 0520213181
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1998-07-01
• Publisher: Univ of California Pr on Demand

Summary

As long as there have been governments, ordinary people have been acting in a variety of often informal or extralegal ways to influence the rulers who claimed authority over them.Shaping Historyshows how ordinary people broke down the institutional and cultural barriers that separated elite from popular politics in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe and entered fully into the historical process of European state formation. Wayne te Brake's outstanding synthesis builds on the many studies of popular political action in specific settings and conflicts, locating the interaction of rulers and subjects more generally within the multiple political spaces of composite states. In these states, says Te Brake, a broad range of political subjects, often religiously divided among themselves, necessarily aligned themselves with alternative claimants to cultural and political sovereignty in challenging the cultural and fiscal demands of some rulers. This often violent interaction between subjects and rulers had particularly potent consequences during the course of the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, and the Crisis of the Seventeenth Century. But, as Te Brake makes clear, it was an ongoing political process, not a series of separate cataclysmic events. Offering a compelling alternative to traditionally elite-centered accounts of territorial state formation in Europe, this book calls attention to the variety of ways ordinary people have molded and shaped their own political histories.

Author Biography

Wayne Te Brake is Professor of History at Purchase College, State University of New York.

Table of Contents

List of Figures
Preface
Breaking and Entering	p. 1
Revolt and Religious Reformation in the World of Charles V	p. 22
Religious Dissent and Civil War in France and the Low Countries	p. 63
The Political Crisis of the Seventeenth Century	p. 109
Popular Politics and the Geography of State Formation	p. 166
References	p. 189
Index	p. 215
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