War and Society in Europe, 1618-1648

✍ Scribed by Josef Polišenský

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 1978
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 275
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

The Thirty Years War was the central political and military encounter of the seventeenth century. It drew in virtually all of Europe, with the exception of England, and by 1650 no European country had entirely escaped the experience of violent conflict. Since the end of the Second World War historians in western and eastern Europe have been engaged in the task of reassuring the significance of the seventeenth century in general and the Thirty Years War in particular. They have formulated questions and attempted to answer them by using fresh sources. One especially rich depository is the archival system of Czechoslovakia. The seventeenth-century generals and diplomats of the Imperial side preserved masses of papers which usually found their way into family archives, many of them housed on Bohemian and Moravian landed estates. With the transfer of private archives into public hands after 1945, much new material became available to scholars. This volume surveys the process of historical rethinking and revision.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents
Preface
Introduction
Part One: Problems in the History of the Thirty Years' War
1 Attempts at a reinterpretation of the conflict
2 The Bohemian War 1618—20
3 The Dutch period of conflict 1621-5
4 The Danish intervention and the attempts at the formation of a grand coalition
5 The Swedish—Dutch period of the conflict 1630-5
6 The Swedish—French Period, 1635-43
7 War, revolution, peace negotiations 1643-50
Part Two: The Effects of the Thirty Years' War
8 The aftermath of conflict
9 Changes in the composition of the Bohemian nobility
Conclusion
Notes
Appendix: Tabular survey of archives, libraries and individual collections
Index