A richly documented study of early modern state formation, sovereignty, legitimacy, and comparative political culture in Alsace between the Peace of Westphalia and the French Revolution

Analyzes how negotiations between Dutch consuls and North African rulers over the liberation of Dutch sailors helped create a new diplomatic order in the western Mediterranean.

The formation of states in early modern Europe has long been an important topic for historical analysis. Traditionally, the political and military struggles of kings and rulers were the favoured object of study for academic historians. This book highlights new historical research from Europe’s northern frontier, bringing ‘the people’ back into the discussion of state politics, presenting alternative views of political and social relations in the Nordic countries before industrialisation. The early modern period was a time that witnessed initiatives from people from many groups formally excluded from political influence, operating outside the structures of central government, and this book returns to the subject of contentious politics and state building from below.

Professor Mary Lindemann inspired several generations of historical researchers in early modern history and culture. She has served as president of the German Studies Association and the American Historical Association and is the author of pathbreaking scholarly work in the history of medicine, urban space, diplomacy, and of women. In honor of her scholarship, service, and dedication, Healing and Harm gathers a group of leading scholars that includes her students, contemporaries, and those who have been inspired by her work to continue Lindemann’s prolific arguments and observations on early modern, central European and German history and culture.

How gunpowder technology exploded heroes, heroics, and war stories from 1400 to 1700, and how German writers tried to glue them back together

Christian history in rural central Germany principally followed not a Catholic and Protestant course but rather an indigenous one, which agricultural and communal forces animated and which bifurcated in the wake of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia.

This book argues that the introduction of popular sovereignty as the basis for government in France facilitated a dramatic transformation in international law in the eighteenth century.