These essays, comprising case-studies and broader surveys, deal with town-country relations and regional systems and identities in late medieval and early modern Germany, especially in their impact on social and religious change in the age of the Reformation.

Draws new attention to popular protest in medieval English towns, away from the more frequently studied theme of rural revolt.

These twenty-six essays examine urban, rural, national, and imperial histories in Early Modern Europe and abroad, and politics in Reformation Switzerland, Burgundy, Germany, and the Netherlands.

Cross-disciplinary perspectives on responses to material and spiritual loss in early modern Germany trace how individuals and communities registered, coped with, and made sense of deprivation through a spectrum of activities, often turning loss into gain and acquiring agency.

No detailed comparison of the city-state in medieval Europe has been undertaken over the last century. Research has concentrated on the role of city-states and their republican polities as harbingers of the modern state, or else on their artistic and cultural achievements, above all in Italy. Much less attention has been devoted to the cities' territorial expansion: why, how, and with what consequences cities in the urban belt, stretching from central and northern Italy over the Alps to Switzerland, Germany, and the Low Countries, succeeded (or failed) in constructing sovereign polities, with or without dependent territories. Tom Scott goes beyond the customary focus on the leading Italian city-states to include, for the first time, detailed coverage of the Swiss city-states and the imperial cities of Germany. He criticizes current typologies of the city-state in Europe advanced by political and social scientists to suggest that the city-state was not a spent force in early modern Europe, but rather survived by transformation and adaption. He puts forward instead a typology which embraces both time and space by arguing for a regional framework for analysis which does not treat city-states in isolation, but within a wider geopolitical setting.

Weathering the Reformation explores the role of the Little Ice Age in early modern Christian culture and considers climate as a contributing factor in the Protestant Reform. The book focuses on religious narratives from Strasbourg between 1509 and 1541, pivotal years during which the European cultural concept of nature splintered along confessional differences. Together with case studies from antagonistic religious communities, Linnéa Rowlatt draws on annual weather reports for a period during which the climate became less hospitable to human endeavours. Social uunrest and the cultural upheaval of Reform are examined in relation to deteriorating climactic conditions characteristic of the Spörer Minimum. This book will be of particular interest to scholars of religious history and climate history.

The book offers a concise introduction to the history of art, culture and everyday life of cities in the German cultural area between renaissance and revolution. References from sources and illustrations define the text; they are together useful resources for classes at schools and universities.