Examining the societies of the hundreds of small states that made up most of Europe before the 19th century, this text takes as its focus the Duchy of Lorraine.

Argues that systems approaches are necessary in order to identify and understand important features of the world.

This book provides a vivid biography of a towering Italian banker, pioneer and entrepreneur. It weaves the entrepreneurial ventures of Alessandro Torlonia (1800-1886) through the narratives of business and politics in the Nineteenth century, the growth of European financial markets and the decline of Papal power during the Italian Risorgimento. The discussion is founded in rigorous historical research using original sources such as the Archivum Secretum Vaticanum papers and other official documents; the archives of the Torlonia family, and of the Rothschild bank in Paris; memoirs; correspondences, and newspapers. Through this book readers learn that Alessandro Torlonia was a man of many faces, who was one of the most complex and influential characters of Italian economic life in the nineteenth century. Felisini also provides an expert critique of the financial history of the papacy: an area of heightened interest given the notoriety of relations between the Holy See and its bankers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Focal topics such as the history of European elites and the history of European financial markets will have an interdisciplinary appeal for scholars and researchers.

In A Europe of Courts, a Europe of Factions the contributors offer an analysis of the political groups of the most representative European courts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Transcending individual cases, this collection presents the first comparative overview of the phenomenon of court factionalism. Through original research and a critical approach, González Cuerva and Koller explore in depth the emergence, coexistence and image of court factions. This contribution to the debate on the nature of early modern policy-making is enriched with a European-wide focus, which allows comparison of the circumstantial and micropolitical factors accounting for the spread of factions and the conditions in which they functioned. It also allows partisan sources to be examined with the necessary caution. Contributors are Stefano Andretta, Janet Dickinson, Luc Duerloo, Pavel Marek, José Martínez Millán, Toby Osborne, David Potter, Jonathan Spangler, Evrim Türkçelik, and Maria Antonietta Visceglia.

French territorial ambitions and consequent military activity during the reign of Louis XIV ensured that a number of territories bordering on France were subject to military occupation for strategic reasons from the 1660s onwards. Drawing on extensive archival research, this study presents the occupation of two of these territories, Lorraine and Savoy, from a comparative perspective. It investigates the aims and intentions of the French monarchy in occupying these regions, the problems of administering them, and French relations with key local elite groups. Absolute monarchy on the frontiers makes a significant contribution to understanding this crucial era in the development of civil-military relations. It also places the occupations of Lorraine and Savoy within the framework of recent scholarship on early modern border societies and frontiers, and on the practice of ‘absolutism’ at the frontiers of the French kingdom. The book will appeal particularly to scholars and students of early modern France and Europe.

In Status, Power, and Identity in Early Modern France, Jonathan Dewald explores European aristocratic society by looking closely at one of its most prominent families. The Rohan were rich, powerful, and respected, but Dewald shows that there were also weaknesses in their apparently secure position near the top of French society. Family finances were unstable, and competing interests among family members generated conflicts and scandals; political ambitions led to other troubles, partly because aristocrats like the Rohan intensely valued individual achievement, even if it came at the expense of the family’s needs. Dewald argues that aristocratic power in the Old Regime reflected ongoing processes of negotiation and refashioning, in which both men and women played important roles. So did figures from outside the family—government officials, middle-class intellectuals and businesspeople, and many others. Dewald describes how the Old Regime’s ruling class maintained its power and the obstacles it encountered in doing so.

During the last two centuries, ethnolinguistic nationalism has been the norm of nation building and state building in Central Europe. The number of recognized Slavic languages (in line with the normative political formula of language = nation = state) gradually tallied with the number of the Slavic nation-states, especially after the breakups of Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. But in the current age of borderless cyberspace, regional and minority Slavic languages are freely standardized and used, even when state authorities disapprove. As a result, since the turn of the 19th century, the number of Slavic languages has varied widely, from a single Slavic language to as many as 40. Through the story of Slavic languages, this timely book illustrates that decisions on what counts as a language are neither permanent nor stable, arguing that the politics of language is the politics in Central Europe. The monograph will prove to be an essential resource for scholars of linguistics and politics in Central Europe.

The hot-air balloon, invented by the Montgolfier brothers in 1783, launched for the second time just days before the Treaty of Paris would end the American Revolutionary War. The ascent in Paris—a technological marvel witnessed by a diverse crowd that included Benjamin Franklin—highlighted celebrations of French military victory against Britain and ignited a balloon mania that swept across Europe at the end of the Enlightenment. This popular frenzy for balloon experiments, which attracted hundreds of thousands of spectators, fundamentally altered the once elite audience for science by bringing aristocrats and commoners together. The Imagined Empire explores how this material artifact, the flying machine, not only expanded the public for science and spectacle but inspired utopian dreams of a republican monarchy that would obliterate social boundaries. The balloon, Mi Gyung Kim argues, was a people-machine, a cultural performance that unified and mobilized the people of France, who imagined an aerial empire that would bring glory to the French nation. This critical history of ballooning considers how a relatively simple mechanical gadget became an explosive cultural and political phenomenon on the eve of the French Revolution.

This book demonstrates the evolution of resilience and recovery as a concept by applying it to a new context, that of courts and monarchies. These were remarkably resilient institutions, with a strength and malleability that allowed them to ‘bounce back’ time and again. This volume highlights the different forms of resilience displayed in European courts during the medieval and early modern periods. Drawing on rarely published sources, it demonstrates different models of monarchical resilience, ranging from the survival of sovereign authority in political crisis, to the royal response to pandemic challenges, to other strategies for resisting internal or external threats. Resilience and Recovery illustrates how symbolic legitimacy and effective power were strongly intertwined, creating a distinct collective memory that shaped the defence of monarchical authority over many centuries.

In Law’s Dominion, Jay Berkovitz offers a novel approach to the history of early modern Jewry. Set in the city of Metz, on the Moselle river, this study of a vibrant prerevolutionary community draws on a wide spectrum of legal sources that tell a story about community, religion, and family that has not been told before. Focusing on the community’s leadership, public institutions, and judiciary, this study challenges the assumption that Jewish life was in a steady state of decline before the French Revolution. To the contrary, the evidence reveals a robust community that integrated religious values and civic consciousness, interacted with French society, and showed remarkable signs of collaboration between Jewish law and the French judicial system. In Law’s Dominion, Jay Berkovitz has gathered and meticulously mined a dazzling array of rich and complex rabbinic texts and records from Western Europe during the early modern period, including the pinkas of the rabbinic court of Metz that he previously rescued from oblivion. What emerges is a remarkably fresh depiction and incisive comparative treatment of central aspects of Jewish law, religion and family, which will have far-reaching ramifications for all future studies in these disciplines. -Ephraim Kanarfogel, E. Billi Ivry University Professor of Jewish History, Literature, and Law at Yeshiva University