The Seventeenth Century

The complete Short Oxford History of Europe (series editor: Professor T.C.W. Blanning) will cover the history of Europe from Classical Greece to the present in eleven volumes. In each, experts write to their strengths tackling the key issues - including society, economy, religion, politics, and culture - head-on in chapters that will be at once wide-ranging surveys and searching analyses. Each book is specifically designed with the non-specialist reader in mind; but the authority of the contributors and the vigour of the interpretations will make them necessary and challenging reading for fellow academics across a range of disciplines.

Lying between the two great 'peaks' of European history, the Reformation and the Enlightenment in the centuries fore and aft, the seventeenth century seems not to have a popular identity itself. And yet, as Professor Bergin points out in his Introduction, it is the very proliferation of major events, crises and processes throughout Europe that has made this transitional age so difficult to label.

In this book, the seventeenth century, heavy with significance for the future of Europe, is fully explored by Professor Bergin and six major authors as they address, in turn, economy, society, politics, war and international relations, science, thought and culture ('The Age of Curiosity'), and Europe in the wider world. In a set of chapters covering and contrasting the European experience across the full century and the full continent, the reader is offered a rich, lively, and provocative introduction to the period, and students a superbly authoritative context for more detailed work.