Wayne te Brake

I read this book all the way through but I don't think I learned anything from it. It seems like a good scholarly book, but it must be intended only for professional historians. The author first discusses the catholic/protestant religious politics that underlay various civil wars and revolts across Europe in the 16th century. He then reviews the revolutions of the 17th century from a more general political perspective.

But the argument is completely impenetrable if you don't already possess good working knowledge on these multiple conflicts. The author moves swiftly from one revolt to the next without putting any of them into a more general context. He never reflects at any depth on social and political factors such as excessive taxation and economic hardship, which presumably gave the people reason to revolt. Instead his main concern is who allied with whom and how strong "princely authority" was in any given location. He presents this information in a number of graphs, but they are completely uninformative.

Here's my test question for prospective readers of this book: have you ever heard of the Schmalkaldic War? If not, then you probably don't know the other crises discussed in this book either and you will gain very little from this constricted review of them.… (mehr)