Guide to the Study of Early Modern European History For Students ...

I have not tried to be comprehensive, but to cover only areas in which I might
actually examine you. You will therefore not find much for the period after the Peace of
Westphalia or for any national history other than the history of Germany. You will find a
great deal about the history of political thought, law and legal thought, the church, the state,
intellectual history, religion, and the like. You will not find a lot about the history of politics,
but that's only because the political history of early modern Europe is well covered by the
books listed in the preceding section on "general knowledge."
I have not been shy about paying attention to older pieces of scholarship. That's not
because they have not been superseded by more recent scholarship. In many ways they have.
But familiarity with older pieces of scholarship is an invaluable aid in finding one's way
through the clutter of new books and articles constantly pouring from the presses into the
academy and onto the web. Without knowing older pieces of scholarship that have proven
their worth over time, it can be very difficult to recognize just which recent publications are
really new and significant and which merely add one more study of a certain very specific
kind to a long and well established list of similar studies, or that merely repeat well known
information in a slightly different form with slightly different words, as they often do at the
invitation of publishers eager to survive in an increasingly tight market.
There is no way you can arrange titles in this kind of bibliography in a thoroughly
consistent manner unless you use a purely mechanical criterion, like the date of publication
or authors' last names. But using a mechanical criterion would be counterproductive for
students trying to understand how the body of scholarly knowledge about early modern
Europe is articulated. It's much more enlightening to arrange books according to some kind
of criterion that reflects the intellectual relationships in which these books stand to each
other.
I have therefore arranged titles according to whatever criterion seemed to make the
most sense for a particular group of titles—by importance, by author, by topic, by date of
publication, by genre, by school of scholarship, and so on—and I have felt free to switch
criteria whenever I could think of no better way to proceed. That means that these
arrangements reflect nothing more clearly than my own judgment. You may not recognize
the reasons why I arranged things the way I did, and if you do, they may strike you as
arbitrary. That's fine by me just so long as it helps you to recognize what these books have
contributed to our knowledge of the past and how they differ from each other. Choose
whatever you think will be most useful for your purposes and discuss your choices with me.
2.1 MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND
*Bartlett, Robert. The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change, 950-1350.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993.
*Moore, R. I. The First European Revolution, c. 970-1215. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000.
*Moore, R. I. The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950-
1250. Oxford: Blackwell, 1987.
**Bloch, Marc. Feudal Society. Trans. L. A. Manyon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1961.
**Brunner, Otto. Land and Lordship: Structures of Governance in Medieval Austria. Trans. with an
introduction by Howard Kaminsky and James Van Horn Melton. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992.
**Tellenbach, Gerd. Church, State and Christian Society at the Time of the Investiture Controversy.
Trans. Ralph F. Bennett. London: Basil Blackwell & Mott, 1959.
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