Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-p2v8j Total loading time: 0.001 Render date: 2024-06-06T20:42:12.977Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Commentary: Making and Remaking the Habsburg Monarchy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 April 2009

Howard Louthan
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Thereis something in a historian that loves wreckage. I am confident that scientists will one day identify a gene on our chromosomes that predisposes us to destruction. As a young graduate student, I listened in rapt attention as Lawrence Stone mesmerized our seminar describing the one opportunity he had in wartime to “sack a house.” Most of us, however, sublimate these illicit desires, and the urge to destroy only becomes evident in our scholarship. Following Gibbon and Huizinga, we relish the study of decay and decline. Humor aside, R. J. W. Evans was well aware of this instinct as he began The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy with a simple but profound observation, “Many historians, in a dozen languages, have sought to explain why the Habsburg Monarchy declined and fell; none has ever seriously investigated the causes of its rise.”

Type
Forum in Honor of R.J.W. Evans
Information
Austrian History Yearbook , Volume 40 , April 2009 , pp. 85 - 90
Copyright
Copyright © Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Evans, R. J. W., The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1550–1700 (Oxford, 1979), viiGoogle Scholar.

2 Winkelbauer, Thomas, Ständefreiheit und Fürstenmacht. Länder und Untertanen des Hauses Habsburg im konfessionellen Zeitalter, 2 vols. (Vienna, 2003)Google Scholar; Fichtner, Paula S., The Habsburg Empire, 1490–1815: Attributes of Empire (Basingstoke, UK, 2003)Google Scholar; Ingrao, Charles, The Habsburg Monarchy: 1618–1815 (Cambridge, 1994)Google Scholar.

3 History Today 32, no. 8 (1982): 51.

4 R. J. W. Evans, The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy, 447.

5 Henshall, Nicholas, The Myth of Absolutism (New York, 1992)Google Scholar.

6 Louthan, Howard, Converting Bohemia: Force and Persuasion in the Catholic Reformation (Cambridge, 2009), 18Google Scholar; Maťa, Petr and Winkelbauer, Thomas, eds., Die Habsburgermonarchie 1620 bis 1740: Leistungen und Grenzen des Absolutismusparadigmas (Stuttgart, 2006)Google Scholar.

7 Ingrao, The Habsburg Monarchy 1618–1815, 130.

8 Matsche, Franz, Die Kunst im Dienst der Staatsidee Kaiser Karls VI., 2 vols. (Berlin, 1981)Google Scholar.

9 Kaufmann, Thomas, The School of Prague (Chicago, 1988)Google Scholar; The Mastery of Nature (Princeton, 1993); Court, Cloister and City (Chicago, 1995).

10 Silver, Larry, Marketing Maximilian: The Visual Ideology of a Holy Roman Emperor (Princeton, 2008)Google Scholar; Wood, Christopher, “Maximilian I as Archeologist,” Renaissance Quarterly 57 (2005): 1128–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Chisholm, Michael, “The Religionspolitik of Emperor Ferdinand I (1521–1564): Tyrol and the Holy Roman Empire,” European History Quarterly 38 (2008): 551–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Maťa, Petr, Svět české aristokracie (1500–1700) (Prague, 2004)Google Scholar; Howard Louthan, “Reshaping Identity and Reforming the Kingdom: Confessional Change and the Bohemian Nobility,” in Converting Bohemia, 47–82.

13 See Murdock's, observations here in “Central and Eastern Europe,” in Ryrie, Alec, ed., The European Reformations (Basingstoke, UK, 2006), 37–38Google Scholar.

14 Brady, Thomas A. Jr., “Confessionalization: The Career of a Concept,” in Headley, John M., Hillerbrand, Hans J., and Papalas, Anthony J., eds., Confessionalization in Europe, 1555–1700. Essays in Honor and Memory of Bodo Nischan, (Aldershot, UK, 2004), 1–20Google Scholar.

15 Most recent on Orzechowski is Koehler, Krzysztof, Stanisław Orzechowski i dylematy humanizmu (Cracow, 2004)Google Scholar; for Abeles, see Carlebach, Elisheva, The Death of Simon Abeles: Jewish-Christian Tension in Seventeenth-Century Prague. Third Annual Herbert Berman Memorial Lecture (New York, 2003)Google Scholar.