Mark Greengrass

This book is long and, to be fair, it needs to be in order to cover such an eventful period of history. Starting at the outset of the Protestant Reformation and concluding at the end of the Thirty Years' War, this book is packed with information about daily life, economic history, complex politics, scientific advancements, and, of course, the overarching theme of religion. In the introduction, the author put forward the idea that the medieval concept of Christendom was eventual replaced in this era with that of Europe and much of this book ties back to that thesis. It's a good argument, particularly for an era which saw so much religious change and conflict associated with that change, and overall I tended to concur. I also appreciated the efforts to detail political structures and events in eastern Europe, which often are neglected in other histories of this period. Overall, this book was definitely worth the effort and it's very much worthwhile for those interested in this period of European history.… (plus d'informations)

Pity the historian who tries to write for people who are not professional historians, for all her options are bad:

i) write in order to sell books to people who want their own prejudices confirmed. See: presidential biographies; new atheist pamphlets; moralistic narratives of war.

ii) write *kind of* for non-professional-historians, but in such a way that you will satisfy other professional historians. They also want their prejudices confirmed, but have some *mighty precise* prejudices. See: books about 1-4 under-represented people over 1-5 years; historiographical polemics; narrative-less fact explosions.

iii) write specifically for intelligent non-professional-historians, while knowing that they'll get angry with you when your book isn't a perfect narrative, with themes, that tells them something new about the past rather than something new about the state of historiography.

And if, like any decent person confronting this dilemma, our historian chooses (iii), she must also be aware that she's trying something that's more or less impossible on the level of craft.

Once upon a time, none of this was a problem. History was the craft of creating narratives that explained the past, where "the past" was understood as the Big Events and Personalities and how they developed. So good history could focus on answering questions like "Why did the English Revolution happen when it did?" or "Why was there an industrial revolution?" or "What caused the Reformation?"

Other than people who still write history as if it were half a dozen white men Creating History from their armchairs in Virginia, however, historians realized that historical causation is a very tricky beast. Nobody can possibly believe that there was *a* cause of the English or Industrial or French or American Revolution, or the Reformation. If you're writing a historical monograph, no problem: you just say, hey, this thing here (e.g., the printing industry/rural poverty/collapsing legitimacy) contributed to the French Revolution, too.

But if you're writing for non-historians, you can't do that. What we non-historians want is a broad overview of the events, and some good thoughts on what caused the events.

But professional historians now have to spend much of their time arguing that x can't have been a cause, or even that event y was not, in fact, an event (e.g., the industrial revolution: thing, or not?) And they know the 'causes' are more interesting and important than the 'events' in most ways: a given peasant rebellion might be a cool story, but what really matters is the price of wheat.

And you know what tables describing the changing price of wheat do *not* do? They don't interest non-historians, unless you can put it in a narrative. In other words: writing history for non-historians, while remaining a responsible historian, is nigh impossible. To begin with, you must make sure that you book doesn't privilege events over things like the price of wheat; you must be sure not to "impose" a narrative on events, because that would distort our understanding of the events. At the same time, the intelligent non-historian requires--dare I say it?--some elegance, some entertainment, in her history books. Some unifying characteristic that she can hold onto while wading through the endless examples of migration patterns. Some dash.

Mark Greengrass has done his damnedest to deal with this problem, and he has not solved it. There's an astonishing amount of information in this book, and he is clearly a responsible historian. I'm ready to believe anything he tells me. What I'm not ready for is a text that makes a fairly unobjectionable statement (say, "most armies at time x comprised multiple nationalities and a large number of what we would call mercenaries"), and then follows it up with fifteen examples of this. I don't need the examples; that's for professional historians who need to have these things proved to them.

I'm not ready for a text that, while being so careful to index every statement about early modern Europe* to fifteen facts, is perfectly willing to make wild and ludicrous generalizations about Europe before the sixteenth century.

I'm not ready for a text that includes paragraphs like this:

"[Before the Reformation the] religion of the laity was very different as between the learned and the unlettered. Such differences were recognized in contemporary debates... the concerns of the laity were influenced by and overlapped with those of the clergy.. the evidence for what people believed is as ambiguous as the analytical categories are crude... When the Franciscans began their missionary work in the New World in the sixteenth century, the gulf between their religious experience and that of the Amerindians was immense. The same cannot be said for the distances separating... the laity and the clergy in Europe on the eve of the Reformation."

To sum up: the laity and the clergy had entirely different religious experiences before the Reformation, though we don't know what experiences anyone had, and there really was no difference between the religious experience of the clergy and the laity before the Reformation, at which point there ceased to be any difference between them.

Now, to be fair, I am ready for much of what Greengrass does. He usually writes fairly clearly, except (irony?) when he's writing about communication technologies, at which point he's prone to using phrases like "the organizational and structural means of functioning at a distance deepened." And this is an excellent, responsible attempt to write the kind of book that almost nobody a) can and/or b) cares to write anymore: large scale history that does justice to the complexities of human life without pretending that there is nothing in the world other than individuals making bad decisions.

So I can recommend this to anyone who wants to learn more about sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe. If you want a good read, of course, there are far better books out there. But they'll all sacrifice some of the nitty gritty to large narratives like "the Reformation," "the thirty years war," and so on.

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* Some historians would object to my using this term, because it imposes a unity on such a diverse period and geographical region. To them I say: THAT'S HOW LANGUAGE WORKS YOU IDIOTS. A friend of mine, who actually is an historian, has a different analysis of this: people who refuse 'grand narratives' or 'structures' end up writing books about one person doing one very particular thing. But that person is only interesting if s/he gives us insight into a larger narrative or structure. So...… (plus d'informations)