Shaping history : ordinary people in European politics, 1500-1700 / / Wayne te Brake

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910496138903321
• Autore: Te Brake Wayne Ph
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: Berkeley : , : University of California Press, , [1998]
• ISBN: 0-520-92071-6; 0-585-11848-5
• Edizione: [Reprint 2020]
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (xiii, 221 pages)
• Disciplina: 940.2
• Soggetti: Europe Politics and government 1492-1648; Europe Politics and government 1648-1715
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Note generali: Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references (pages 189-213) and index.
• Nota di contenuto: Breaking and Entering -- Revolt and Religious Reformation in the World of Charles V -- Religious Dissent and Civil War in France and the Low Countries -- The Political Crisis of the Seventeenth Century -- Popular Politics and the Geography of State Formation.
• Sommario/riassunto: As long as there have been governments, ordinary people have been acting in a variety of often informal or extralegal ways to influence the rulers who claimed authority over them. Shaping History shows how ordinary people broke down the institutional and cultural barriers that separated elite from popular politics in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe and entered fully into the historical process of European state formation. Wayne te Brake's outstanding synthesis builds on the many studies of popular political action in specific settings and conflicts, locating the interaction of rulers and subjects more generally within the multiple political spaces of composite states. In these states, says Te Brake, a broad range of political subjects, often religiously divided among themselves, necessarily aligned themselves with alternative claimants to cultural and political sovereignty in challenging the cultural and fiscal demands of some rulers. This often violent interaction between subjects and rulers had particularly potent consequences during the course of the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, and the Crisis of the Seventeenth Century. But, as Te ; Brake makes clear, it was an ongoing political process, not a series of separate cataclysmic events. Offering a compelling alternative to traditionally elite-centered accounts of territorial state formation in Europe, this book calls attention to the variety of ways ordinary people have molded and shaped their own political histories.