Early Modern Europe

Last update: 01 Aug 2026 00:03
First version: April 2003 (or before)

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See also:
• Alchemy
• Demonology
• Erasmus
• Millenarianism
• the Renaissance (a sub-period)
• the Scientific Revolution
• the Witch-Craze

Recommended (naturally, very misc.):
• Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State
• Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th--18th Centuries [Ostensibly this is world history, but the focus is actually very much on Europe, with the rest of the world mostly showing up in briefer contrast sections, or in relation to Europe. Given the state of scholarship when Braudel wrote, this may have been responsible on his part...]
  1. The Structures of Everyday Life
  2. The Wheels of Commerce
  3. The Perspective of the World
• Peter Burke, The Renaissance Sense of the Past [Extends somewhat before and after the Renaissance proper]
• Elizabeth L. Eisenstein Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change
• Anne Goldgar, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters, 1680--1750
• Anthony Grafton
  • Cardano's Cosmos: The Worlds and Works of a Renaissance Astrologer
  • Magus: The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa
• Paul Hazard, The Crisis of the European Mind, 1680--1715
• Jacob L. Heilbron, The Sun in the Church: Cathedrals as Solar Observatories
• Jonathan Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477--1806
• A. O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea
• Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation: A History
• Robert Mandrou, From Humanism to Science, 1480--1700
• Otto Mayr, Authority, Liberty, and Automatic Machinery in Early Modern Europe [Politics and Pendula]
• Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500--1800
• Richard H. Popkin, The History of Skepticism: From Erasmus to Descartes
• Jay A. Smith, Monsters of the Gevaudan: The Making of a Beast
• Jonathan Spence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci
• Richard S. Westfall, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton [Which is necessarily also a book about many other things...]
• Catherine Wilson, Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity
• Ruldof and Margot Wittkower, Born Under Saturn: The Character and Conduct of Artists: A Documented History from Antiquity to the French Revolution

Recommended with substantial reservations:
• Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern [The subtitle is totally over-the-top and unjustified, and so is a lot of the argument]
• Margaret C. Jacob, Strangers Nowhere in the World: The Rise of Cosmopolitanism in Early Modern Europe

Modesty forbids me to recommend:
• Christopher N. Warren, Daniel Shore, Jessica Otis, Lawrence Wang, Mike Finegold and CRS, "Six Degrees of Francis Bacon: A Statistical Method for Reconstructing Large Historical Social Networks", Digital Humanities uarterly 10:3 (2016) and Six Degrees of Francis Bacon

To read:
• Walter G. Andrews and Memhmet Kalpakli, The Age of Beloveds: Love and the Beloved in Early Modern Ottoman and European Culture and Society
• Alex Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu, How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism
• Catalin Avramescu, The Intellectual History of Cannibalism
• Rosalind Ballaster, Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England 1662--1785
• William J. Bouwsma, The Waning of the Renaissance, 1550--1640
• Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II
• Rebecca Bushnell, A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice
• David Cordingly, Under the Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of Life among the Pirates
• Cunningham and Grell, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Religion, War, Famine and Death in Reformation Europe
• Jonathan Dewald, Aristocratic Experience and the Origins of Modern Culture: France, 1570--1715
• Robert S. DuPlessis, Transitions to Capitalism in Early Modern Europe
• Thomas Ertman, Birth of the Leviathan: Building States and Regimes in Medieval and Early Modern Europe
• Paula Findlen
  • Athanasius Kircher
  • Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy
• Oscar Gelderblom, Cities of Commerce: The Institutional Foundations of International Trade in the Low Countries, 1250--1650
• Carlo Ginzburg and Bruce Lincoln, Old Thiess, a Livonian Werewolf: A Classic Case in Comparative Perspective
• Anne Goldgar, Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age
• Anthony Grafton, What Was History? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe
• Mary S. Hartman, The Household and the Making of History: A Subversive View of the Western Past
• John M. Headley, The Europeanization of the World: On the Origins of Human Rights and Democracy [Color me skeptical]
• Henry Heller, Labour, Science, and Technology in France, 1500--1620
• R. Po-chia Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal, 1540--1770
• Victoria Tin-Bor Hui, War and State Formation in Ancient China and Early Modern Europe
• Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages
• Andreas Kalyvas and Ira I. Katznelson, Liberal Beginnings: Making a Republic for the Moderns
• Henry Kamen, Empire [History of the Spanish empire, 1492--1763]
• Donald F. Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe
• Richard Lachmann, Capitalists in Spite of Themselves: Elite Conflict and Economic Transitions in Early Modern Europe [Or, how capitalism was born from the quarrels of tyrants]
• Antonia Lolordo, Pierre Gassendi and the Birth of Early Modern Philosophy
• Katherine A. Lynch, Individuals, Families, and Communities in Europe, 1200--1800: The Urban Foundations of Western Society
• John A. Lynn II, Women, Armies, and Warfare in Early Modern Europe
• Noel Malcolm, Useful Enemies: Islam and The Ottoman Empire in Western Political Thought, 1450--1750 [via David Auerbach]
• Robert Mandrou, Introduction to Modern France, 1500--1640: An Essay in Historical Psychology
• John Jeffries Martin, A Beautiful Ending: The Apocalyptic Imagination and the Making of the Modern World
• John Levi Martin, "The objective and subjective rationalization of war", Theory and Society 34 (2005): 229--275 [Pace Weber and Foucault, "[c]lose attention to the question of rationalization and the history of infantry warfare, however, suggests that far from representing a watershed change from non-rationalized to rationalized war, the early-modern period was more like other rapid expansions of armies based on recruitment of commoners, and had little to do with the distinctive characteristics of the emerging nation-states."]
• Joel Mokyr, A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy
• Steven M. Nadler
  • The Best of All Possible Worlds: A Story of Philosophers, God, and Evil in the Age of Reason
  • A Book Forged In Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age
• William G. Naphy, Plagues, Poisons and Potions: Plague Spreading Conspiracies in the Western Alps, 1530--1640
• Daniel H. Nexon, The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change
• Anthony Ossa-Richardson, The Devil's Tabernacle: The Pagan Oracles in Early Modern Thought
• R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760-1800
• Geoffrey Parker
  • Emperor: A New Life of Charles V
  • Success Is Never Final: Empire, War, and Faith in Early Modern Europe
  • Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century
• Geoffrey Parker and Lesley M. Smith, The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century
• David Parrott, The Business of War: Military Enterprise and Military Revolution in Early Modern Europe
• Annabel Patterson
  • Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England
  • Early Modern Liberalism
  • Nobody's Perfect: A New Whig Interpretation of History [i.e., a new interpretation of the history of the Whigs]
• Mary Elizabeth Perry, The Handless Maiden: Moriscos and the Politics of Religion in Early Modern Spain
• Steve Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution [JSTOR]
• J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition
• Claire Preston, Thomas Browne and the Writing of Early Modern Science
• Meredith K. Ray, Daughters of Alchemy Women and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy
• John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton
• Margaret F. Rosenthal, The Honest Courtesan: Veronica Franco, Citizen and Writer in Sixteenth-Century Venice
• Moshe Sluhovsky, Believe Not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism
• Janice E. Thomson, Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns: State-Building and Extraterritorial Violence in Early Modern Europe
• James D. Tracy, Europe's Reformations, 1450--1650
• Gary K. Waite, Heresy, Magic and Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe
• Margaret Dauler Wilson, Ideas and Mechanism: Essays on Early Modern Philosophy
• Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People without History
• Robert Wuthnow, Communities of Discourse: Ideology and Social Structure in the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and European Socialism
• Perez Zagorin, How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West