ABSTRACT
Hundreds of pages in the UCLA Research Library's electronic catalogue, dealing with scholarly discussions of power in general and its exercise in the late Middle Ages and early modern period, attest to our enduring interest in defining and explaining the sources of power and, thus, of authority. Technology today allows for unprecedented levels of surveillance and propaganda; hence the power of those who rule to know what most of the population does and to influence and shape its behavior. Even the so-called "absolutist" monarchies in seventeenth-and-eighteenth-century Europe, with their power to tax and conscript, had very limited ways of controlling and influencing most of their population. The counterparts of power are resistance, evasion, and delaying tactics, as individuals and groups seek to slow down the pressures of power. Emerging centralized monarchies were not the only players in the political and ideological transition from medieval to early modern and in the slow, uneven, and long-term emergence of the state.
