ABSTRACT
Of all the debates that have agitated historians during the past few years, none has been more lively, or less conclusive, than the great debate surrounding what has come to be known as ‘the general crisis of the seventeenth century’. While dissenting voices have been raised here and there,1 the current fashion is to emphasize the more turbulent characteristics of the age. It was in 1954, which seems in retrospect to have been an unusually crisisconscious year, that Professor Roland Mousnier published a general history of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Europe, in which the seventeenth century was depicted as a century of crisis, and especially of intellectual crisis.2 In the same year, Dr Hobsbawm, in an article that now stands as the classic formulation of the ‘general crisis’ theory, argued that the seventeenth century was characterized by a crisis of the European economy, which marked a decisive shift from feudal towards capitalist organization.3 Since then, Professor Trevor-Roper, with one eye on the political revolutions of the 1640s and the other on Dr Hobsbawm, has produced a uniquely personal interpretation of the seventeenth century as an age of crisis for the ‘Renaissance State’.4
