ABSTRACT
Despite our general understanding of the wave of Early Modern European revolts that began with the Wars of Religion after 1560 and ended with a cluster of political rebellions during the 1640s, we still do not know to what extent and in what ways those upheavals constituted a revolutionary situation. Here is an excellent laboratory for comparative history by the traditionalist scholar daring enough to escape old generalizations about the uniqueness of this or that revolt. Here is also a mass of useful data for social scientists who specialize in testing revolutionary models. Yet until quite recently traditionalist historical scholarship has been content with brief critiques or bland acceptance of Trevor-Roper’s thesis of a mid-seventeenthcentury ‘general crisis’,1 while sociologists and political scientists have generally applied their model-building technique to the period since the late eighteenth century, which boasted political changes that were more intelligible to twentieth-century man than those of 1560-1660.2
Now, some of this timidity and evasiveness has been swept aside. Early Modern historians have not yet found a Robert Palmer to give us another ‘Age of Revolution’, but Helmut G.Koenigsberger has produced three essays that pull together his long-standing views on revolution and crisis in the states influenced by the Spanish Habsburgs between 1516 and 1660.3 His traditionalist approach is complemented by a multi-authored book in which five distinguished scholars discuss particular uprisings of the period 1560-1775 from the perspective of what social scientists call the ‘preconditions’ of revolution. The editors of this innovative work, Robert Forster and Jack P. Greene, have made their own contribution by extracting from the discussions of specific uprisings some provocative generalizations about Early Modern revolt and revolution. In their introductory essay, the editors categorize the uprisings according to ‘types’, and sort out the overall preconditions of revolution that lie behind those types that seem to be revolutionary in scope.4 Even a cursory reading of both books reveals that the fundamental questions raised by the authors and editors cannot be discussed adequately in a brief, conventional review. Some sort of extended analysis seems in order.
