ABSTRACT
In his introduction to the anthology, Crisis in Europe 1560-1660, published in 1965, Christopher Hill maintained that agreement now seemed to have been reached that there was an economic and political crisis all over western and central Europe in the seventeenth century. This is undoubtedly correct: the crisis has been an undisputed fact among those historians who are occupied with early modern Europe; it has become the hallmark of the seventeenth century in the same way as the Renaissance and the Reformation characterize the sixteenth century and Enlightenment and Revolution the eighteenth century. But agreement does not lie very deep; historians are agreed about the existence of the crisis, but not about its character. Since it first became recognized in the middle of the 1950s, the term ‘seventeenth-century crisis’ has been employed in at least four different senses.
