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Commentary: The Making of Five Images of the Habsburg Monarchy: Before Nation There Was Agglutination

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 April 2009

Joseph F. Patrouch
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Extract

Thirty years ago, R. J. W. Evans, in the preface to his influential work, The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1550–1700, outlined what he saw as needed in the study of this complex subject. The three themes to which he pointed and then addressed in the 450 packed pages that followed were: “a consistent account of the Central European Counter Reformation,” “a balanced view of the Monarchy as a whole,” and “an understanding of intellectual evolution from the Renaissance to the Baroque.” Over the last three decades, numerous historians have taken Evans's lead and contributed to a deeper and more variegated image of the histories of the lands of the Central European Habsburgs. Pieces by five of these historians comprise the forum under discussion here.

Type
Forum in Honor of R.J.W. Evans
Information
Austrian History Yearbook , Volume 40 , April 2009 , pp. 91 - 98
Copyright
Copyright © Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota 2009

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References

1 Evans, R. J. W.., The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1550–1700 (Oxford, 1979), viiGoogle Scholar.

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid., viii.

4 Evans, R. J. W. and Thomas, T. V., eds., Crown, Church, and Estates: Central European Politics in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New York, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See Evans, “Introduction,” xvii–xxxi.

5 Ammerer, Gerhard, Godsey, William D. Jr., Scheutz, Martin, Urbanitsch, Peter, and Weiß, Alfred Stefan, eds., Bündnispartner und Konkurrenten der Landesfürsten? Die Stände in der Habsburgermonarchie (Vienna, 2007)Google Scholar.

6 For more on the early modern constitution of Tirol, see Marcello Bonazza, “Tiroler Ständewesen und Fürstentum Trient—Bemerkungen zu einer Variante der Ständeverfassung,” 172–93, in ibid. Chisholm has recently discussed the relations between Archduke Ferdinand's father, who was Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I, and the empire in “The Religionspolitik of Emperor Ferdinand I (1521–1564): Tyrol and the Holy Roman Empire,” European History Quarterly 38, no. 4 (2008): 551–77.

7 Evans, Making, vii. In the introduction he wrote to a set of conference papers published in 1994, Evans discussed how rule over a “state” such as the Habsburgs' “involved endless bargaining with the vested interests inside or outside explicitly constitional structures.” Evans, R. J. W., “Introduction: State and Society in Early Modern Austria,” 1–23, in Ingrao, Charles W., ed., State and Society in Early Modern Austria (West Lafayette, IN, 1994)Google Scholar, here 2. This introduction also provides references to other pieces by Evans on related topics and ties them to the European Science Foundation project on the origins of the modern state in Europe, a central theme of historical inquiry in the period.

8 Evans, Making, 240. On this page, Evans uses a footnote to decry “the normal Austrian ignorance of things Hungarian.” (n. 12). (Of course, according to Evans in 1991, English-language scholarship did not deal much with the complexity of the Hungarian situation in the sixteenth century either. This was “still little treated in English-language sources.” Evans, “Introduction,” xxii.)

9 Evans, Making, 159–60.

10 On the Hungarian war, see Wertheimer, Eduard, “Zur Geschichte des Türkenkrieges Maximilians II. 1565–1566,” Archiv für österreichische Geschichte 53 (1875): 43–101Google Scholar. Later Tirolean apologists would point to the county as an essential element of the Habsburgs' southern defensive system, citing Emperors Maximilian I and Charles V to that effect. See reference to a document of 1706 in Astrid von Schlachta, “Identität und Selbstverständnis. Die Landstände in Tirol in der ersten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts im Vergleich mit Ostfriesland,” 394–419, in Ammerer et al., Bündnispartner, here 409–10.

11 The Habsburgs' acquisition of the Portuguese kingdom and its overseas empire in this period also necessitated some shuffling of offices among the family's members. Maria's son Cardinal Albrecht of Austria, the papal legate and nuncio to that kingdom, would take over as viceroy there. On Dowager Empress Maria in Spain, see Sanchez, Magdalena S., The Empress, the Queen, and the Nun (Baltimore, 1998)Google Scholar.

12 Evans, R. J. W., Rudolf II and His World: A Study in Intellectual History, 1576–1612 (Oxford, 1973), 35Google Scholar.

13 On female monasticism in Vienna, see Patrouch, Joseph F., “Das Königinkloster—Wiener Klosterfrauen um 1580,” Pro Civitate Austriae: Informationen zur Stadtgeschichtsforschung in Österreich N.F. 7 (2002): 45–52Google Scholar. On Ernst, Archduke, Bibl, Viktor, “Erzherzog Ernst und die Gegenreformation in Niederösterreich,” Mitteilungen des Instituts für österreichische Geschichtsforschung Ergänzungsband 6 (1901): 575–96Google Scholar.

14 Evans, Making, Part Two: “The Centre and the Regions,” Chapter 8: “The German Empire: limited hegemony,” 275–308.

15 Evans, R. J. W., “Calvinism in East Central Europe: Hungary and Her Neighbors, 1540–1700,” 167–96, in Prestwisch, Menna, ed., International Calvinism 1541–1715 (Oxford, 1985), 167Google Scholar.

16 Evans, R. J. W., The Wechsel Presses: Humanism and Calvinism in Central Europe, 1572–1627 (Oxford, 1975)Google Scholar.

17 Evans, “Calvinism,” 176, 171. Evans concluded that “East Central Europe has been greviously neglected in standard accounts of Calvinism,” 193.

18 Evans, Making, 238. See also, Evans, “Calvinism,” 190.

19 Murdock mentions Evans, R .J. W., “Religion and Nation in Hungary, 1790–1848,” in Evans, , ed., Austria, Hungary and the Habsburgs. Essays on Central Europe, c. 1683–1867 (Oxford, 2006), 153Google Scholar.

20 Evans, Making, 447. Evans also later described what he saw as “historians' neglect of the reign of Charles VI and their tendency to associate it with a purely conservative cast of mind.” Evans, “Introduction: State and Society,” 8.

21 Ibid., 7. Evans took the opportunity in this introduction to point out “the almost complete absence of discussion of the situation in Bohemia and Hungary” in the collection, attributing this absence to “the constraints of institutional financing rather than any estimate of scholarly significance,” 2.

22 Ibid.

23 For a similar point and how study of the women of the dynasty can help to overcome this chasm, see Joseph F. Patrouch, “The Archduchess Elisabeth (1554–1592): Where Spain and Austria Met,” in Hewitt, Cameron M. K., Kent, Conrad, and Wolber, Thomas, eds., The Lion and the Eagle: Interdisciplinary Essays on German-Spanish Relations over the Centuries (New York, 1999), 77–90Google Scholar.

24 Luc Duerloo, “Discourse of Conquest, Discourse of Contract: Competing Images on the Nature of Habsburg Rule in the Netherlands,” 463–78, in Ammerer et al, Bündnispartner.

25 Ibid., 476.

26 Evans, “Introduction: State and Society,” 10.

27 See Pörtner, Regina, The Counter-Reformation in Central Europe: Styria 1580–1630 (Oxford, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 Evans, Making, 447.