Power, violence and mass death in pre-modern and modern times ; [... first presented in August 2000 during a session at the Nineteenth International Congress of Historical Sciences in Oslo

The fourteenth, seventeenth and twentieth centuries in European history were marked by exceptionally intense experiences of power, violence and mass death. Power, Violence and Mass Death in Pre-Modern and Modern Times undertakes the ambitious and entirely new task of analyzing, through comparison, the importance of power, violence and mass death in these centuries. Death and the excesses of power were characteristics of the twentieth century, but this volume teaches about the causes and possible consequences of this oppressive individual and collective experience. We now have a more established historical perspective for understanding the importance of power and the causes and results of the rapid increase in mortality in the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. In this way, this volume makes progress towards reaching new perceptions of all three 'crisis' epochs. Appealing to a wide readership, Power, Violence and Mass Death in Pre-Modern and Modern Times will be of interest to scholars not only of the three centuries highlighted, but also to anyone with an historical and sociological interest in the larger questions raised about the nature of power, violence and mass death on European society. Introduction: The 14th, the 17th and the 20th centuries as centuries of violence and mass death, Hartmut Lehmann; Part I Fourteenth Century: The crisis of the 14th century, Joseph Canning; Famine and popular resistance: Northern Europe, 1315-22, William Chester Jordan; The Black Death: the end of a paradigm, Samuel K. Cohn, Jr.; War in 14th-century Europe, A.D. Carr. Part II Seventeenth Century: Under the spell of Mars: Power, violence, and mass death in 17th-century Europe, Hartmut Lehmann; The experience of violence during the Thirty Years War: a look at the civilian victims, Otto Ulbricht; The atrocities of war in early modern art, Bernd Roeck; The experience of violence and the expectation of the end of the world in 17th-century Europe, Markus Meumann; Part III Twentieth Century: Representations of war in the East, 1941-45: the German case, Tobias Jersak; Representations of war in Western Europe, 1939-45, Pieter Lagrou; Representations of war on the Eastern Front, 1914-18, Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius; Representations of war on the Western Front, 1914-18: some reflections on cultural ambivalence, Jay Winter; Index. A dozen essays, all but one revised from presentations at the International Congress of Historical Sciences in Oslo in August 2000, focus on particular examples of violence in the 14th, 17th, and 20th centuries in order to elucidate the relationship between power, violence, and mass death. Common themes that emerge are the rule of violence, the production of new world views and especially the search for new religious answers and practices, and a new level of social instability and large-scale migration. Among their topics are famine and popular resistance in northern Europe in 1315-22, the atrocities of war in early modern art, and representations of the eastern and western fronts of the two World Wars. Only names are indexed. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR Medieval and modern European history can be conceived as a coherent sequence of developments or transformations with a number of caesurae which were important for the whole of Europe, as for example the Reformation or the French Revolution, and a whole series a minor caesurae with specific meanings for the history of individual European countries. The essays that comprise this collection test the assumption that historians may be better equipped to understand the causes of the tragic war-torn 20th century if they are able to grasp the relationship of power, violence and mass death in earlier extraordinary centuries.