The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century

by Geoffrey Parker (Editor), Lesley M. Smith (Editor)

One of the most fierce and wide-ranging debates in historical circles during the last twenty years has concerned the theory that throughout Europe, the seventeenth century was a period of crisis so pervasive, significant and intense that it could be labelled a 'General Crisis'. A number of articles stimulated by the debate were collected and published in a book entitled Crisis in Europe , edited by Trevor Aston.
This volume takes the still acrimonious debate up to the present day. The editors have collected together ten important subsequent essays concerning the social, economic and political crises which affected not only Europe but also Asia in the mid-seventeenth century. All the pieces are essential reading for a clear understanding of the period. This new edition of The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century contains fresh research, new perspectives and completely updated bibliographies and index.

Genres: History

320 pages, Paperback

First published October 19, 1978

About the author

Geoffrey Parker is Andreas Dorpalen Professor of European History and an Associate of the Mershon Center at The Ohio State University. He has published widely on the social, political and military history of early modern Europe, and in 2012 the Royal Dutch Academy recognized these achievements by awarding him its biennial Heineken Foundation Prize for History, open to scholars in any field, and any period, from any country.

Parker has written or co-written thirty-nine books, including The Military Revolution: Military innovation and the rise of the West, 1500-1800 (Cambridge University Press, 1988), winner of the 'best book prize' from both the American Military Institute and the Society for the History of Technology; The Grand Strategy of Philip II (Yale University Press, 1998), which won the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize from the Society of Military History; and Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (Yale University Press, 2013), which won the Society of Military History’s Distinguished Book Prize and also one of the three medals awarded in 2014 by the British Academy for ‘a landmark academic achievement… which has transformed understanding of a particular subject’.

Before moving to Ohio State in 1997, Parker taught at Cambridge and St Andrews universities in Britain, at the University of British Columbia in Canada, and at Illinois and Yale Universities in the United States, teaching courses on the Reformation, European history and military history at both undergraduate and graduate levels. He has directed or co-directed over thirty Doctoral Dissertations to completion, as well as several undergraduate theses. In 2006 he won an OSU Alumni Distinguished Teaching Award.

He lives in Columbus, Ohio, and has four children. In 1987 he was diagnosed as having Multiple Sclerosis. His latest book is Imprudent King: A New Life of Philip II (Yale University Press, 2014).

Reviews

[Ekin Aksu]

This book is a collection of 7 papers + an introduction on the subject. The papers are very detailed and assume a high level of previous knowledge, most of which I was lacking. Hence I won't be rating this book at all. This being said, I can still comment on it.

I really liked the introduction and the first article by Niels Steensgaard. They were well structured and instructive, and I learned quite a lot. Also the article about the "Maunder Minimum", the absence of sunspots between 1645 and 1715, was very interesting (side note: I really wasn't expecting to read a Science paper in a history book!). The rest of the articles were either going into tedious detail or into long historiographical discussions, both of which I found boring.

I definitely don't recommend this book as a first-book into this subject. The readers should be well-informed especially about the English Revolution (which I was most certainly not) and the Dutch Revolt. Even then, half of the book would probably be too much for the non-academic reader. But the other half is nice nevertheless.

[Simon Harrison · Rating 3 out of 5]

Extremely dry.