History 275B: Early Modern Europe

History 275 is the foundational course for graduate students in the history of early modern Europe from the Renaissance to the French Revolution. This year, rather than surveying disconnected subjects, I have decided to organize the syllabus around the theme “Forms and Functions of Early Modern Politics.” This is capacious enough to include a wide range of interconnected topics: state formation; empire; gender and power; popular politics; the general crisis of the seventeenth century; political culture; church-state relations; and much else besides. Readings will consist of secondary scholarship covering many different parts of (mostly Western) Europe from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, supplemented by primary sources in political theory from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment.