Before the great war: Europe between compromise and confrontation 1598-1656

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The proposed study is to take a fresh look at the period immediately preceding the outbreak of the Thirty Years War. Whereas German research has often emphasized the increasing tensions shaping politics and religion before 1618 in Western Europe the end of the Wars of Religion in France and the subsequent treaties between Spain and England (1604) and Spain and the Netherlands (1609) seemed to create a chance for defusing the religious and political conflicts which had ravaged large parts of Europe for such a long time. But the new settlement, fragile as it turned out to be in the end, achieved between 1598 and 1609 was not limited to the realm of high politics and diplomacy. Rather organised religion adapted itself to some extent to the stalemate in the conflict between rival religious claims to truth and at the same time political theory and scholarship tried to find foundations both for knowledge and political authority which transcended the boundaries of strict confessional allegiance. The planned monograph wants to look both at the contest between advocates of peace or at least some kind of modus vivendi and those rejecting any sort of compromise and at the lasting legacy of this period which did have a long term impact both on concepts of political authority (and its relationship with ecclesiastical claims to power) and on attempts to find languages of communication be they those of jurisprudence, of philosophy or of the new science (which saw its first beginnings during this period) which could reunited a divided Christianitas.