A Panoramic View of Early Modern Europe

Abstract

T his is a book with an unusual publishing history. When it first appeared in  it was widely and in some cases enthusiastically reviewed in the German media. Many critics in the culture sections of the broadsheets were impressed by the panoramic view of courtly society unfolding before their eyes and praised the new, almost literary style that the author brought to history writing. Wider recognition was soon to follow. The volume was shortlisted for the Sachbuchpreis of the Leipzig Book Fair, Germany’s most prestigious non-fiction book award, and named Book of the Week by a public broadcaster. It also entered the top twenty of the Spiegel bestseller list— no mean feat by any standard, let alone a doorstopper of more than a thousand pages written by an academic historian who had made his name with an almost equally hefty volume on a classic topic of early modern historiography: the career patterns of the French nobility at the court of Versailles under Louis XIV. The reception of Horowski’s volume by the historical profession, on the other hand, has been rather mixed so far. While there are a couple of broadly positive reviews to date, the Historische Zeitschrift, the traditional flagship journal of German historians, published an -pagearticle that bemoaned the lack of abstract concepts and precise terminology, castigated the way the book was written as too colloquial and, in the end, dismissed the whole as confusing and more in the vein of a trashy historical novel than a proper academic monograph. In light of this colourful history any new reviewer has to step back and start with the basics. What is this book all about? To put it briefly: Horowski chronicles the fate of European court society from the middle of the seventeenth to the end of the eighteenth century with a special emphasis on the courts of France and Prussia, and to a certain extent also the British monarchy. Other European aristocracies get walk-on parts which, given the length of the book, still amount to extensive coverage. Readers in search of a systematic treatment of the topic or a handbook-style overview, however, will be disappointed. Horowski has chosen to arrange his material in a different way. In each of his twenty chapters he has selected a specific moment in time, an episode which he then narrates at length, shining a spotlight on a certain political event, a social occasion at court, or a juncture in the life of a particular nobleman. Some of these episodes are well-known set pieces from political history, for example the flight of members of the British royal family from London to France in December  or the battle of Malplaquet. But most of them zoom in on incidents that in the greater scheme of things were only of marginal interest, if any: a duel between two high-ranking aristocrats from opposite ends of the European continent in the final phase of the Thirty Years’ War; a clash between two groups of (noble) youths on Lake Geneva, during which one person was killed and a few others wounded; the thwarted escape of a high-ranking aristocrat from a