the thirty years war

no it's more like he's trying to have it both ways - "i may be just a poor unfrozen caveman, but i don't understand how a bunch of drippy paint constitutes good art... and i don't think i'm alone... not saying it's bad though, i just don't know!"

this is a side issue though to the guy's shocking condescension re: non-great-man history - he's like a step and a half away from asking why we don't have white history month

german coffee house culture in the 17th century as the cradle of "print democracy", a development which basically gives birth to the entire concept of the public sphere.

Does he basically get this from Habermas? If so, i think emergent public sphere stuff is later than the war, but yeah, I would be interested in seeing what the equivalent to the thomason tracts would be for them - assume there was an explosion of broadsheets, pamphlets etc.

xp, i didn't get that from him, but maybe i interpreted generously

if it's true that people have vast differences in power and resources available to them, with the many having little of x, and a few having lots of x, then it makes sense that the agency and flaws of the few have greater weight on what happens to all. i can't decide which town to raze next with my armies but some people have made that decision.

in a way you can square the circle of "great man"ism and oppression that way. they're the same thing.

goole i agree totally! i can't think of anybody would disagree actually

the first ever western newspaper (a weekly) was published in strasbourg in 1605, had a network of correspondents, and quickly appealed to the local prince for protection against others duplicating the stories under their own names

it's been a long time since i read imagined communities but my memory is that coffee houses specifically in the hapsburg empire were a kind of novel, hip thing, and became the place people would come to swap stories (in lieu of twitter obv)

i'd love to know the class makeup of those coffee houses though..

bunch of bohemians probably

hipsters

yeah, my coffee-house history is kind of anglocentric but they're big for the Habermas's 'emergence of the bourgeois public sphere' thing (in which England is the exemplary case) & for any more general social/cultural history here - a place where you can get the latest newssheets (esp as they develop into more critical/essayistic forms) & have conversations with a range of classes.

but those people didn't hold real power, didn't crush entire hamlets with their cavalries PFFFFFT

on the class thing - by 1700 certainly diff shops for diff factions & trades in England, but I get the impression there's some reach across classes - the literary ones certainly have connections upwards, & across land/trade squirearchy/gentry/city merchant gaps.

they held some power

xp

the power to spurn dreary lutheran robusto for a full-bodied calvinist arabica

or is it the other way around?

great momus theory

i ordered this book btw, wallenstein is mentioned in the book on weber i just read

Fwiw coffee shop world is after 30yw. Only getting underway in the 50s iirc.

hipsters make some sense in late c17th/early 18th. Younger sons of Norfolk squires who have written a play and know someone who knows Addison.

mad jack mytton, regency rake -- he's a bit late, but i will pass up no opportunity to acquaint the world with his works

oh man that guy is a hero

Worth looking up Radio 4, Misha Glenny series "The invention of Germany", which begins, appropriately enough, in the 30 years war. Some interesting tidbits:

In memory of Gustavus Aldophus German children are still chastised with the threat of the Swedes. eg. "If you don't go to sleep the Swedes will get you"

Fredrick I of Prussia was more Polish than German, Prussian nationalism's affinity for germany was, in part a move to distance Prussia from feudal obligations to Polish Kings.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b016btb4

Berlin gets its name from a slavic word for lake.

Fwiw coffee shop world is after 30yw. Only getting underway in the 50s iirc.

DAMMIT

totally want the relatable everyman character in the HBO series to be a fledgling reporter

or barista, obv

he should be a courier obv

and a potman

He can invent the exposé - just a thuringian broadsheet-writer-for-hire who's meant to be covering the birth of a two-headed lamb, but uncovers a Bavarian secret treaty with France.

when i get back to the smiley project, i should add in a bit about the writer smiley is doing a monograph on, who seems to be a german diplomatic envoy, from around this time, who writes up his travels (i'm on a train at the moment so can't look it up) (or even move, the student beside me is lolling in his sleep)

lolling or lol-ing?

the copy i'm reading is a 1961 penguin (v.early pelican imprint): it has a callot collage on the cover, in blue and pink, and the pages are nice and old and furry-feeling

it is very funny

The Death of Wallenstein, by Fredrich Schiller -

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6787

The Piccolomini

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6786

I think I voted already: Frederick V - he thought he could win, with magic.

SPOILERS

just reached the bit where one of the many christians* gets thrown from a horse 80 feet down from the battlements and another dies aged 28, his "vitals gnawed by a giant worm"

END SPOILERS

*name not denomination

"If one considers the expense on this occasion and wants to reduce it so that it can be afforded for a long time, it should be replied that great emergencies have no rule; that it is not a question of an expense that will last for many years; but that if, in order to remedy the present evil, one fails to make an extraordinary expenditure now, it will be necessary to make one in the future -- though it would not then produce any result, nor prevent our ruin."

-- Cardinal Richelieu to Louis XIII, Sept 6 1634

voted john george

John George... has been known to sit at table gorging homely foods and swilling native beer for seven hours on end, his sole approach at conversation to box his dwarf's ears, or pour the dregs of a tankard over a servant's head as a signal for more.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

oh no I haven't read this all the way through yet!

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Disappointed this poll didn't run for 29 more years.

so is wedgwood definitely a better bet than wilson?

i think so

if wilson is at your library give it a try but it's dry. he just isn't an engaging writer imo

Piet Pieterszoon Hein was robbed u cocks.

we have this book in our library! *borrows book*

Great thread, this one...

this is pretty breezy reading, considering

it was a pretty breezy war

it was a helluva war

some called it the "war of a lifetime"

for some, their lifetime WAS the war of a lifetime, because they were born after 1618 and died before 1648

legend has it that the phrase "put up your dukes" was coined during the thirty years war, after one nobleman, after hearing tell of the maiming of an enemy duke, said "gather anew thy dukes of replacement, for we shall battle again as soon as it stops raining"

re: economics and bottom-up social business upthread, she does start after protestantism has been firmly entrenched across parts of europe. my thumbnail understanding was that war broke out right away after the reformation but duh there was a generation or two in between. it's during the period of protestant emergence when socio/demo/economic type questions are really interesting imo.

interestingly she does touch -- breezily! -- on intersecting questions of demographics, money and technology when explaining why most of the armies of this period were mecernaries

retroactively it was briefly named "world war -I", and historians referred to it as such for a time in the late 1940s to mid 1950s, until the popular re-release of the wedgwood book returned the name "thirty years war" to popularity