Lectures on Early Modern European History -- Main

Welcome to The History Guide's Lectures on Early Modern European History. These lectures were written over the past ten years and served as the basis for my upper division European intellectual history and western civilization classes at Florida Atlantic University (Boca Raton and Davie, FL) and Meredith College (Raleigh, NC).

The lectures presented here are between five and ten pages in length and are meant to be downloaded and printed. Of course, you can read them online if you wish. Please keep in mind that these lectures are intended for your education and edification and not for publication by anyone but myself. If you would like to link any of these pages to your own or use them in a classroom exercise or as a citation in one of your essays, please be courteous enough to let me know about it by sending email to You should also read my Conditions of Use statement for particulars. If you are looking for my credentials, please consult my curriculum vitae.

The purpose of these lectures is to supply a corrective to the void left between my lecture series on Ancient and Medieval Europe, which ends with a discussion of Europe during and immediately following the Black Death, and my lectures on Modern European Intellectual History. Although this latter series begins with Abelard and the 12th century Renaissance, it does not adequately present the reader with any concentrated discussion of the period 1350-1700. Hopefully, this new lecture series will fulfill its mission by providing the reader with a balanced account of Europe from the Renaissance through the Scientific Revolution. I apologize for the duplication of lectures but in the interests of continuity, it was unavoidable.

Navigational Hints
Throughout these lectures you will encounter images and links. Clicking on an image will take you to a related page of information (located at this site). These links may contain biographies, a selection from an author's work or simply a set of Internet resources. If the title of a work is hyperlinked, then that link will take you to a digitized version of that text located on another server. Hyperlinks in UPPER-CASE refer to pages located at this site. All other hyperlinks will take you to related sites on the Internet.

If you would like to see an index of all pages on this site, please use the SITE MAP.

This site saw the light of day on January 14, 2002.

This site is "in progress" -- I shall upload the files as they become available

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Lecture 1: Renaissance Portraits

Lecture 2: The Age of Discovery

Lecture 3: The Protestant Reformation: Luther and Calvin

Lecture 4: The Impact of Luther and the Radical Reformation

Lecture 5: The Catholic Reformation

Lecture 6: Europe in the Age of Religious Wars, 1560-1715

Lecture 7: The English Civil War

Lecture 8: Political Theory, 1660-1715

Lecture 9: France in the 17th Century

Lecture 10: The Scientific Revolution, 1543-1600

Lecture 11: The Scientific Revolution, 1600-1642

Lecture 12: The Scientific Revolution, 1642-1730

Lecture 13: The New Intellectual Order: Man, Nature and Society

Lecture 14: A Century of Genius: Art, Philosophy and Drama

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