War, Religion and Court Patronage in Habsburg Austria

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiii

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2. Introduction

   1. Introduction

      • Karin J. MacHardy

      Pages 1-18

3. Co-ordinating State, Reformation and Elites

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 19-19

      PDF

   2. Political Culture, Political Space

      • Karin J. MacHardy

      Pages 21-46

   3. Religious Reformations and Civil War

      • Karin J. MacHardy

      Pages 47-88

   4. Discourse of Division, 1618–20

      • Karin J. MacHardy

      Pages 89-122

4. Court Patronage and Noble Strategies

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 123-123

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   2. Social Capital, Symbolic Power and Religious Conflict

      • Karin J. MacHardy

      Pages 125-150

   3. Advancing at the Imperial Court

      • Karin J. MacHardy

      Pages 151-182

   4. Confessionalizing Court Patronage

      • Karin J. MacHardy

      Pages 183-213

5. Back Matter

   Pages 214-331

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This case study of the causes of the Thirty Years' War suggests an alternative framework to that of Absolutism, and views statebuilding as an interactive bargaining process that can engender challenges to political authority. It shows how selective court patronage changed the cultural habits of nobles in education, manners, and tastes, but failed to transform religious identities, which were intimately tied to noble interests. Instead, the confessionalization of patronage deepened divisions within the elite, providing multiple incentives for the formation of an anti-Habsburg alliance among Protestants in 1620.

• absolutism
• Austria
• civil war
• reform
• reformation

KARIN J. MACHARDY is Associate Professor of History at the University of Waterloo, Canada. She has published numerous articles on the early modern nobility and on historical methodology, and is co-editor of Fact and Fiction: German History and Literature, 1848-1924.

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