Study Guide for midterm

History 304, F07

We are going from the Renaissance, Scientific Revolution, Enlightenment and French Revolution, through the Congress of Vienna in 1815. This includes a variety of areas and individuals, including:

· Preludes to the Reformation

· Martin Luther, Calvin; Catholic Counter-Reformation

· Wars of Religion + Habsburg Valois wars: political and religious wars overlap

· Problems of power and State: HRE, France and England as comparisons

· English Reformation: H8 and the Church of England

· Concepts of Civil War and limitations of kings

· Rise of Absolutism: England vs. France

· Wars of politics instead of religion

· Changes in land tenure; cottage industry and protoindustrialization; urbanization

· Commercialism and mercantilism; cross-atlantic trade

· The individual thinkers who make things happen: Galileo, Newton, Descarte, Locke, Hobbes, all of them.

· Decline of Absolutism, rise of Enlightened Despotism, discussion of politics in its myriad forms.

· The French Revolution

· Agricultural-Industrial-Demographic revolution

· The social and cultural transformation of Europe; think comparatively about Ancien Regime and “modern” Europe.

· Age of Diplomacy and return of the autocratic, centralist regime

· Romanticism and the backlash to the enlightenment.

Your midterm will be an in-class essay. You may use your Enlightenment reader and a sheet of paper for reference. You may review maps on the overhead.