Beyond The Battlefield

This volume draws together an international team of scholars to explore the experience and significance of early modern European continental warfare from an interdisciplinary perspective.

Individual essays add to the lively fields of War and Society and the New Military History by combining the history of war with political and diplomatic history, the history of religion, social history, economic history, the history of ideas, the history of emotions, environmental history, art history, musicology, and the history of science and medicine. The contributors address how warfare was entwined with European learning, culture, and the arts, but also examine the ties between warfare and ideas or ideologies, and offer new ways of thinking about the costs and consequences of war. In addition to its interdisciplinarity, the volume is distinctive in including chapters focused not only on Western and Central Europe but also the often-ignored European peripheries, such as the Baltics and the Russian frontier, Scandinavia, and the Habsburg-Ottoman borderlands of Southeastern Europe. As a whole, the volume offers readers interesting alternatives and threads for reconsidering the place and meaning of warfare within the larger history of early modern continental Europe.

This book will be valuable for general readers, undergraduate and graduate students, and scholars interested in military, early modern, and European history.

Tryntje Helfferich is Associate Professor of History at The Ohio State University, Lima. She studies the history of war, religion, and politics in early modern Europe. Her publications include The Essential Thirty Years War (2015) and The Iron Princess (2013).

Howard Louthan is Professor of History and Director of the Center for Austrian Studies at the University of Minnesota. His scholarship focuses on the intellectual and cultural history of early modern Europe. His publications include Theuerdank: The Illustrated Epic of a Renaissance Knight (2022) and Converting Bohemia (2009).