Beyond the Battlefield

Book excerpt: 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.