This volume of The Austrian History Yearbook offers a rich harvest of fresh new scholarship on a number of classic issues in Austrian and Central European history, ranging from the Middle Ages to the 1950s. In recent years all too few articles in The Yearbook have addressed the medieval period and the Reformation era, so the editors welcome particularly the articles by David Mengel, James Mixson, and Christopher Ocker. In highly nuanced discussions, they examine the multisided debates about religious doctrine and practices and the performance of the clergy and church institutions in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. These articles depict a rich and highly variegated terrain with no simple line of development toward the rupture of the Protestant Reformation.

Maria Golubeva's article on the seventeenth-century court historian to the Austrian Habsburgs, Galeazzo Gualdo Priorato, and David Luft's Kann Memorial Lecture underscore the dangers of accepting many conventional views of Austrian intellectual and cultural history. Golubeva reminds us that a prominent figure like Priorato was able to work against the grain of the confessionalization of politics and the state in an era of bitter religious conflicts by taking a fundamentally secular stance as he assessed the work of the rulers and government in the Habsburg domains. Luft argues that the strong focus of historians over the last twenty-five years on the decline of liberal rationalist culture in late-nineteenth-century Vienna and the birth of the twentieth-century modern has led to ignoring many important strands of Austrian thought in the wider terrain of the Alpine and Bohemian Crownlands during the early and middle nineteenth century. These strands had their own important legacies for later developments.

Two of the articles in this volume present interesting new research on the history of international relations and diplomacy. Miroslav Šedivý's article on Metternich and the Syrian question offers a fresh view of Austria's continued role as a great power in the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East during the early nineteenth century. The Syrian crisis of 1840–1841 was not merely an Ottoman-French-British affair; Prince Metternich and Austrian diplomacy played a significant part in assuring the security of the Syrian Christian population. Although historians of Austrian foreign policy after the 1955 State Treaty have devoted much attention over many years to Austrian neutrality as a matter of international law and Austrian parliamentary politics, Andrew Harrod's article contributes to recent examinations of neutral Austria's dealing with the practical challenges of the Cold War era and the need to maintain relations with the Soviet bloc, as well as with the West.

In varied ways, the articles by Andriy Zayarnyuk, Alexander Vari, Britta McEwen, and Tara Zahra offer new explorations of how national claims, nationalist discourses, utopian world views, and the rights of citizenship were negotiated during the last century of the Habsburg monarchy and then under the first and second Austrian republics. Zayarnyuk reassesses an important moment in the conflicts between the Ukrainophile and Russophile movements among the Ruthenian population in Austrian Galicia by moving beyond conventional treatments of political, clerical, and intellectual elites to map regional mass support for the Russophile groups. Vari examines a fascinating moment in the cultural history of Budapest around 1900 when civic and cultural leaders debated whether the city should affirm its cosmopolitan European character by hosting events such as Spanish bullfights or protect its Hungarian nationalist moral purity by rejecting immoral foreign displays. McEwen treats the Socialist eugenic visions of Julius Tandler, architect of health and welfare policies in Red Vienna and interwar Austria. Tandler, a Jew and professor of anatomy at the University of Vienna, developed a program of positive eugenics for the Viennese population, hit hard by war, starvation, disease, and migration. Finally, Zahra's treatment of displaced persons who sought Austrian citizenship after World War II analyzes the cases made by ethnic German refugees from East Central Europe and demonstrates the distinct advantages they enjoyed over other less favored refugees groups, such as Jews.

The editors are pleased to congratulate an author from volume forty of The Yearbook, Alison Frank, for winning the 2009 R. John Rath Article Prize for her essay, “The Pleasant and the Useful: Pilgrimage and Tourism in Habsburg Mariazell.” We are also happy to have the opportunity to thank a number of colleagues who helped significantly in preparing this volume of The Yearbook. We are particularly grateful to Howard Louthan for bringing together the articles for the forum, “Religion and Reform in ‘Late Medieval’ Central Europe.” During the early stages of work on this volume, Joshua Kortbein served ably as assistant editor. After finishing his doctorate in philosophy at the University of Minnesota in summer 2009, he accepted a visiting teaching appointment at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa. At the end of that summer, Matthew Konieczny returned from a year of dissertation research in Poland to resume duties as assistant editor of The Yearbook. Daniel Pinkerton from the Center for Austrian Studies brought his considerable graphical skills to bear in preparing the cover image, maps, and other images for inclusion in this volume. As a newly elected member of the executive committee of the Society for Austrian and Habsburg History, David Mengel has joined the Editorial Board. The editors and the Center for Austrian Studies express deep gratitude to the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science and Research for again supporting the position of assistant editor and to the Austrian Cultural Forum in New York for continuing to subsidize the publication of The Yearbook through the purchase of copies.