Much conventional history has been written from the perspective of the great urban centers of Europe or America. Things can seem very different when viewed from the perspective of the village, as Peter Blickle demonstrates in his new history of Europe from 1300 to 1800. Modernity, he argues, is generally defined as the product of the French and industrial revolutions. The search for antecedents helped to fashion the current term “early modern,” related to developments such as the Renaissance, the Reformations, state formation, and European overseas expansion and conquest. This periodization preferences the activities of a minority of Europeans, principally the political, intellectual, and economic elite, while marginalizing the contributions of the more humble majority, as well as those living before the mid-fifteenth century. Blickle seeks to recover these aspects by presenting the five centuries after 1300 as a distinct epoch of “old Europe.”

The coherence of old Europe rests on four aspects that emerged after 1200 and achieved sufficient force by 1300 to shape the next five hundred years. The development of new forms of housing and marriage patterns made the household the center of social, economic, and political power. Power ran both vertically and horizontally. The hierarchy of peasant and burgher households through noble, monastic, princely, and royal households was based on concepts of loyalty and sustained lordly and monarchical rule. The close proximity of households in new forms of urban and rural settlement fostered a sense of community based on equity between neighbors and an idealized common good. Termed “communalism,” this latter form of power offered an alternative route to modern statehood from below through federations between communities. Only the Swiss created a stable state this way, but communalism's existence elsewhere prevented unfettered monarchy. There was thus continuity in principle, if not always practice, between old European representation and modern democracy.

The institutional expansion of the church accompanied the spread of communities and gave Christianity its first really effective presence in the localities by 1300. Developments such as the introduction of regular confession and the iconography of the suffering Christ on the cross spread a new understanding of Christianity distinct from the earlier medieval majestic God and the nineteenth-century rational supreme being. At its core, Blickle argues, this was a message of human sympathy that reinforced households and communities, and underpinned old Europe's other two characteristics: peace and order. Peace was the prerequisite for both subsistence and freedom. Blickle eschews the current interest in early modern commercial and maritime activity to stress the overwhelmingly agrarian character of Europe, even in the eighteenth century, that remained primarily oriented toward the subsistence needs of a “moral economy.” Social ideals mirrored economic collectivity in articulating common, not individual freedoms. Considerable space is devoted to demonstrating that these ideals emerged in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries through direct popular action, rather than in the reinterpretation of ancient Greek and Roman authors during the Renaissance. Peace and freedom were to be guaranteed by law that emerged as much from the practical necessity of regulating neighborly relations as by lordly concession or royal decree. Regulation in turn promoted a “civilizing process” in the manner envisaged by Norbert Elias, Gerhard Oestrich, Michel Foucault, and others, whereby potentially destructive individual urges were gradually curbed by internalized self-discipline.

Many of these arguments will already be familiar to some readers through Blickle's earlier work on the Reformation, the German Peasant War, and the role of the subject in German history. They are presented here in more developed form as a general thesis for all Europe that draws on French, Iberian, Italian, and Scandinavian examples as well as Swiss and German. The book has great pedagogical potential. Its arguments are clear and forceful, while Blickle possesses the enviable skill of rendering complex phenomena intelligible in a few sentences. The translation of much of his earlier work into English was of considerable benefit, and it is to be hoped this work will likewise reach a wider audience.

Like some of his earlier writing, this is also polemical, often deliberately so. Though identifying old Europe's contribution to modernity, Blickle sometimes appears antimodernist. The Enlightenment and French Revolution are presented as a break with previous European traditions, abolishing both kings and estates-based corporate representation, and leaving just an abstract, impersonal state. Liberalism destroyed the old reciprocity of rights and duties, detaching state from society and replacing the collective common good with individual human rights. While the latter derive from old Europe's ideals of freedom and property, they were transformed into individualism and capitalism, with mixed consequences for later society. While free of any hint of folksy nostalgia, there is an inescapable sense of loss accompanying the discussion. The examples are wide-ranging, but they draw mainly on areas where communal forms of life were strongest, with little discussion of the situation in the Balkans or beyond the Vistula. Some threads are introduced without being followed up, such as the link between civic humanism and American republicanism. There is some comment on the debate surrounding the ideas of Otto Brunner whose influence Blickle expressly acknowledges in his own work. Other approaches, such as those of Elias, Oestreich, and Foucault, are woven into the argument with little discussion of the often quite formidable critique these authors have encountered. There are also difficulties with communalism itself, not least its tendency to emphasize collective solidarity and minimize internal division. Nonetheless, there is a powerful and quite convincing argument here about the contribution of ordinary folk to creating the world around them, through negotiation, protest, and collective action. And there is an important challenge to the conventional, but often arbitrary division between medieval and early modern history.