Scholars of eighteenth-century Europe are well known for arguing that their century was a period of sizeable and consequential change. As the editors of Niederösterreich im 18. Jahrhundert contend, the experience of this transformation in Lower Austria was patchy, far from linear, and beset by resistance. Yet as their choice of front cover reveals—a contemporary painting of the Augustiner-Chorherrenstift in Dürnstein, Lower Austria—this schism between tradition and transformation at the local level was felt in surprising ways that, for its effect on Central Europe, are worthy of exploring.
Niederösterreich im 18. Jahrhundert’s two substantial volumes bring together thirty-six chapters examining the discontinuous transformation of Lower Austria across the long eighteenth century through six thematic clusters. Edited by leading figures in the regional histories of Europe, and of Austria in particular, the collection is a statement on regional archives and regional histories’ indispensability in connecting the silos of national historiography prevalent in Central Europe. Departing, but not neglecting, the administrative and ecclesiastical histories that have dominated studies of the area in the last fifty years, the contributors approach Lower Austria as an emerging region yet to be properly defined at the beginning of the eighteenth century and still far from solidified by its end. Together, they bring into focus Lower Austria as a capsule of political reform and social transformation in Central Europe, as well as a place where local dynamics absorbed and mediated the enlightenment while still preserving the deeply rooted traditions, confessional practices, and insulated communities of early modern estate-based societies. The result of this work is a study of considerable empirical and descriptive depth, revealing the wealth of rarely used material in regional archives.
Niederösterreich im 18. Jahrhundert locates Lower Austria as a place defined by interrelationships and transfers that began beyond its borders, which then refracted through contact with the people and institutions of the land, before going on to affect those outside the province and beyond the Habsburg domains. The siege of Vienna in 1683 begins the editors’ eighteenth century, with subsequent plague, devastation, and Habsburg expansion in Hungary clearing the way for Lower Austria to act as a dynamic node in broader networks of exchange. The collection’s period of analysis ends with the death of Joseph II in 1790. He was a modernizing reformer whose political and cultural progressiveness was reversed, the editors explain, in opposition to the violent excesses of the French Revolution, thus ending Lower Austria’s transformation for nearly fifty years. Some of the later chapters in the second volume extend beyond 1800, but most follow a linear analysis of each author’s theme from 1683 up until the late 1780s.
The first volume charts Lower Austria’s participation in the eighteenth century’s larger systems of movement and change by focusing on it’s emergence as a place within the minds of contemporary people. It moves on to the politics of transformation and tradition exercised within its borders, before concluding with works on the networks of trade, media, and economies that provided the arenas for global/regional forces to meet local realities.
The second volume is tighter still, examining the gradual shifts in societal expectations, demographics, and outside pressures within rural manor and urban town communities, as well as the clergy and the nobility. It then examines the rapid rise of elite Baroque religious culture after the Great Turkish War (1683–99), which later transformed into a broadly accessible, somewhat profane civic sphere of open discourse in the 1780s. As the last section of this volume argues, Lower Austrian culture’s move to the profane was influenced by the Theresian-Josephinian reform period (1750–90). During this enlightened era, the state dismantled, but far from eliminated, the clerical power of the Counter-Reformation and the Baroque institutions it underpinned, allowing the province to serve as the centrifugal cultural and political force at all levels, influencing approaches to regional governance, cooperation, culture, and society in other areas under the Habsburg dominion into the nineteenth century.
After Ernst Bruckmüller’s broad chronological descriptive study of Lower Austria, which is an essential addition to upper-year undergraduate courses, each thematic section is introduced by one of the editors in a short essay. Each section is of merit, yet two work particularly well together, providing invaluable research for scholars at all levels.
In the second volume of the work, Gesellschaft, Kultur und Religion, the chapters that make up the thematic approach to rural society and the interdependence within it between households, manor estates, the church, and the state demonstrate the collection’s thematic tension between tradition and transformation at the local level. This section includes Margareth Lanzinger and Matthias Donabaum’s work on the socioeconomic and gender-specific contexts of peasant households within the manorial system and their relationship to top-down state building, as well as Elke Hammer-Luza’s examination of the multilayered, excluded, and segregated strata of society that lived underneath the power of the peasant landholder, upon which much of Lower Austria’s economy and social cohesion relied. Together, these scholars clearly show how regional histories and their focus on the locale can reveal how the lives of those at the grassroots can affect the limits of power from above.
These chapters build upon the substantial contributions made by a quartet of University of Vienna historians—Josef Löffler, Thomas Winkelbauer, Martin Scheutz, and Anton Tanter—whose research is in the collection’s first volume, Land, Politik und Wirtschaft. These scholars’ contributions reveal the interplay between regional authority, dynastic power, and manorial governance that characterized eighteenth-century state building. Across their analysis of fiscal, military, and manorial power, as well as the entrenched divide between authority and subject, they demonstrate the Habsburg state’s self-fashioned dual role during this period: underpinning institutional power native to Lower Austria while simultaneously mediating between subjects and local authorities, thereby serving the state’s own interests in maintaining control.
In a collection of substantial contributions, beautifully accompanied by period illustrations, maps, and paintings, some observations are worth noting. By ending the periodization of the collection’s eighteenth century before the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, a significant testing ground for the work’s thesis of tradition and transformation in a Central European context is omitted. The editors’ implicit argument that the transformation of what they periodized as the long eighteenth century in Lower Austria buckled at the first external friction makes it seem their century of change was a fragile veneer within a passive locale wholly susceptible to global forces. By placing the competing mix of tradition and transformation that the collection clearly demonstrates starkly against the modernizing violence of France’s imperial project, the editors might have teased out more of the messy and lived interplay between the two. Finally, the index clearly labels places and people but fails to include topics or key terms. This makes the physical book less accessible for thematic research. The digital, open-access edition will hopefully remedy this with a search function.
These remarks aside, which are minor to the level of scholarship on display, Niederösterreich im 18. Jahrhundert is a work that exhibits the strength of local archives, regional history, and the importance of Austrian Habsburg history to the wider questions that dominate scholarly debate of the eighteenth century. Each chapter is worthy of exploration, and the collection as a whole provides material for researchers, students, and the wider reading public that will prove essential for future research.
