Fifty years after the beginning of the debate about the 'general crisis of the seventeenth century, ' and thirty years after Theodore K. Rabb's reformulation of it as the 'European struggle for stability, ' this volume returns to the fundamental questions raised by the long-running discussion: What continent-wide patterns of change can be discerned in European history across the centuries from the Renaissance to the French Revolutio

Philip Benedict is professor ordinaire at the University of Geneva's Institut d'Histoire de la Réformation. Myron P. Gutmann directs the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research at Ann Arbor.