Political Culture and Media Culture in the 17th Century

A project to which I would like to return in the near future (after having co-edited an essay collection on the topic in 2012) explores the ways in which confessional conflict intersected with the media culture and political culture of the early modern period across Europe. Under the working title Conciliation and Conflict, it focuses on the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) and its role in the process of early modern Europeanization. That military conflict over religion involved, to varying degrees, the entire continent from Spain to Sweden, from Britain to Bohemia. While its destructive and divisive force is undeniable, it nevertheless also gave rise to an emergent sense of interconnectedness across Europe. This was achieved through the coverage of events of the war in different media, ranging from oral to written media, from print to performance, from visual to material media. The project’s multi-media approach enables a comparison of the different kinds of media expressing different responses and points of view and catering to different interests and audiences. The perception of difference also fosters a sense of identity, however: the knowledge networks formed through complex transmission systems for political news, national identities and images of the religious other produced a sense of interconnectedness and attempts at conciliation that are the motor of the process of Europeanization still today.