This unique volume undertakes the ambitious and entirely new task of analyzing, through comparison, the importance of power, violence and mass death in the fourteenth, seventeenth and twentieth centuries. In this way, Power, Violence and Mass Death in Pre-Modern and Modern Times makes progress towards reaching new perceptions of all three of these 'crisis' epochs as well as helping to illuminate wider questions about the nature of power, violence and mass death on European society.

Hartmut Lehmann, Joseph Canning

Contents: Introduction: The 14th, the 17th and the 20th centuries as centuries of violence and mass death, Hartmut Lehmann; Part I Fourteenth Century: The crisis of the 14th century, Joseph Canning; Famine and popular resistance: Northern Europe, 1315-22, William Chester Jordan; The Black Death: the end of a paradigm, Samuel K. Cohn, Jr.; War in 14th-century Europe, A.D. Carr. Part II Seventeenth Century: Under the spell of Mars: Power, violence, and mass death in 17th-century Europe, Hartmut Lehmann; The experience of violence during the Thirty Years War: a look at the civilian victims, Otto Ulbricht; The atrocities of war in early modern art, Bernd Roeck; The experience of violence and the expectation of the end of the world in 17th-century Europe, Markus Meumann; Part III Twentieth Century: Representations of war in the East, 1941-45: the German case, Tobias Jersak; Representations of war in Western Europe, 1939-45, Pieter Lagrou; Representations of war on the Eastern Front, 1914-18, Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius; Representations of war on the Western Front, 1914-18: some reflections on cultural ambivalence, Jay Winter; Index.