Age of Kings [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION The Age of Kings was a great age. Today, we are more willing to admit this than our ancestors were, for they had to fight and eventually to destroy the monarchies that were the 17th Century's distinctive product. Louis XIV and Peter the Great were towering figures whose achievements included far more than the triumph of monarchial absolutism. This was the epoch in which the secular state, such as England, France or Russia, finally won its independence from ecclesiastical supervision and interference. Sometimes the period treated in this fine volume has been called the Age of the Baroque, a style much favored by the great secular monarchs even though it was originally created by and for the ardently missionary Society of Jesus. Style is often the most telling hallmark of an age, and there was, as Charles Bhtzer recognizes, a strong link between the Age of Kings and the Baroque. The link was the startling new experience of power—power of the mind over nature, power of the army and the state over man. In art, this new sense of power led to an "art of the impossible" that dared to defy all the familiar canons of form and taste. It was an age of demonic urges, symbolized by the figure of Satan —a Satan, in the words of John Milton, "aspiring to set himself in glory among his peers" and rebelling "against the throne and monarchy of God." Herein lies the key to the renewed appreciation of this remarkable age. Once more man is overwhelmed by a new sense of power—and of impotence: the space age and the nuclear age are also the age of totalitarian dictatorship. Just as Europeans in the 17th Century fought to control the partitioning of Europe, so men of today are fighting to control the whole globe. Just as emergent nations clashed in the 17th Century, so emergent cultures clash now. The ever higher towers in our cities, the ever faster planes that link continent with continent, the ever more refined methods of mass communication testify to a new age of power. So too do our explorations of the infinitely small and the incomprehensibly vast; our search for an understanding of the subconscious by psychoanalysis, and for a means to manipulate power with the help of political science. It would be a mistake, of course, to stress these similarities too much. Nevertheless, they do help to explain the new and deeper interest in the 17th Century, an interest well served by this book. In sketching the essential traits of the Age of Kings, Charles Bhtzer has marshaled those facts that allow us to perceive the century's character in all its strength and weakness. He thus enables us better to understand and appreciate the strengths and weaknesses of our own times. CARL I. FRIEDRICH Eaton Professor of the Science of Government Harvard University