Bever

The five articles in this issue agree that Europe went through an important transition in the seventeenth century, but they are in less agreement about what it was or when it happened. De Vries makes a strong case for important structural changes in Europe during the first half of the century, arguing persuasively for the existence, and importance, of crisis in the European economy. McCants insists that the "crisis concept" plays a vital role in historical demography as the label for the long period of slight decline in Europe's overall population between the expansion of the sixteenth century and the population explosion that began in the eighteenth. However, she has trouble finding "a single, definitive narrative of European population behavior across the early modern period," and even "a moment of critical change among the demographic indicators." Europe as a whole experienced nothing like the Black Death during the early modern period, despite certain localized disturbances that were almost counterbalanced by growth in other areas, until the epochal upsurge that began in the eighteenth century.

Soll shows that the political transition from the Renaissance state to either absolute or constitutional monarchy involved more than the resolution of the (generally violent) struggle for power between monarchs and estates. It also involved a subtler change in the concept of statecraft, from humanist political theory to the kind of mercantilist political economy that incubated in Holland during the early and mid-seventeenth century. This new style of government moved, most notably, to France and Restoration England during the last third of the century, not as a direct response to crisis but as an adaptation to conditions that resulted from a crisis, or from crises, that had taken place earlier in the century.

My own contribution on the crisis of confidence in the witch demonology and the prosecutions that it inspired readily endorses the notion that this cultural change both reflected and contributed to larger changes in society and culture-encompassing climate, demographic pressure, economic stress, social conflict, political development, and the "crisis of authority" in European culture. Moreover, although the overall crisis of confidence was made up of individual crises of confidence in different locales at different times between the late sixteenth and mid-eighteenth centuries, the critical "tipping point" on the European scale came in the middle third of the seventeenth century, the very time when the General Crisis is supposed to have taken place.

Burke is the least sure of the utility of the "crisis concept," at least in terms of the arts. He discovers no fundamental changes in artistic styles or support structures in the mid-seventeenth century. Nonetheless, he detects reflections of social crises in the content and reception of various art forms, concluding that "the contrast between the mood or tone of the arts (especially literature and painting) in the early and in the late seventeenth century is a dramatic one." The nearest paradigm shift-hence, crisis-that he identifies is the emergence of the Baroque around 1600, but it happened too early to be part of a General Crisis at mid-century.

Burke, however, finds it "difficult to deny" that there was a "major change in style around the middle of the seventeenth century . . . less interest in theatricality or shock" and a "rise of clarity, harmony, and purity" that dovetails nicely with the subsiding of civil disorders, international wars, and religious conflict. Furthermore, certain developments in the arts at this time would seem to have been the first stirrings of a modern sensibility-for instance, the appearance of unheroic depictions of the "horrors of war" and a heightened awareness of the "gap between appearance and reality." Thus, the arts, though not necessarily suffering a crisis of their own, appear to have reflected crisis and resolution in other aspects of social life.

Burke's article shows how a domain of social life not in crisis could have reflected crises elsewhere. McCants' article, reinforced by mine and de Vries, shows how a domain not in crisis could, nonetheless, have contributed to crises elsewhere. According to de Vries, the demographic downturns in Spain and Italy during the seventeenth century, just when...