The Witch-Hunt That Wasn't: How Historians Deflated the 'Burning Times' Myth
How counting the dead revealed that ideologically convenient narratives about witch persecution couldn't survive archival scrutiny
The Atlantic World's Rise and Fall: How a Framework Conquered and Then Complicated Early Modern Studies
Tracing how Atlantic history conquered early modern studies, then faced critiques that revealed the limits of any organizing framework
Why Gender Transformed Early Modern Historiography: Beyond Women's History
How thinking about masculinity and femininity as historical constructions revolutionized interpretation of early modern politics, religion, and power.
The State Before the State: How Historians Rethought Early Modern Government
How historians learned to stop projecting modern states backward and started taking early modern governance seriously on its own terms
The Problem of Popular Religion: How Historians Discovered the People's Faith
How the search for ordinary believers' faith revealed the hidden assumptions shaping historical interpretation itself
Why Print Didn't Start a Revolution: The Eisenstein Thesis Under Fire
How scholars dismantled the idea that Gutenberg's press transformed everything, and what that tells us about technological determinism
Microhistory's Challenge: How a Miller's Trial Transformed Historical Method
How one sixteenth-century heretic's trial forced historians to rethink the relationship between exceptional evidence and general knowledge.
The Court Society That Wasn't Absolutist: Revising Our Understanding of Versailles
How archive-driven scholarship dismantled the elegant myth of Louis XIV's domesticated nobility and revealed Versailles as a site of ongoing political negotiation.
The Black Legend Under Scrutiny: How Historians Reassessed Spanish Colonial Violence
How four centuries of historiography transformed our understanding of Spanish colonialism from Protestant propaganda to decolonial critique
The Decline of Spain That Didn't Happen: Revisiting a Classic Historical Problem
How generations of historians misread Spanish seventeenth-century history by measuring it against anachronistic standards of success
How Historians Learned to Read Silence: Evidence Problems in Early Modern Studies
Archival silences transformed from obstacles into evidence, reshaping how historians reconstruct marginalized lives from fragmentary early modern sources.
Why the Thirty Years' War Stopped Being a Religious War: Methodological Shifts in Conflict Interpretation
How successive generations transformed Europe's bloodiest religious war into a case study for whatever methodology happened to be fashionable.
Why the Scientific Revolution Never Happened: The Historiographical Debate That Transformed Early Modern Studies
How historians dismantled one of history's most celebrated concepts—and why it refuses to disappear from the scholarly landscape.
How the English Revolution Lost Its Bourgeoisie: Marxist Interpretations in Decline
The dramatic collapse of class-based Civil War history reveals how scholarly paradigms rise and fall through evidence, theory, and politics.