Section Essays for Early Modern Europe
The section essay questions will be posted here on 7 May 2008.
You are to choose one question from the list below to answer. Send your completed essay directly to me as email or as an attachment to email.
- Analyze the rise and fall of Spain. Be sure your answer takes into account not only economic factors but also social and political factors as well.
- Narrate the events leading up to the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, the event itself, and its immediate consequences.
- How absolute were the absolute monarchs? Your essay should give a definition of absolutism, present examples of absolute monarchs, and should assess in what ways they met the definition and in what ways they did not.
- Compare any two female monarchs from this time period. Possibilities include Elizabeth I, Catherine de Medici, Marie de Medici, Anne of Austria, and Queen Christina.
- Narrate the events leading up to the Spanish Armada in 1588, the events themselves, and describe the consequences of its defeat.
- What were the causes of the English Civil War? Be sure to look at underlying as well as at immediate causes, and at individual players as well as general factors and forces.
- The Reformation has been explained in terms of people breaking away from oppression, as just another heresy that got out of control, as a failure of the Catholic Church, and as another manifestation of the change from medieval to modern. Assess each of these interpretations, say which you think is more correct, and why.
- With "early modern" Europe we are no longer in "medieval" Europe. What changed? That is, what were the most important political, economic, social and cultural differences between early modern and medieval Europe? Which do you think were most important? What continuities were there between the two eras?