In a preface written for the paperback edition, Professor Hay examines some of the changes in Renaissance scholarship since the first publication of this volume in 1957. Successive chapters examine the social and economic structure of a continent about to establish trade and colonies in the New World, the intellectual and artistic movements which made up the Renaissance, the position of the Church on the eve of the Reformation, the political inheritance of the Middle Ages, with its rising nation states, and the growth of the Ottoman Empire.

This is the second, amended and enlarged edition of a familiar standard work, first published in 1958. Like its predecessor, it describes the open conflicts of the Reformation from Luther's first challenge to the uneasy peace of the 1560s. Reforming movements in all the principal countries are discussed against the background of constitutional development and the political struggles of the ruling dynasties. Europe's relations with the outside world are given due prominence. The second edition incorporates the results of some thirty years of further research and fills some of the gaps, especially in the history of central Europe, which beset the first edition. All chapters that remain from 1958 have been revised, some very substantially, while other contributions are wholly new. The only other volume of The New Cambridge History planned to appear in a second edition is Volume I: The Renaissance scheduled for 1991.

This volume deals with the bloody half-century that intervened between the final conflicts of the Lutheran Reformation and the first warnings of the Thirty Years War. It covers the economic consequences of the decline of Antwerp and the rise in prices; the social and political strains that produced the Revolt of the Netherlands and the French Civil Wars; the religious passions that eventually fused the local tensions of Western Europe into a general conflict between Spain and her English, French, and Dutch neighbours; and the intellectual conditions that made it difficult to find solutions for the deeper problems of government and society which the ferment of the previous century had bequeathed. It also deals with the growing struggle for Baltic supremacy, the waning menace of Turkish power, and the consolidation of European influence in other continents.

War, plague, rebellions, and religious and dynastic conflicts changed the distribution of power between states, as well as their structure, when many of the social, intellectual and political foundations of Europe during the Ancien Régime were laid. The mass of the people suffered from direct and indirect effects of war, but both limited and absolutist governments and a variety of social groups strengthened themselves. In this volume, contributors discuss the shift of power and command of oceanic routes to north-western Europe, the failure of Habsburg power in Spain and Germany and the rebuilding of their power in Bohemia. The internal costs of France's victory over Spain and her international position in the 1650s are assessed. Greater immediate gains were won by smaller powers, the Dutch and the Swedes and, despite the Civil War, England. Particular attention is paid to attitudes towards absolutism and the development of scientific ideas.

This volume, the sixth to be published, covers the age of Louis XIV, when France played the leading role not only in the political and military sphere, but also in culture, literature and art.

Volume VI draws attention to two of the paramount developments which, with the growth of the Hapsburg monarchy, affected all of Europe and many parts of the Americas during the period under survey. War, politics, and society in Western Europe are studied from the English Revolution to the death of Louis XIV, and elsewhere from the accession of Charles XII to the death of Peter the Great (and for the Ottoman Empire to 1730). There is a survey of European maritime commerce extending to all important traffic within the overseas world, and a chapter on population and prices in Europe. Although much space is necessarily occupied by war and diplomacy, and by new methods of conducting them, the cultural and religious history of the period was of fundamental importance to the Enlightenment that was to follow. In this and other respects, the present volume complements volumes V and VII.