Rudolf Vierhaus's work is much more than a political history of Germany from the Thirty Years' War to the end of the Seven Years' War: His study reconstructs the historical structures that marked this age. He examines economic developments, the social system, and cultural life, even as he continues to pay close attention to Germany's political organization, its war, and political conflicts. German history is presented within both the diverse pattern of its regional life and the larger European context, in order to restore a full analytical complexity to the age of absolutism.

‘In place of the traditional chronological account of history, Vierhaus presents a series of analytical sections of socio-economic development, of cultural life, of political organization, and of interstate relations. Without doing violence to the great complexity of the age, he manages to find a connection between certain individual characteristics.’

Source: Bulletin of the German Historical Institute

‘It is hardly possible to imagine a more suitable author for this project, which seeks to present German history as a part of European history and not just as severely restricted national history … It is seldom one fields such a well-founded, comprehensive and yet concise account of this important period of German history.’

Source: Philosophy and History

‘He has made the complexity of the era come alive in European and regional-territorial terms, especially its religious and cultural mentality … In his carefully balanced presentation he has also not neglected the traditional emphases of political organization, wars, crises and conflicts.’

Source: Innsbrucker Historishe Studien

‘I view Vierhaus’s survey not only to be extraordinarily persuasive but in many ways brilliant and unusually stimulating.’

Source: Historische Zeitschrift