Writing is a lonely and demanding craft, and it is only natural that writers nearing the completion of a work are given to morose doubts about the real point or value of their efforts. I was struck by these doubts as I neared the completion of the doctoral thesis upon which this book is based. In those early months of 1989, the work seemed to me to be unforgivably irrelevant as politics and aggressively unfashionable as history. To the latter charge I must still plead guilty: the history in this book covers a broad sweep of time; it does not refer to localities, draws on only one oral source, and is neither ethnographic nor deconstructionist. My only consolation here can be that fashions change.

The first problem, irrelevance, is of a different order. ‘Irrelevance’, in the sense of a lack of any direct application to the problems of the present, is of course not a vice in historical scholarship. Scholars of the diplomacy of the Thirty Years War or the everyday life of twelfth-century serfs are rightly not obliged to demonstrate the immediate utility of their work, but can justify it by pointing to the cultural and intellectual value of the broad historical enterprise itself.