This volume contends that a holistic idea of Europe emerges from the incunabular era up to the advent of the nation-state at the threshold of the nineteenth century. Europe, an allegory in the Middle Ages, becomes a discursive fact in the 1600s. The editors argue that as of 1500 a sense of geographic identity is shaped in iconography, Neo-Latin treatises, and “polemic statements within a field of political competition and erudite argument” (4). Whether discursive, pictorial, or both, they are representations, not “ideas or feelings of belonging” separate from their performative expression (5). The discourses fall into three categories: (1) implicit personification of Europe in medical, astronomical, mythological, and theological treatises; (2) strategies of centralization that focus on communities and their margins or peripheries; (3) a sense of European pluralities born of republican consciousness and national hegemony.

Part 1, “Embodying Europe: Allegories of the Self and the Other,” begins with Detering and Dennis Paulina's “Rivalries of Lament,” a study of the prosopopoeia of a tattered Europe in Neo-Latin encomia honoring rivals Charles V and Francis I. In chapter 2 Ronny Kaiser notes how Spanish physician and humanist Andrés Laguna, in his Europa Heautentimorumene (1543)—an autopsy of Europa deplorans—wrote in hope for a future Europa triumphans. Michael Wintle (chapter 3) sees an ascendant Europe in atlases displaying personifications of the four continents, (e.g., Ortelius's Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1570). Marion Romberg examines how paintings and murals in rural churches become “mental maps” (102) for illiterate but perceptive parishioners (chapter 4). Ulrich Heinen (chapter 5) correlates Rubens's paintings and diplomatic missions in the Scenea Europaea (1628–29) and in the allegorical programs of “Peace Nourishes Wealth” (London, National Gallery), “The Abduction of Europa” (The Prado, Madrid), “The Consequences of War” (Florence, Palazzo Pitti), and other works.

Part 2 begins under the title of “Cartographic Manipulations.” In “Framing the Center of Europe in ca. 1500” Katharina Piechocki shows how German humanist Johannes Cochläus located the umbilicus of Europe in Nuremberg. Stressing the expanse of the Hercynian Forest in the nation's imagination of its center and periphery, she concludes, “nothing was (and is) less natural than so-called ‘natural’ borders” (171). Niall Oddy's “Conflicts of Meaning: The Word ‘Europe’ in Sixteenth Century French Writing” (chapter 7) examines its usage in the travel writings of André Thevet (1557 and 1575), Jean de Léry (1578), François de Belleforest's amplified edition of Münster's Cosmographie universelle (1575), Rabelais's Quart Livre (1552), and Montaigne's essay on “Cannibals” (1580). Europe is inflected politically, either on the wane, demonstrative of barbarity, or a model of civility. Building on Peter Burke's Social History of Knowledge (1997), in “Portugal and the Early Modern Discourse on Europe,” Peter Hanenberg (chapter 8) demarcates Northern (German) and Southern (Portuguese) depictions of the Continent anticipating our so-called globalized world (209). In response to “How Did Venetian Diplomatic Envoys Define Europe, Its Divisions, Centres, and Peripheries (ca. 1570–1645)?” (chapter 9), Piotr Chmiel contends that the “Most Serene Republic of Venice” lauded its Christian self in view of the noxious other, the Ottoman Empire. In chapter 10, Lucie Storchová studies endeavors of humanist scholars at the University of Prague who defined Europe through “cultural transmission” (244) of Germany into Bohemian consciousness. Ovanes Akopyan (chapter 11) studies how an image of Russia promoted the nation inside Europe and, second, how Muscovites rejected its simplistic portrayal.

Part 3 argues for a sense of community Europeans share in the declining years of the ancien régime. Niels Grüne and Stefan Ehrenpreis (chapter 12) consider how self-fashioned ideals of liberty and participation inform governance from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Isabella Walser-Bürgler, in “Geopolitical Instruction and the Construction of Europe in Seventeenth-Century Texts” (chapter 13), affirms that geopolitics applies to Cyriacus Lentulus's Europa (1650), a poem of import in a growing field of cultural geography. Beginning with the Journal des Sçavants (1665), Enrico Zucchi (chapter 14) studies the impact of newspaper, newsprint, and periodicals establishing “supranational scholars’ networks” and a “European Republic of Letters” (361). Volker Bauer, in “Europe as a Political System, an Ideal and a Selling Point: The Renger Series (1704–23)” (chapter 14), traces the history of forty descriptions of different European states whose sum betrays the idea of a singular political system. Common traits among different nations are registered, and so also “reference to and demarcation from non-European ways of government and rule” (366), the tally picturing Europe as a site worthy of capital investment.

In plan and execution Contesting Europe suggests that from 1500 to 1750 Europe developed a sense of identity. Read sequentially, the sixteen chapters become the chronicle of a tortuous evolution. Along the lines of what analysts call projective identification, the editors and contributors displace onto the past contested issues that mark the European Union here and now. The book is at once an extensive history of the idea of Europe and a symptom of concern about its future.