Marc Boone - Charles V In Context

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With this collection of essays the editors have tried to achieve three goals. Taking the birth of Charles V in 1500 as their starting point, they have wanted to gauge the impact of his reign and policies on the next centuries, both in western Europe and abroad, in the American colonies. The sixteenth century which started as a century of promise and renewal was to witness bloodshed, destruction of old certainties and religious intolerance but it was also a period of intense renewal in the field of science, philosophy and religion. Above all it stands as a period in which a decisive step towards more ‘globalisation’ was made. Indeed, the questions raised by the Habsburg construction of a unified European and catholic empire and the comparison with the ongoing European construction offers many points of comparison. <br />In a second group of essays, the traditional historical approach is complemented by a literary one. The contributions here focus and the construction of identities in Western Europe and the views on deviancy and gender. Insight is gained into the new power relations which emerged in Charles’s period and the ways in which the label ‘insane’ was used to exert control over individuals who dared to differ. <br />Part III returns to the imperial ambitions of Charles V and a juxtaposition of those with the present day development of the European political construction. An anthropological way of looking at processes of constructing political identities, and of controlling the essential notion of citizenship that offers access to identities, is what the last group of essays propose.<br />