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Gender in Early Modern German History . Edited by Ulinka Rublack. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2002. Pp. xiii + 308, including ten black and white illustrations and one map. Cloth $60.00. ISBN 0-521-81398-0.

seigneurialism. Nineteenth-century "peasant emancipation" stands alongside the abolition of extra-European slavery as an epochal moment in the history of human liberty. Yet Blickle ties freedom and property rights so closely to emancipation from seigneurialism that the attainment of freedom and unencumbered property in pre-modern urban Europe, beginning in the medieval communes of Italy and the Low Countries, never figures in his argument. But can the bourgeoisie, in the broadest sense of the term, be excluded from the ranks of "the people" (Volk)? And what of the contribution to human rights and liberty of aristocratic liberties and privileges, so crucial in the history of western, central, and eastern Europe? Blickle's book combines originality of argumentation, provocative reinterpretation, and rich and wide-ranging insight, particularly into Swiss and southwest German history, within an interpretive framework that is, in important and sometimes polemically driven ways, distorted and one-sided. It is a passionate work by an important historian whose career has changed the terms in which early modern German history is understood and debated. This book problematizes human rights in Germany anew. It is a historiographical drama's intriguing, if often also puzzling, opening act, but not the final act.