This volume of essays reflects the interests and expertise of H. G. Koenigsberger, Professor of History at King's College London, who has written and taught widely on early modern Europe, from Sicily and Spain to Germany, France and the Netherlands. The contributors pay tribute to Koenigsberger's range of interest by taking up themes that have resonated through his lectures, seminars and public writings. What emerges from a variety of approaches and topics is an overriding concern with intellectual unity, an overview which encompasses and reconciles the values of the politician or scholar with those of the spiritual idealist. Even the most overtly political of the major cultural figures discussed in these pages, as Robert Kingdon's essay on Calvin demonstrates, bent their political will to the service of an intense spiritual idealism.
