Switzerland

The Swiss Confederacy was a product of the late 14th and 15th centuries that occupied an increasingly anomalous place within the mostly Germanic Holy Roman Empire and the European political system during the 16th and 17th centuries. The evolution of its complex political and institutional fabric, which long rested on late medieval feudal and communal practices, was accompanied by the emergence of a distinctive historical mythology, centered on the figure of William Tell and the three “Urschweizer” forest cantons, that profoundly shaped understandings of the Confederacy both inside and outside its boundaries. The Confederacy garnered attention from European thinkers from time to time as a model alternative to the emerging system of absolute sovereign states—for example, during the Dutch Revolt and before the French Revolution—but otherwise remained little more than a footnote in broader histories of Europe. The extraordinary richness of Swiss source material, ranging from the early medieval holdings of abbeys such as St. Gall to the extraordinary illustrated urban chronicles of the 15th century to the remarkably intact series of administrative records of the Swiss cantons from the 16th century onward, also contributed to various historiographical movements as historians’ interests changed. Inside Switzerland, a dense tradition of local and regional history grappled with the epistemic potency of Swiss historical mythology through repeated waves of revision and restatement, beginning in the first published overview by Petermann Etterlin in 1507 (Kronica von der loblichen Eydtgnoschaft, jr harkommen und sust seltzam strittenn und geschichten [Basel, Switzerland: Mich. Furtter, 1507]) and continuing to the present. The profoundly federal nature of Swiss politics always shaped Swiss historical practice as well, however, so that even today, much of the best historical writing on Switzerland is cantonal or local in focus, even as it embodies larger historiographical currents. This article seeks to provide access to this complex historical terrain by concentrating on the political, social, and cultural history of the Swiss region in particular. Larger European movements with significant Swiss components—including Humanism, particularly in the person of Erasmus of Rotterdam; the printing industry, which flourished early on in Basel; and the artistic currents of the northern Renaissance—are not included, since they are better comprehended in their European scope. Many publications on Swiss history carry titles in German and French, and often also in Italian; here, only one title is given in most cases, depending on the origin and focus of the reference.

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