Prosperity and Plunder

In the Catholic countries of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Europe communities of monks and nuns were growing in number and wealth. They constructed vast buildings dominated education and played a large part in the practice and patronage of learning music and the arts. This lavishly-illustrated book offers a unique comparative description of these communities--their wealth growth life and importance--and then explains their catastrophic decline and fall between 1650 and 1815 by reforming rulers the ''Enlightenment'' and the French Revolution. Derek Beales Professor Emeritus of Modern History Cambridge is a Fellow of both the Royal Historical Society and the British Academy. He has published numerous historical monographs including a book on musical history entitled Mozart and the Habsburgs (Reeding 1993) as well as articles in the New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement.