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"In many ways, the German-speaking lands of Europe, grouped together in the loose federation of states, cities, and still smaller entities known collectively as the Holy Roman Empire, stand apart from their British and European counterparts at the outset of the early Modern period. The devastating Thirty Years War (1618-48), a pan-European conflict that took place largely on German soil, imposed lasting and disproportionate costs on its population and economy. Indeed, in contrast with, for instance, Anglican England and Catholic France, the religious schism between Catholics and Protestants that had provided the original pretext for the war continued to divide the German lands into Catholic, Lutheran, and Calvinist states. This had the effect of fragmenting the intellectual climate, as the agenda for academic inquiry was set by the confession of the regional potentate and enforced by state censors. Outside of the universities, there was little in the way of the independent institutions-the learned societies and journals-that contributed so much to setting and driving the intellectual debate elsewhere, while most German universities themselves, including a clutch of respected Medieval universities, bent their resources to churning out scholastic textbooks and advancing their own spiritual cause. And where the rest of Britain and Europe had completed their turn to the vernacular as the preferred mode of learned expression, German remained unestablished as a literary language, and even into the 1680s professors had yet to lecture, much less publish, in their mother-tongue as Latin remained the language of scholarly discourse"--
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