1. Chronological and geographical boundaries. The "office" of Historian of the Modern Age and the basic lines of modernist historiographical research. 2. The3 new European monarchies and their limitations. 3. Dynastic rivalries and religious conflict. 4. Humanism and humanists. Scope and diffusion of the new culture. 5. Protestant reforms. The Catholic reform. The Council of Trent and its projection in Europe. 6. The technique and geographical discoveries. 7. The old demographic cycle. Quantification and distribution of the population. 8. Social organization: estates, orders and social groups. 9. Agricultural expansion, the industrial horizon and commercial development 10. The crisis of the seventeenth century. Baroque and classicism 11. Political thought and the birth of modern science 12. France, England and Holland in the seventeenth century. The Thirty Years War and Westphalia. 13. The Europe of Louis XIV and the War of Spanish Succession. 14. The Great Colonial Empires and the Extra-European World 15. Old and new social and economic attitudes in the eighteenth century 16. The Enlightenment and European thought. 17. Illustrated Despotism. The old and the new European powers 18. The American Revolution and the revolutionary crisis in Europe.