Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>In 1750, a nobility of great significance and status, social authority and political influence dominated the majority of Europe. Consisting of a relatively small group of families at the top of each country’s aristocracy, this tiny elite became entrenched between the mid-fourteenth and mid-eighteenth centuries. A distinction between ‘nobility’ and ‘aristocracy’, apparent to contemporaries but too often ignored by historians, is fundamental to this study and this book starts by making that distinction. It also presents an argument about how the history of the nobility and aristocracy should be written in focus and approach. It then goes on to provide a comparative study of how, when and why this remarkable elite group of families emerged, with particular emphasis on the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and the ‘long’ seventeenth century. After establishing in some detail the book’s chronological and geographical parameters, a series of thematic chapters pursues an explicitly comparative approach. Families rather than individuals are the book’s principal focus throughout. Aspects of the development of individual families and of particular elites are employed to illustrate wider arguments about the formation of Europe’s aristocracy. As the book argues, noble elites were fluid, unstable, ever changing both in their composition and their size, as families rose or fell in importance and in their control of resources but at the same time they remained remarkably resilient and enduring.</jats:p>