Summary: Publisher Summary 1 The period of the baroque (late sixteenth to mid-eighteenth centuries) saw extensive reconfiguration of European cities and their public spaces. Yet, this transformation cannot be limited merely to signifying a style of art, architecture, and d茅cor. Rather, the dynamism, emotionality, and potential for grandeur that were inherent in the baroque style developed in close interaction with the need and desire of post-Reformation Europeans to find visual expression for the new political, confessional, and societal realities. Highly illustrated, this volume examines these complex interrelationships among architecture and art, power, religion, and society from a wide range of viewpoints and localities. From Krak贸w to Madrid and from Naples to Dresden, cities were reconfigured visually as well as politically and socially. Power, in both its political and architectural guises, had to be negotiated among constituents ranging from monarchs and high churchmen to ordinary citizens. Within this process, both rulers and ruled were transformed: Europe left behind the last vestiges of the medieval and arrived on the threshold of the modern.   Publisher Summary 2 Volume ten of the Austrian and Habsburg Studies series, this title explores the expression of power through baroque buildings in Europe in the late sixteenth though mid-eighteen centuries. Cohen (Center for Austrian Studies and history, U. of Minnesota) and Szabo (Wirth Institute for Austrian and Central European Studies and Austrian and Habsburg history, U. of Alberta, Canada) edit ten essays on the topic, including studies of Graz, Innsbruck, Prague, Wroclaw, Vienna, Krak贸w, Dresden, Nuremberg, Munich, Rome, Naples, and Madrid. Annotation 漏2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)