The context for this special issue of the JIH is the persistence in scholarship and teaching of the Crisis as a way of organizing seventeenth-century history. Five historians, specialists in different fields, bring an interdisciplinary perspective to bear as they indicate how fundamental change took place in mid-seventeenth-century economies, demography, politics, art, and popular belief. The realms of warfare, international relations, science, attitudes toward knowledge, and religion also saw profound transformations during this period.

The interactions between operas and the societies in which they were composed and first heard are of interest to both historians and musicologists, especially because operas since the seventeenth century have had significant connections with political and social change. The essays in this special double issue of the journal, entitled “Opera and History”, pursue the connection in six settings: seventeenth-century Venice; Handel's London; Revolutionary Europe from 1790 to 1830; Restoration and Risorgimento Italy; Europe during the birth of Modernism from 1890 to 1930; and twentieth-century America.

The traditional account of the Renaissance holds that intellectual and artistic influence moved overwhelmingly in one direction—from Italy to the rest of Europe, and especially toward the North. A remarkable exhibition in Bruges, however, has made the case that traffic did not go just one way, at least so far as innovation in painting was concerned, because the vibrant cultural center of the Low Countries had a powerful and significant impact on southern Europe. That this case is made through art is an indication of how important it is to bring different disciplines to bear on our understanding of the past.

The growing use of images by historians is strewn with pitfalls that are not always self-evident. The purpose of an image, its comprehensibility, its audience, the conventions that it observes, and the traditions that it accepts are among many features that can skew its ostensible message. Much about a period or situation can be learned that is otherwise not accessible, but caution is necessary when pictures, artifacts, or buildings are used as historical evidence.