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As long as there have been governments, ordinary people have been acting in a variety of often informal or extralegal ways to influence the rulers who claimed authority over them. This text shows how ordinary people broke down the institutional and cultural barriers that separated elite from popular politics in 16th- and 17th-century Europe and entered fully into the historical process of European state formation. Wayne Te Brake's synthesis builds on the many studies of popular interaction of rulers and subjects more generally within the multiple political spaces of composite states. In these states, says Te Brake, a broad range of political subjects, often religiously divided among themselves, necessarily aligned themselves with alternative claimants to cultural and political sovereignty in challenging the cultural and fiscal demands of some rulers. This often violent interaction between subjects and rulers had particularly potent consequences during the course of the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, and the Crisis of the 17th Century. But, as Te Brake makes clear, it was an ongoing political process, not a series of separate cataclysmic events.