Ronald G. Asch holds the Chair of Early Modern History at the University of Freiburg in Germany. He graduated from Tübingen University and previously taught in Münster and Osnabrück. He is an expert on sixteenth and seventeenth-century British and European history and has published monographs on the Thirty Years War and the history of the European nobilities in the early modern period as well as on the court of Charles I. His latest publication is Die Stuarts: Geschichte einer Dynastie (Munich, 2011). He is a member of the Heidelberg Academy of Arts and Sciences.