The Holy Roman Empire, Reconsidered

The Holy Roman Empire has often been anachronistically assumed to have been defunct long before it was actually dissolved at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The authors of this volume reconsider the significance of the Empire in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Their research reveals the continual importance of the Empire as a stage (and audience) for symbolic performance and communication; as a well utilized problem-solving and conflict-resolving supra-governmental institution; and as an imagined political, religious, and cultural "world" for contemporaries. This volume by leading scholars offers a dramatic reappraisal of politics, religion, and culture and also represents a major revision of the history of the Holy Roman Empire in the early modern period.

The Holy Roman Empire has often been anachronistically assumed to have been defunct long before it was actually dissolved at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The authors of this volume reconsider the significance of the Empire in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Their research reveals the continual importance of the Empire as a stage (and audience) for symbolic performance and communication; as a well utilized problem-solving and conflict-resolving supra-governmental institution; and as an imagined political, religious, and cultural "world" for contemporaries. This volume by leading scholars offers a dramatic reappraisal of politics, religion, and culture and also represents a major revision of the history of the Holy Roman Empire in the early modern period.

List of Illustrations
Series Preface
Volume Preface
List of Contributors

Introduction: The Holy Roman Empire in History and Historiography
Jason Coy

SECTION I: PRESENCE, PERFORMANCE, AND TEXT

Chapter 1. Discontinuities: Political Transformation, Media Change, and the City in the Holy Roman Empire from the Fifteenth to Seventeenth Centuries
Philip Hoffmann-Rehnitz

Chapter 2. Overloaded Interaction: Effects of the Growing Use of Writing in German Imperial Cities, 1500–1800
Alexander Schlaak

Chapter 3. Princes’ Power, Aristocratic Norms, and Personal Eccentricities: Le Caractère Bizarre of Frederick William I of Prussia (1713–1740)
Benjamin Marschke

SECTION II: SYMBOLIC MEANING, IDENTITY, AND MEMORY

Chapter 4. The Illuminated Reich: Memory, Crisis, and the Visibility of Monarchy in Late Medieval Germany
Len Scales

Chapter 5. The Production of Knowledge about Confessions: Witnesses and their Testimonies about Normative Years in and after the Thirty Years’ War
Ralf-Peter Fuchs

Chapter 6. Staging Individual Rank and Corporate Identity: Pre-Modern Nobilities in Provincial Politics
Elizabeth Harding

7. The Importance of Being Seated: Ceremonial Conflict in Territorial Diets
Tim Neu

SECTION III: CEREMONY, PROCEDURE, AND LEGITIMATION

Chapter 8. Ceremony and Dissent: Religion, Procedural Conflicts, and the “Fiction of Consensus” in Seventeenth-Century Germany
David M. Luebke

Chapter 9. Contested Bodies: Schwäbisch Hall and its Neighbors in Conflicts Regarding High Jurisdiction (1550–1800)
Patrick Oelze

Chapter 10. Conflict and Consensus around German Princes’ Unequal Marriages: Prince’s Autonomy, Emperor’s Intervention, and the Juridification of Dynastic Politics
Michael Sikora

Chapter 11. Power and Good Governance: The Removal of Ruling Princes in the Holy Roman Empire, 1680–1794
Werner Trossbach

SECTION IV: IMPERIAL INSTITUTIONS, CONFESSION, AND POWER RELATIONS

Chapter 12. Marital Affairs as a Public Matter within the Holy Roman Empire: The Case of Duke Ulrich and Duchess Sabine of Württemberg at the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century
Michaela Hohkamp

Chapter 13. The Corpus Evangelicorum: A Culturalist Perspective on its Procedure in the Eighteenth-Century Holy Roman Empire
Andreas Kalipke

Chapter 14. Gallican Longings: Church and Nation in Eighteenth-Century Germany
Michael Printy

Conclusion: New Directions in the Study of the Holy Roman Empire - A Cultural Approach
André Krischer

Glossary
Bibliography
Index