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.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
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
Über den Autor
David Warren Sabean is Henry J. Bruman Professor of German History at the University of California at Los Angeles. He has been the recipient of an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Prize. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His publications include Property, Production, and Family in Neckarhausen, 1700–1870 (1990); Kinship in Neckarhausen, 1700–1870 (1998). He is co-editor with Simon Teuscher and Jon Mathieu of Kinship in Europe: Approaches to Long-Term Development (1300-1900) (2007).