Description
Berghahn Books The Holy Roman Empire Reconsidered 2010 Edition by Jason Philip Coy, Benjamin Marschke, David Warren Sabean
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. Table of contents :- List of IllustrationsSeries PrefaceVolume PrefaceList of ContributorsIntroduction: The Holy Roman Empire in History and HistoriographyJason CoySECTION I: PRESENCE, PERFORMANCE, AND TEXTChapter 1. Discontinuities: Political Transformation, Media Change, and the City in the Holy Roman Empire from the Fifteenth to Seventeenth CenturiesPhilip Hoffmann-RehnitzChapter 2. Overloaded Interaction: Effects of the Growing Use of Writing in German Imperial Cities, 1500-1800Alexander SchlaakChapter 3. Princes' Power, Aristocratic Norms, and Personal Eccentricities: Le Caractere Bizarre of Frederick William I of Prussia (1713-1740)Benjamin MarschkeSECTION II: SYMBOLIC MEANING, IDENTITY, AND MEMORYChapter 4. The Illuminated Reich: Memory, Crisis, and the Visibility of Monarchy in Late Medieval GermanyLen ScalesChapter 5. The Production of Knowledge about Confessions: Witnesses and their Testimonies about Normative Years in and after the Thirty Years' WarRalf-Peter FuchsChapter 6. Staging Individual Rank and Corporate Identity: Pre-Modern Nobilities in Provincial PoliticsElizabeth Harding7. The Importance of Being Seated: Ceremonial Conflict in Territorial Diets Tim Neu SECTION III: CEREMONY, PROCEDURE, AND LEGITIMATIONChapter 8. Ceremony and Dissent: Religion, Procedural Conflicts, and the "Fiction of Consensus" in Seventeenth-Century GermanyDavid M. LuebkeChapter 9. Contested Bodies: Schwabisch Hall and its Neighbors in Conflicts Regarding High Jurisdiction (1550-1800)Patrick OelzeChapter 10. Conflict and Consensus around German Princes' Unequal Marriages: Prince's Autonomy, Emperor's Intervention, and the Juridification of Dynastic PoliticsMichael SikoraChapter 11. Power and Good Governance: The Removal of Ruling Princes in the Holy Roman Empire, 1680-1794Werner TrossbachSECTION IV: IMPERIAL INSTITUTIONS, CONFESSION, AND POWER RELATIONSChapter 12. Marital Affairs as a Public Matter within the Holy Roman Empire: The Case of Duke Ulrich and Duchess Sabine of Wurttemberg at the Beginning of the Sixteenth CenturyMichaela HohkampChapter 13. The Corpus Evangelicorum: A Culturalist Perspective on its Procedure in the Eighteenth-Century Holy Roman EmpireAndreas KalipkeChapter 14. Gallican Longings: Church and Nation in Eighteenth-Century GermanyMichael PrintyConclusion: New Directions in the Study of the Holy Roman Empire - A Cultural ApproachAndre KrischerGlossaryBibliography Index