The Holy Roman Empire, Reconsidered (review)

Since the nineteenth century, most historians of the Holy Roman Empire have been preoccupied with the question of its statehood (Staatlichkeit). Before 1945 the focus was generally on the inadequacy of the Reich and its failure to develop into a German nation-state. Since the 1960s there has been a tendency to view the Reich more positively and to discover in its early modern history the origins of democratic, liberal, or parliamentary traditions, or to see it as an early model of European integration or, as Georg Schmidt does, as a distinctive early modern German polity. More recently, however, some scholars have challenged what they see as an anachronistic preoccupation with questions of statehood and nationality, and have argued instead for a new cultural approach that claims to understand early modern society on its own terms. Drawing on Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory, Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger (Münster) and Rudolf Schlögl (Konstanz) explore the Reich as a communicative system with its own symbolic, procedural, and ceremonial language. The editors of this lively collection of new essays nail their colors firmly to the mast of the Münster and Konstanz schools. The old political-constitutional history is finished, Jason Coy’s historiographical introduction suggests; the way for future research lies in exploring the meaning of the symbols and rituals of the Reich.

The essays are grouped under four headings, starting with “presence, performance, and text.” Philipp Hoffmann-Rebnitz illuminates the role played by urban chronicles in providing narratives of continuity and stability through the dramatic political and social transformation experienced by Hanseatic cities between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. Alexander Schlaak highlights the significance of petitions in the imperial cities, identifying them as vehicles of communication between burghers and magistrates, and as evidence for the vitality of the political life of urban communes into the nineteenth century. Benjamin Marschke presents the unconventional, erratic, and often frankly boorish behavior of Frederick William I as an example of political performance: a ruler flouting convention and transgressing the bounds of appropriate behavior to make political points in his dealings with the emperor and fellow rulers such as the Elector of Saxony.

The second theme is the “symbolic construction of meaning, identity, and memory.” Len Scales shows not only how, in the absence of a fixed capital, late medieval emperors used architectural symbols of an imperial past and their own physical presence to establish their authority, but also how princes and urban magistrates used imperial symbols themselves for their own dynastic and local purposes. Ralf-Peter Fuchs analyses the testimony collected by commissions charged with restoring order after 1648, which focused on memories of the confessional status quo in the early 1620s in order to establish a clear boundary between confessional communities under the Peace of Westphalia. Elizabeth Harding elucidates the significance of symbolic action and representation in constructing and articulating corporate identity among the lower nobility in eighteenth-century Westphalia. Other aspects of this issue feature in Tim Neu’s analysis of the conflict over noble opposition to the demand of urban magistrates for the right to remain seated during deliberations of the Hessen-Kassel territorial diet after 1700.

David Luebke opens the third part, devoted to “ceremony, procedure, and legitimation,” with a detailed account of a procedural dispute at the Münster territorial diet of 1608, which revolved around the nobility’s fear that an episcopal decree on communion and burial threatened their rights to maintain chaplains or domestic ministers who were exempt from territorial legislation on these matters. Patrick Oleze’s account of jurisdictional disputes between Schwäbisch Hall and Brandenburg-Ansbach demonstrates how even the custody of the corpses of individuals drowned in rivers could trigger bitter wrangling over territorial boundaries and competing jurisdictions. Michael Sikora explains how the morganatic marriage of a prince could occasion fierce family disputes and appeals to the emperor via the Vienna Reichshofrat. The emperors’ occasional attempts to solve these...