The Holy Roman Empire, Reconsidered

Jason Philip Coy is an Associate Professor of History at the College of Charleston, in Charleston, South Carolina. He has received a DAAD Research Grant and a Maria Sibylla Merian Fellowship for Postdoctoral Studies from the University of Erfurt, Germany. He is the author of Strangers and Misfits: Banishment, Social Control, and Authority in Early Modern Germany (2008).

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