These essays derive from ten conference panels at the 2007 German Studies Association Conference held in San Diego. The editors organized the panels in collaboration with research groups at the University of Münster, headed by Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, and the University of Konstanz under Rudolf Schlögl. The coordinated planning gives these essays an analytical coherency that is rare in published conference presentations, and the collection also makes available in English the excellent insights of young German scholars.

In his introduction, Jason Coy claims that the essays will help “overturn a century of negative assessments of the empire and its institutions” (1). In the nineteenth century German nationalist historiography viewed the “Old Reich” before 1806 as a politically moribund roadblock to the development of a German state and nationalist sensibilities. Recently, however, revisionists such as Georg Schmidt have argued that the empire was a functioning composite monarchical state–not unlike Habsburg Spain, Great Britain, or even Bourbon France. In imperial institutions such as the perpetual Reichstag at Regensburg, they see the historical precursors to contemporary federated Germany and the European Union. These essays follow Stollberg-Rilinger's critique of the revisionists. She argues that treating the empire as a state can be misleading; rather, it was a symbolic order, a collectively shared fiction to be performed ritually in order to become a political reality. In this light Stollberg-Rilinger's collaborative research project, “Symbolic Communication and Social Value Systems,” focuses on symbols and ceremonies, whereas Schlögl's project at Konstanz, “Norm and Symbol,” explores urban written and oral communication from the perspective of politics as a “community of presence.” In all, these essays consider imperial institutions as cultural arenas for political interactions, and the empire as a system for communicating political culture.

Four authors examine ritual performance and ceremonial procedure at imperial and territorial estates. According to Andreas Kalipke, the Corpus Evangelicorum employed confessional caucusing to legitimize its parity status through performance at the post-Westphalian Reichstag. Deliberations within the caucus entailed private negotiations to secure a majority, followed by a ceremonial roll-call vote initiated by the leading Protestant states. Every decision, however, was displayed to Catholics as Protestant confessional consensus. At the territorial level, Elizabeth Harding shows how Westphalian knights wore uniforms to sessions of the diet after 1648 to present themselves as a privileged social group, but also trimmed their uniforms with piping, epaulettes, and medals to display interpersonal hierarchy among members. Tim Neu explains how a ceremonial dispute at the diet in Hesse-Kassel in 1704 over whether the marshal of the territorial towns should be granted a seat—and thus the right to vote—nearly led to the disbanding of the assembly. Here, conflicting memories of procedure fueled political conflict. Finally, David Luebke recounts how the estates of the Prince Bishopric of Münster proposed new ceremonial procedures to thwart efforts by Bishop Ernst of Bavaria to mandate Counterreform church services in 1606. They argued that implementation required debate before the estates preceded by the reading of grievances against the bishop. Accepting this fictive precedent would have altered the political balance between bishop and estates. Ernst's mandate thus remained dead letter. According to each of these studies, procedure and ceremony served as tools to protect political tradition or to assert a new political order.

Myths and fluid collective memories also served political purposes in the empire. Len Scales's essay demonstrates the role that symbols played in addressing the challenge of political “presence.” Lacking an established capital, late medieval emperors created imperial imagery, such as the black eagle on gold, which they emblazoned on city halls and monuments. The need to distribute imagery reflected the emperors' weakness, but the images' growing popularity may have raised imperial consciousness and patriotism among their subjects. Ralf-Peter Fuchs examines social pressures on personal recollections of confessional conditions for the normative year 1624 in the confessionally mixed county of Mark following the Peace of Westphalia. The interrogators' questions reflected official views on what comprised Lutheran and Catholic practices, but the villagers' answers suggested that confessional conditions in 1624 were a hybrid mix. Fuchs nevertheless argues that the process itself generated confessional cohesion among Catholic subjects, whereas Lutherans remembered and learned a more confessionally coherent faith than they had actually practiced. Finally, Michael Printy sees Johann Niklaus von Hontheim's late eighteenth-century antipapal and anti-Jesuit writings as an effort to reimagine German Catholicism as Gallican. Hontheim's call for enhanced episcopal authority did not produce immediate reforms, but did help frame a German Catholic national sensibility that laid the groundwork for later reforms. In these essays memory and imagination helped to fashion both the empire and the confessional communities within it.

Both the revisionists and their critics agree that down to its dissolution, the Empire remained feudal and thus socially dominated by its nobility. Four essays demonstrate how the personal was political for the high nobility. Benjamin Marschke shows how the irascible behavior of Frederick William I of Prussia disrupted court ceremonies at Potsdam and in neighboring principalities. As an undisputed sovereign, Frederick William indulged himself, banning all courtly extravagance and refusing to participate in ceremonial protocols when visiting neighboring princes. Moreover, his cruelty and personal violence nearly cost Crown Prince Frederick his life. Frederick William eventually accepted behavioral limits advocated by advisors, but only reluctantly. In another study of a ruler's violence, Michaela Hohkamp outlines the political and historiographical fallout of Duke Ulrich of Württemberg's murder of his lover's husband and his abandonment of his wife, Sabina of Bavaria. Both Sabina and Ulrich defended their rights in court and in texts. In political terms, Sabina retained her title and secured her son's succession. But in the subsequent historiography, the tough-minded Sabina became an obstinate shrew incapable of love, whereas Ulrich became a victim driven from his rightful lands by the covetous Habsburgs. In contrast, Werner Trossbach recounts how after 1648, the emperors used criminal proceedings at the Reichshofrat to depose three ruling princes accused of violence and bad governance: Count Ferdinand Carl Franz of Vaduz, Prince William Hyacinth of Nassau-Siegen, and Duke Carl Leopold of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. Their subjects brought them to court, and the legal process against the princes enhanced the emperor's authority. Finally, Michael Sikora explores disputes over the status of offspring from morganatic marriages between imperial princes and women of lower social rank. Could their children inherit if the male line was threatened with extinction? For potential heirs, princely families as the threatened class, and the emperor as arbiter and guarantor of noble status, resolution of this question was less important than engaging in the legal process itself. Thus for the upper nobility, the empire's feudal cultural residue offered space for impulsive personal behavior, whereas imperial institutions helped to regulate the effects and set limits to noble self-indulgence.

Finally, three essays by Schlögl's students examine the transition from oral to written civic political culture, and how the weak sought to secure their “presence” symbolically through writing. Philip Hoffman-Rehnitz argues that substituting written decrees for public assemblies in early sixteenth-century Lübeck decentralized networks of communication, as guilds and other small groups became new sites for enhanced face-to-face political participation. What first appears as textual usage that fostered political centralization and popular exclusion becomes instead a process that decentralized authority and enhanced corporate influence. Alexander Schlaak explores the growth of petitioning by citizens at Esslingen am Neckar. Petitions allowed citizens to maintain their civic “presence” by having their words read aloud in council chambers. In the early eighteenth century, however, Esslingen's magistrates appointed syndics to read beforehand the petitions and summarize them before council, thus ending the citizens' symbolic “presence” at deliberations. Finally, Patrick Oelze traces jurisdictional conflicts between Schwäbisch Hall and the margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach over the handling of dead bodies in a district under their joint lordship. Legal resolution was not, surprisingly, as critical to the city as the filing of formal written protests, for the language of each claim set the framework for further legal challenges. Like Esslingen's citizens, those of Schwäbisch Hall employed petitions as weapons of the weak. In each case the spread of written texts created new ways for the less powerful to assert their presence in imperial political life.

All in all, these essays demonstrate the rich possibilities of analyses of political culture in helping to understand the complex but viable historical beast known as the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. They show that at various social levels, individuals and groups actively engaged in making the empire a viable political order. They also demonstrate, nevertheless, that imperial institutions, such as the Reichstag and judicial bureaus, functioned effectively in what might be seen as a composite monarchical state.