On 6 August 1806, Emperor Francis II abdicated as ruler of the “Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation” or Reich. This brought to an end an institution that traced its ancestry deep into the Middle Ages and legitimated itself through claimed descent from the Roman Empire and from the rule of Charlemagne, whose coronation as emperor in 800 has traditionally been taken as its starting point. Wolfgang Burgdorf, in his essay in the second of these volumes, underlines the shock together with the “grief, shame and rage” (52) that accompanied its dissolution, contemporary reactions that—appropriately—were full of classical allusions. Two centuries later the Reich's demise provided the occasion for numerous conferences and edited collections that have provided a valuable stocktaking of recent research on what was one of the most enduring polities in European history and also one of the most puzzling. It extended south from the shores of the Baltic to the northern regions of the Italian Peninsula (Reichsitalien as it was known) and east from the Rhine as far as the distant frontier of Poland-Lithuania. At the end of the eighteenth century, its territorial extent was around 687,000 square kilometers, making it the second largest polity in Europe after the Russian Empire. It was also among the most populous, with some 29,000,000 inhabitants. Its only demographic rivals were Russia and France. Long seen as a notable example of a “failed state,” its coherence and vitality have instead been revealed by recent scholarship, which has highlighted its unique nature.

These two volumes celebrate a double anniversary, as the editors of the first volume note in their introduction (23), taking Karl Otmar von Aretin's Heiliges Römisches Reich 1776–1806 (2 vols.; Mainz, 1967) as the starting-point for the modern study of the empire. They are the proceedings of a notable and large-scale conference held in Oxford in 2006, generously funded by the German Historical Institute in London. Professor Burgdorf's chapter summarizes the conclusions of a large-scale study published in German in 2006, and in so doing highlights the principal reason to welcome the publication of these volumes. While Peter H. Wilson and, more recently, Joachim Whaley have provided valuable introductions for the English-language reader, much of the more specialized research that is transforming our view of the Reich's structure, politics, and society demands the ability to read German. These notably well-edited proceedings will be invaluable for everyone teaching early modern European history and represent a giant step forward in the English-language literature on the Reich, opening as they do a rich vein of German-language historiography to an Anglophone audience. The list of almost forty contributors contains every leading German scholar of the past and present generation still alive, together with the major figures from Britain and the United States. In the space available, it is impossible to mention every essay, but almost all are worth reading and have points of importance to offer.

Imperial institutions have always received considerable attention because of a combination of their own longevity and the traditional preference of historians. The first volume opens with a series of essays on the Reich's administrative structures and constitutional practices. Georg Schmidt reiterates his well-known views on the Reich as an “empire-state.” Though his interpretation seems to be supported by Joachim Whaley, who examines the development of a cultural sense of nationhood, it is explicitly rejected by the doyen of historians of the empire, K. O. von Aretin (41), and implicitly by the majority of his fellow-contributors. The striking ability of imperial structures to evolve, however slowly, emerges most clearly from Leopold Auer's study of the Aulic Council, and is implicit in Peter H. Wilson's valuable reminder that the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) was a major constitutional crisis, recovery from which attests to its underlying strength. One interesting emphasis in Professor Wilson's chapter is that religion was legally more deeply embedded after 1648, despite the Westphalian settlement's reputation as a step toward more secular politics at the end of what is often seen as the final war of religion. Siegrid Westphal's rather abstract plea for a practice-based study of imperial institutions as locations of negotiation and Karl Härter's interesting if occasionally rather forced examination of the Imperial Diet as the center of “a living constitution” (132) demonstrate the possibilities offered by the new-style cultural history of politics.

The sharp and enduring religious divisions introduced into the Catholic Reich by the Reformation make its survival even more striking. Recent scholarship on the establishment of Protestantism in the imperial cities is surveyed by C. Scott Dixon, who achieves a notably convincing balance between wider perspectives and particular local circumstances in a chapter that will be invaluable for everyone teaching the German Reformation. Dominic Phelps then provides a subtle and original exploration of the pro-Habsburg stance of Protestant Saxony during the decades between the Religious Peace of Augsburg (1555) and the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War, which underlines the emperor's importance to the effective functioning of the Reich. The most poignant essay is Trevor Johnston's subtle, multifaceted exploration of re-Catholicization in the Upper Palatinate, a reminder of just how much we have all lost by his sadly premature death. Marc R. Foster, then provides an imaginative survey of rural Catholicism, rightly pointing out that the “confessionalization” debate highlighted the role of the state and urban religion, to which he provides a necessary corrective.

Susan Karant-Nunn, in the course of a welcome and heartfelt plea for a new social history of the Reich, notes the important role played by elites in the workings of the imperial system (248, 261). Christian Wieland takes up this theme in an informative study of the Bavarian nobility. Hillay Zmora does the same in a highly original examination of the Knighthood of Franconia. Both authors highlight the tension between the validation of elite status through service to a prince and the simultaneous search for independence as an essential attribute of nobility. The final chapter in the first volume is in many ways the most welcome. Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger is currently the most imaginative and original historian of the Reich, but her important work has hitherto not been readily available in English. Here, she presents a short statement of her views on the centrality of ritual in the workings of the empire and in its noted longevity, emphasizing that the repeated public staging of acts of authority was quite crucial.

The second volume, as its subtitle proclaims, adopts a contrasting “European” perspective. It opens with a suggestive survey of the Westphalian settlement by Lothar Höbelt, emphasizing that the treaties of Münster and Osnabrück were viewed in Vienna as an armistice, rather than a permanent settlement, and that within Germany their terms did not really amount to a constitution, as they have often been regarded. Several essays are then devoted to regions and polities on the periphery of the Reich, exploring their ambiguous and often shifting relationships with imperial structures. Nicolette Mout provides a convenient introduction to her previous work on the position of the Netherlands during the long sixteenth century, while Sven Externbrink tackles the important parallels between the rise of Brandenburg-Prussia and Savoy-Piedmont, though he is much better informed about the former than the latter.

Fresher perspectives are evident in the essays by Thomas Munck and Robert Frost. Emphasizing Denmark's permeable southern frontier with the Reich, Professor Munck highlights the continuing strength and importance of German cultural influences there. He persuasively argues that the nativist reaction during the 1770s and 1780s, culminating in the so-called German feud in 1789, has been exaggerated by Danish scholars, and instead demonstrates the enduringly cosmopolitan character of Copenhagen and, more generally, the kingdom's political and literary culture. Here, he provides indirect support for an argument first advanced by R. J. W. Evans a generation ago, and confirmed in this volume by a sophisticated study of the artistic sphere by Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann: that after 1648 the Reich retained very considerable cultural coherence and influence. By contrast Robert Frost offers an illuminating comparison between the military systems of Poland-Lithuania and the Reich, very much to the favor of the latter. Although the hitherto formidable Polish army declined sharply during the second half of the seventeenth century, with the evident weakening of royal authority, the Reich's ability to raise taxation and troops remained impressive. Professor Frost's article is a model of comparative history, and it furnishes unexpected support for Peter H. Wilson's earlier contention that the Holy Roman Empire functioned as “a system of collective security.”

Territories located within the Austrian Habsburg monarchy and, at times, also inside the Reich are the subject of the largest group of essays. The leading Hungarian scholar, Géza Pálffy, contributes a pioneering study of the links between the Kingdom of Hungary and the empire, emphasizing the urgent need for detailed research. Olivier Chaline traces the way in which the Buquoy family, originally a French noble house from Artois and Picardy, rose through impressive military service to the Habsburgs to become one of the leading landowners in Bohemia, a trajectory that is now the focus of his detailed research. A subtle examination of the ambiguous and “very loose” relationship (131) between the Bohemian Kingdom and the Reich is provided by Jaroslav Pánek, underlining the ways in which it evolved and also the extent to which historians distorted it during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In one of the most original essays, Peter Mat'a offers a more ambiguous reading of this relationship than Professor Pánek through a richly documented study of the position of princes within Bohemia, Silesia, and the Reich. Revealing the ways in which the empire structured aristocratic rank on its peripheries, he makes a persuasive case for the importance of political negotiation side-by-side with the legal and social factors that so often secure the lion's share of attention from historians.

Finally, the growing separation evident between the hereditary lands (Erblande) and the empire during the seventeenth century is explored in two fine articles. Jeroen Duindam underlines his mastery of the intricacies of the emperor's household and court in a fluent and incisive exploration of whether imperial or dynastic themes were uppermost there. Thomas Winkelbauer, in an important if occasionally rather dense essay, then examines the wider issues raised by this divergence. Emphasizing its pre-1600 origins, he reveals how aristocrats from the Erblande came to monopolize membership of the Privy Conference from the 1660s onward. He also demonstrates how the separation of dynasty and empire was most clearly evident in the postal system, whose importance to the operation and coherence of the Reich is emphasized by Wolfgang Behringer in the first volume. Here, as in so many of the essays assembled in these two volumes, established themes are pushed further and opened up to non-German readers. Taken together, the proceedings of this conference constitute an indispensable resource for anyone teaching the Holy Roman Empire and should be in all research libraries.