This stupendous piece of scholarship on provincial Estates and their assemblies is not for the faint-hearted. More than 1,000 pages in length, it is steeped in previously uncharted sources from some three dozen archives and libraries across the former Habsburg monarchy. A good spatial sense is needed fully to appreciate Petr Maťa’s interdisciplinary approach, which brilliantly combines architectural history with the cultural history of politics. Elaborate questions of spacing and the arrangement of furnishings, including benches, tables, and barriers, substantially qualified the events taking place in the assembly chambers under consideration. Where a person took his seat or when he cast his vote—only men attended the diets—were issues fraught with political meaning. To the post-revolutionary imagination, the earlier preoccupation with ritual and ceremony seemed until not long ago a distraction from the “real” matters at hand. Inspired by the insights of recent scholars that the hierarchies of premodern societies were not fixed or static but constantly in flux, negotiation, and renewal, Petr Maťa restores the practices of “symbolic communication” (Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger) to the central place they occupied in the minds of contemporaries. Dense and ramified, the analysis opens up a vast arena of politics hitherto unaccounted for in the Habsburg scholarship. It further reconnoiters the complex terra incognita of provincial assemblies between Prague and Laibach/Ljubljana. Reward beckons the patient reader.

The volume focuses on the meeting places as well as seating and voting arrangements of the diets of seven Habsburg-ruled lands (Bohemia, Moravia, Lower Austria, Upper Austria, Styria, Carinthia, and Carniola), each of which receives its own exhaustive chapter. Though the preservation of provincial Estates constituted a hallmark of the Habsburg strategy of rule over the centuries, the tenacity of the “rise of the state” narrative that seemed particularly apposite to a polity as diverse as the Habsburg one explains the comparative lack of research into these bodies. Petr Maťa has fully exploited the massive holdings of records that these institutions left behind precisely at the time when, in the older view, they were supposedly in terminal decline. The temporal emphasis is on the period from the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) to the accession of Maria Theresa (1740), even as the lens widens at strategic points to take in relevant aspects from both earlier and later periods. We learn, for instance, that Emperor Joseph II (1765/80–90), famously no friend to representative bodies, ruthlessly evicted the Moravian Estates from their traditional rooms in Brünn/Brno, even as he permitted the Carniolan Estates to rebuild their modest palace in Laibach/Ljubljana.

The historical specificities, meticulously excavated from a host of manuscript, printed, and pictural sources, condition the content and structure of the individual chapters. The chamber of the Bohemian diet uniquely contained a royal throne similar to the setup at Westminster—long before the events of the Thirty Years’ War. The Styrian diet was remarkably “the only one for which contemporary figurative depictions” exist (695). A discussion of these exceptional images that raise all manner of questions relating to actual practice distinguishes the chapter on Styria. The volume reproduces not only these pictures but is otherwise richly illustrated with material indispensable to the argument. The private papers of one aristocratic family, Collalto, yielded up two rare sketches of mid-seventeenth-century seating arrangements, one each for Bohemia and Moravia (pictured at 130 and 351). The Carinthian diet uniquely contained a round table, as opposed to the more ceremonially contentious quadrate ones otherwise the rule. It was reserved to the representatives of two ecclesiastical princes in the wider Holy Roman Empire—Salzburg and Bamberg—each with large landholdings in the province. Two other diets, in Carniola and Moravia, likewise hosted the agents of bishops (Freising and Olmütz/Olomouc, respectively) with claims to autonomy vis-à-vis the provincial establishment. Reconstructing the seating and voting arrangements in the diets of two lands, Bohemia and Carniola, required special consideration of those same issues in meetings of the local tribunal of privileged jurisdiction (Landrecht and Schrannengericht, respectively). Partly interchangeable in membership with the diets, these bodies invariably met in the same chambers. Generally speaking, this volume clears up many astonishing misconceptions about where the diets actually gathered. Petr Maťa shows that this occurred not in the grander “halls” (Säle) available in the buildings of the provincial Estates but in smaller, more easily heated “chambers” (Stuben). It was the Little Ice Age, after all.

This volume is a resounding exercise in comparative history, an area in which the Prague-born and Vienna-based author has already made a name for himself. The question of similarity and difference is a thread running through the story’s intricate weave. The comparative lack of conflict in Lower Austria is attributed to the “absolutely clear and incontrovertible guiding principle” (547) that governed seating and voting arrangements: the biological age of the participants. This is contrasted to the more complex practice in Moravia and Bohemia, where official rank (both within and beyond the Estates) was calculated into the equation. None of the diverse voting patterns in these assemblies had much to do with modern conceptions of parliamentary procedure. In Carniola and Carinthia, the manner of polling alternated between nobles and prelates; this practice was “observably simpler than the [one] in Styria, where several benches were involved in the alternation, and significantly different from those in [Lower and Upper] Austria, where the votes ‘circulated’ among several benches or corporations” (785). The question of the rights accorded (or not) to imperial privy councilors, a prestigious group whose size expanded over time, is another motif, as is the position of the Estates of burghers in the various assemblies. The effort of the Moravian towns to end the humiliating practice by which their representatives had to remain standing behind a barrier throughout the proceedings is narrated at some length.

Petr Maťa’s findings cast new light on wider processes of change that have been a staple of Habsburg scholarship, such as Catholic confessionalization and the diversification of the nobility in response to the expansion of state power. To be sure, historians have noted that Ferdinand II restored the prelates to the diet in Prague—formally as the First Estate, no less—by the terms of the provincial charter promulgated in 1627. Yet, the author is able to show that the organization of the new entity “proved to be a lengthy process that was accompanied over decades by conflicts over rank and other matters” (196). The precedence conferred by the emperor on the prelates appears as nothing less than a “fiction” (196) in view of the immense prestige of the Bohemian lords. In connection with the question of precedence at the Moravian diet, a previously little-heeded group of nobles that emerged under Ferdinand II and Ferdinand III and labeled by Maťa the “privileged counts” (405), comes into view. These families claimed a place on the “prince’s bench” installed in the assembly there and in Prague during the Thirty Years’ War. That they and many others jockeying for position saw the emperor as the ultimate arbiter of their claims—repeatedly well documented by Maťa—suggests how little the notion of a purely or even primarily oppositional (“dualist”) relationship between ruler and Estates in the Habsburg lands holds.

The only reservation that might be noted in conclusion is that the author is consistently reluctant to take a bird’s eye view, telling us how his multifarious findings change historical perspectives on the Habsburg monarchy generally. It is not as if the material were lacking. To take one example: the content revolves heavily around the problem of conflict—among nobles, between nobles and clergy, and even among prelates. At the opening of the Bohemian diet in 1678, the dean of the collegiate chapter of Vyšehrad in Prague, Wenzel Klimeš, tried both verbally and physically to block the abbot of a recently founded monastery from taking a certain seat. In Upper Austria a disagreement about the iconographic program of the frescos to be painted on the walls of the assembly chamber was only one aspect of a struggle “on various fronts” (646) between lords and prelates in the 1670s. At the Bohemian diet, the energetic claims of the Slavata family to privileged seating disintegrated in the 1650s and 1660s into a “struggle of noble clans and parties” (194). We might recall that Count Wilhelm Slavata (1572–1652), one of the two men famously defenestrated at Prague in 1618, had been a leading Habsburg partisan in Bohemia. In Brünn/Brno the “princes’ bench” proved to be “the scene of probably the most frequent and protracted seating conflicts that were fought out in the chamber of the Moravian Estates in the seventeenth century” (399). What might these often-bitter fractures and divisions tell us about the overarching Catholic-aristocratic political dispensation taking shape in the Habsburg lands in this period? But then the hallmark of this study is that it maps out exciting new lines of inquiry. There is no doubt: it stands as a work of rare merit, one that goes far toward restoring the provincial Estates and their assemblies to the central place they deserve in the history of the Habsburg monarchy. It will be an indispensable and enduring resource for generations of scholars.