This is a highly innovative book. It combines what have heretofore been seen as mutually exclusive methodologies, that of constitutional historians and that of semioticians, and successfully demonstrates that the resort to nontraditional perspectives can open portals for a field that has been weighted down by the exclusive analysis of written law. As a historian, Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger came to her task with the conviction well in place that knowledge of the context in which a law was written was essential to its comprehension. She moves decisively on from that elemental position to consider the feudal principles reflected in the late medieval constitution of the Holy Roman Empire and their increasingly anachronistic character over the subsequent three hundred years until, in 1806, Napoleon mercifully dispatched a lingering wraith that is now detached from the distinctly nonfeudal reality around it.

In Des Kaisers alte Kleider, she uses the forms of and the struggles over rituals at four imperial diets (Reichstage; 1495, 1530, 1653–54, 1764–65) in order to penetrate to the heart of the estates' mind-sets and the ways in which each struggled, by means of material symbols (such as the alleged official garments, the “old clothes of the title,” and coronation jewels of Charlemagne) and ritual behavior (the emperor's display of majesty as a prominent example), to maintain its status in the estimation of the rest of the imperial hierarchy. Sources, such as the memoirs and letters of observers, that constitutional scholars have rejected as reflective only of the outmoded mentality and social ambitions of a doomed nobility, are now tapped for their wealth of information concerning conceptions of the Empire and its deterioration.

A theme recurring throughout this book is Inszenierung—in English, roughly staging or dramatization. The goal of this “enscenement” was visibly to demonstrate one's claims to office to peers and rivals. It was also to reconfirm and transmit these claims to the future, to refresh one's hold on them. The emperor himself in 1495 sat in majesty, no mere activity engaged in to pass the time but a crucial, carefully planned rite of splendid superiority, in which Maximilian I was not only arrayed in ancient garb and treasure (crown, scepter, orb-apple, sword) but he was also surrounded by the electors specified in the Golden Bull of 1356. But what order the electors sat in was perpetually at issue. The Count Palatine of the Rhine, after all, was not even a duke; and by the eighteenth century the three electoral archbishops were of unmentionably low provenance! Stollberg-Rilinger taps every category of evidence in showing how all participants wrangled over the symbolic order and ritual makeup of being received by the emperor, sitting at table, enfiefing each new generation of vassals, and arriving at consensus on complicated matters in plenary sessions.

The Reformation added new dimensions to this struggle for consensus. The Reichstag of 1530, but even more that of 1653–54 following the Peace of Westphalia, demonstrated the virtual unattainability of agreement. Attendance at high mass together had previously bound all participants in late medieval diets, but now half the electors were Protestant and refused to remain in the presence of priestly claims to transubstantiation. They left the sanctuary, returning after this rite of “presumption” was complete. The mass, then, did not unite; it ultimately divided. Indeed, attendees could not reach terms for the official adjournment (Reichsabschied), and they went home without dismissal. In 1663, this lack produced the legal curiosity of a perpetual (immerwährender) diet (221).

Politics and culture constantly changed. Joseph II himself sat in majesty only once, and that reluctantly, after his election as King of the Romans in Frankfurt am Main. Johann Wolfgang Goethe remarked on the “half-ghostly” theatrics of that occasion (229). Thereafter, Joseph held court in Vienna, which the rest of the empire regarded as on the periphery or even completely beyond the imperial boundary. Emperors added one and then two new electors. In the eighteenth century, all stayed away from the Diet of Regensburg. They sent their representatives, who were meant to fulfill their masters' duties and convey their grandeur, but no one would accord symbolic capital to lowly, however noble, substitutes. Stollberg-Rilinger notes that absences designed to avoid further humiliation by men who had by now often assumed kingships, simultaneously lent substance to the meaninglessness of the electoral office. She includes (243) the stunning depiction from Martin van Meytens the Younger's atelier of Joseph II's coronation banquet, at which the seats at the dining tables, which are set with food, are empty.

For this creative colleague, constitutions are encompassing abstractions the fabric of which must also be sought in the mental universe of those whose roles were meant to be expressions of them. Stollberg-Rilinger has exploited a window upon that universe that she herself will have helped to open for others. Her book traces the decay of relations of political interdependence in the early modern world and compellingly explains the demise of the Holy Roman Empire. It is a model of fruitful transdisciplinary scholarship.