If the editors of Spektrum: Publications of the German Studies Association were looking for an impressive collection with which to lead off their new series, they certainly succeeded admirably in choosing The Holy Roman Empire, Reconsidered. Jason Philip Coy, Benjamin Marschke, and David Warren Sabean chose ten papers on the Holy Roman Empire from a set of thematically linked presentations at the 2007 German Studies Association Conference. Taken together these chapters provide original scholarship on little-known but important historical topics and offer provocative revisions of standard interpretations. As a whole, the collection continues the revisionism Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger and Rudolf Schlögl pioneered.
Jason Coy's introduction briefly sketches the historiographical background on the Holy Roman Empire and highlights current scholarly debates. He notes that several authors included here aim “to examine the empire and its institutions as a framework for political and intellectual interaction” and see it “as a dynamic arena for shifting behavioral norms and intellectual currents” (3). Similar theoretical underpinnings, in particular Niklas Luhmann's social systems theory and especially his theory of “Legitimation durch Verfahren,” inform most papers in the collection. In the conclusion, André Krischer returns to the Stollberg-Rilinger understanding of the Holy Roman Empire “as a symbolical order, a collectively shared fiction that had to be performed ritually in order to become a political reality” (266). The papers in this volume, which cover topics ranging from writing and other forms of communication, memory, rank, nobility, courts, and dynastic marriages, demonstrate that every aspect of the empire, including the myriad smaller individual units and corporations within it, was not only itself a symbolic order, but also an integral part of a larger and more comprehensive one.
Although such collections often prove less coherent than desired, that is happily not the case here. All the contributors discuss the role of direct or symbolic communication, whether they locate its expression in written, visual, oral, or performative media. They then carefully analyze the central role these symbols played in the erection and maintenance of the empire and of its component parts.
The book itself is organized into four thematic sections, yet several themes reappear frequently and thus give the collection a strong internal unity. Three examples include the political evolution of the Imperial Cities, the role of internal group differentiation, and the performance of outward consensus. Several papers argue that the Imperial Cities, long understood to have declined along with the empire, actually remained politically vibrant into the eighteenth century. Changes in written and oral communication may have led to a decrease in the face-to-face relationship between urban oligarchs and burghers, yet they did not cause the institutional ossification historians have often claimed to observe. Instead, seemingly unnecessary institutions survived as symbols of constitutional stability and new traditions crystallized around them. Similarly, scholars have long understood the importance contemporaries attached to symbolic status differentiation within and between groups on both the imperial and territorial levels. Understanding these symbolic differences as real and immanent, however, helps us understand why jockeying for position proved so central and time-consuming without falling into the anachronistic trap of assuming them to be trivial or a waste of time. Even when these conflicts engendered disputes, however, the presentation of consensus to the outside world remained of the utmost importance to these groups.
The idea of the Holy Roman Empire as premodern and “fictive,” lacking, in short, a direct relationship to the modern world (pace Georg Schmidt's thesis), is intriguing but awaits a similar comparison with other European states. If we are to view the empire as a fictive reality, such that “it existed as such in the perceptions and the actions of its contemporaries,” we should remember that the same could be said about early modern France and England, or even their modern counterparts (267).
In sum, each individual paper in this collection repays careful reading. Taken as a whole, they reveal the vitality and variety of contemporary scholarship on the Holy Roman Empire.
