This beautifully produced and well-illustrated collection was published by the German art history publisher Schnell & Steiner. In addition to scholarly articles, it contains essential genealogical charts, maps of some of the Arenberg family properties, many illustrations, and an index (mostly of people and place names). Short English-language abstracts give some general indication of the contents of the chapters. According to the volume's preface written by the current Duke of Arenberg, this book is the sixth and latest in a series of such volumes dedicated to various aspects of the Arenberg family's history. Founded by the duke's father in the 1980s, this series should conclude with one more volume. Given the transnational histories of this important noble dynasty, it should not be surprising that previous volumes have appeared in German, Dutch, and French.

The volume currently under review contains twelve chapters of varying lengths written by scholars affiliated with museums, professors, and researchers: four men and four women. The authors are based in Austria, France, Germany, and Luxembourg. All but two of the contributors composed one chapter each; one co-editor, William D. Godsey, wrote the introduction, while the other, Veronika Hyden-Hanscho, wrote five of the chapters.

Godsey is the author of an important recent monograph on the finances of the early modern Habsburg province of Lower Austria. He has also written on the role of the nobility in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. His interests in the details of administration as well as in the continued importance of the nobility's role even after the French Revolution are both reflected in this volume. In his introduction, Godsey places the research project in the context of “transterritorial” history. He also ties the book to a recognition of the declining significance of and interest in national histories (12). As he wrote, “[d]ie Geschichte des Hauses Arenberg … kann innerhalb einzelner National- bzw. Landeskategorien kaum sinnvoll erfasst werden” (12). For members of this family, who at times collaborated with rulers in Brussels, Madrid, Paris, Vienna, and eventually even Berlin, and whose holdings were scattered across much of the European continent, the consistent challenge over the longue durée studied in this volume was how to serve the Arenberg dynasty's interests without stepping too hard on the toes of their more powerful patrons and neighbors.

Appropriately enough for a dynasty that traces its origins back to the heiress Marguerite de La Marck (1527–1599), an important and valuable theme tying together many of the chapters is the role of women in the dynasty, including those who married into the family, not just those born into it, and not forgetting the daughters and sisters who married out. This theme is especially pronounced in the chapters written by Hyden-Hanscho and Katrin Keller. Keller, like Godsey, of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, directs the institute that hosted this research project and has dedicated much of her research to the roles of women in early modern court society. It should be pointed out that the important roles ascribed to Arenberg consorts and noble marriage politics make the genealogical chart essential (19).

A strength of this volume is the thorough foundation of archival sources on which most of the chapters are based. The researchers associated with this volume, particularly Hyden-Hanscho, not only dug through well-known as well as lesser-known archives in Vienna (especially the Haus-, Hof-, und Staatsarchiv), but appropriately enough brought sources from the Arenberg Family Archives in Enghien and the Royal Archives in Brussels into their analysis. The authors also used unpublished sources found in Graz and Salzburg, Austria; Třeboň and Plzeň, the Czech Republic; Munich, Germany; and Simancas, Spain. The analysis presented stays very close to the sources and what is on record, pointing out repeatedly the limits of what archival records reveal. Keller, for example, in her chapter wrote, “Waren und sind Untersuchungen zu adeligen Frauen immer damit konfrontiert, dass fast ausnahmslos die Quellenlage deutlich schlechter ist als für die Männer der Familie” (145). The repeated self-reflective references of the researchers serve as a reminder of not only what is put in the chapters, but what is left out.

Like their patrons the Habsburgs, male Arenbergs were not very likely to go into religious professions. Perhaps not surprisingly, they preferred military careers, and many Arenbergs, particularly from the sixteenth into the eighteenth centuries, are known for their martial accomplishments. This theme comes out in a number of the chapters centering on the lives of men of the dynasty, including Martin Wrede's contribution “Live and Let Die,” which points out that one of the most important reasons for the Arenbergs’ promotion to princely status in 1576 was the heroic death on the battlefield of Marguerite de La Marck's husband, Jean de Ligne. He died at the Battle of Heiligerlee in 1568 fighting anti-Habsburg rebels. The chapters by Guy Thewes and Horst Carl go into particular detail about the military service of various Arenbergs in the eighteenth century. For all of these chapters, a thorough knowledge of the military history of the period would be helpful, if not perhaps required, because of the specifics mentioned as context for various Arenberg officers’ careers. Hyden-Hanscho's third chapter, titled “Zwischen Ritterideal und Modernisierung,” points out that the Arenbergs’ military proclivities continued into the nineteenth century. Her focused study of the careers of three younger Arenberg sons who benefited from the patronage of their mothers’ relatives to gain access to Habsburg military positions uses fascinating sources such as the officers’ personnel records, found now in the Military Archive of the Austrian State Archive, to reveal the men's training and aptitudes (or lack thereof).

A theme that comes up often in the volume relates to how the Habsburgs managed to rule such a variety of political units over such a wide area for such a long time. The term “composite monarchy”—often left untranslated from English—is used repeatedly, recalling John H. Elliott's use of the term in an influential 1992 article (“A Europe of Composite Monarchies,” Past & Present 137, 48–71). The authors in this volume all to some extent interact with the question of how families such as the Arenbergs benefited from their alliances with various central powers, and conversely how much those central powers (be they in Vienna, Brussels, Madrid, Paris, or elsewhere) needed families such as the Arenbergs. (The Arenbergs were generally regarded in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful, noble family in the Habsburg Netherlands.) Hyden-Hanscho refers to the question as follows: “Wie Herrschaft in frühneuzeitlichen zusammengesetzten Monarchien vom abwesenden Souverän über lokale Eliten zu ständischen Institutionen und Korporationen bis hin zum ausführenden Beamten funktionierte und vermittelt wurde und welche Rolle dabei der Adel spielte” (184). In his other work, Godsey has stressed how important the nobles were for helping to raise money, a key to the financial health of the monarchs in this time of rapidly rising military outlays. This role is also touched upon in this volume.

When looking back over the three hundred–plus years of Arenberg history covered in the twelve chapters, the flexibility and independence of the dynasty are striking. The close analysis of the shifts undertaken by the Arenbergs as they adapted to changing historical contexts reveals how they managed to survive (even into the present) when many early modern noble families did not. Two shifts bear mentioning in particular: how the family went from being tied to the Habsburgs in Madrid to being tied to the Habsburgs in Vienna (obviously connected to how the court in Brussels changed), and how the family maneuvered through the tortured political landscape of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods, appearing, after the Congress of Vienna, with holdings now mostly on the east bank of the Rhine and located in four different political units: the Netherlands, France, Prussia, and Hanover.

The first of these shifts, brought about by the death of the last Spanish Habsburg ruler, Carlos II, and the resulting War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), placed the nobility of the Habsburg Low Countries into quite a predicament: Should they back the Bourbon claimant (from France, next door) or the Habsburg one (from Austria, far away)? The Arenbergs (this time) stuck with the Habsburgs, their decision to do so obviously influenced by the successful military intervention by British and Netherlandish troops and ships on behalf of the Habsburg claimant Carlos III. The shift toward Vienna, however, was already underway in the later seventeenth century, as Keller and Hyden-Hanscho discuss in their chapters dealing with the marriages of Arenbergs to del Carrettos. Here one sees evidence of the importance of widows and heiresses who married into the Arenberg family. The women's clout at court paid off for their spouses, whose power bases may have been far from the Danube.

The complications confronting a noble family in the decades around 1800 were considerable, and William Godsey in his chapter “Überlebens- und Erfolgstrategien in einer Zeit revolutionärer Umbrüche” does a nice job of guiding the reader through a period he knows well. One theme that presents itself to Godsey is that not only was the political scene in France changing, offering at one point even a French Imperial family marriage to an Arenberg, but the scene in Austria and with the Habsburgs was hardly stable as well, as the Habsburg ruler Maria Theresa gave way to Joseph II, then his brother Leopold and Leopold's son Franz, all in a relatively short period. The Habsburgs’ government in Brussels ended forever in 1794, leaving the Arenbergs without a court to dominate or at least heavily influence. Although the chapter relies more on published sources than most of the other contributions in the volume, this is understandable given the complicated, widespread, and shifting constellation of political ploys various Arenbergs tried, resulting in their continued if reduced position in the new world of post-Congress Europe.

Perhaps inevitably, the collection suffers from some overlaps and repetitions. The same family figures come up in multiple chapters, for example, and it is difficult to keep all of the names and relationships straight. (Again, thank heavens for the genealogical charts!) The wealth of archival data surveyed is related in a bit too much detail because the narrative or argument gets bogged down at times in the longer, almost booklet-length chapters with hundreds of footnotes. This leads to the difficult question of the intended audience. The academic apparatus is a bit cumbersome to use, with no central bibliography or list of archival sources. Each chapter must be approached anew. This is a pretty book with lots of information about an important European family, but it is a book most likely appreciated by a rather small group of scholars dealing with a particular set of historiographic issues, important as those issues may be.