This volume presents chapters that developed out of a conference held at the Institut für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung in Vienna in March 2014. It appears in the series published by that institute as volume 64 of its “Veröffentlichungen.” Ten women and five men with academic affiliations in Austria, Germany, Italy, and Spain present overviews of the lives of twelve women who served as (crowned or uncrowned) Holy Roman Empresses from the early sixteenth until the early nineteenth centuries. In addition, a chapter sketches some themes dealing with late medieval empresses, and another (the only one in English) discusses three (“Austrian”) archduchesses who served as queens of Spain. Katrin Keller provides an introductory chapter and Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger provides a concluding commentary. The volume includes no illustrations, genealogical charts, maps, or other such aids. English-language abstracts are provided for all the chapters, as is a helpful index of names.
In her introductory chapter, Keller describes how the participants in the conference were given a set of questions to keep in mind as they prepared their papers. This provides the volume with an acceptable coherence, one leavened by the variety of sources used as well as the variety of experiences analyzed. The authors utilized a rich set of published and unpublished evidence found in archives and libraries from Vatican City, Mantua, and Milan in Italy, to Simancas in Spain, Munich and Dresden in Germany, and Innsbruck and Vienna in Austria. Not surprisingly, the rich sources of the Haus-, Hof- und Staatarchiv in Vienna are cited very frequently. Evidence from that repository included not only correspondence and testaments, but particularly the rich records of court administration such as Hofstaatsverzeichnisse.
As the authors’ contributions reveal, the sixteenth century was not a good one for the development of empresses’ political authority. This fact no doubt had consequences for the internal cohesion and stability of the empire in that tumultuous period. Although Alexander Koller persuasively points to the substantial contributions of Empress María of Spain, consort of Maximilian II, writing that she “is certainly one of the great female rulers of the 16th century” (85), her term in office (only a dozen years long) was not characteristic of the century as a whole: The numbers of years without a reigning empress was more than three times the length of time an empress such as María occupied that position. It was not until the precedent-setting period in office of Empress Anna of Tyrol, consort of Mathias, discussed in the chapter by Elena Taddei, following a challenging decades-long “empress-less” period, that the contours and facets of the empresses’ early modern period were determined. Taddei points out that Anna's separate coronation in 1612 was the first and the most influential of the six coronations of empresses in the early modern period (108).
Most of the empresses discussed in this collection were in office in this later period. The various chapters reveal a fascinating variety of women and their undertakings during the last two centuries of the empire's existence. One important set of contexts discussed in the volume is the role of these rulers in their parents’ as well as their husbands’ families. Although most of the empresses came from outside the dynasty, three empresses were Habsburgs: María Ana (consort of Ferdinand III), Maria Amalia (the last crowned empress and consort of Charles VII), and the oft-studied Maria Theresa (consort of Francis I). The latter two examples provide particularly fruitful comparative possibilities: Maria Amalia continued to have influence long after her husband's death, coming as she did from a higher-ranked family than her husband's Wittelsbach dynasty, and Maria Theresa held much more power hereditarily than her spouse, of the relatively minor and dispossessed House of Lorraine.
Bettina Braun's contribution about this latter, well-known couple, Maria Theresa and Francis, highlights two concepts that inform implicitly or explicitly many of the volume's contributions. Building on ideas attributed to the path-breaking historian Heide Wunder, Braun focuses her attention on “regierende Fürstinnen”: women who participated in the government of their spouses (not women who ruled in someone else's name). As she informs us, this term “implies that the princely wife always participated in the rule” (211, note 2; see also note 3 on Wunder). Historians should not concentrate exclusively on the activities of the men in these couples. The two people functioned as an “Amtspaar,” and Francis and Maria Theresa represent such a pair “par excellence” (212). This idea is related to Wunder's concept of an “Arbeitspaar.” Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger reminds the reader in her concluding commentary to imbed their analysis in early modern concepts of dynasty and collective identity instead of resorting to anachronistic individualism in a supposedly autonomous political world. In this case, both parts of the ruling pair need to be considered (249).
Although the collection introduces the roles of the empresses studied as queens of Bohemia and Hungary, the emphasis is more on studying their roles as Austrian archduchesses or hereditary rulers of those two kingdoms (in the case of Maria Theresa). As the celebrations, commemorations, and exhibitions of the three hundredth anniversary of the birth of Maria Theresa in Prague and Zagreb this year reveal, there is more to be written and said about how the women studied functioned as queens-consort, not just as empress- or archduchess-consorts. It would be useful in the future to include historians of the Crowns of St. Václav and St. István in the analysis of early modern empresses.
In a short review such as this, it is, of course, impossible to go into much detail about each of the volume's fourteen chapters. For historians of the early modern Holy Roman Empire, the volume is an important step in the process of including the female halves of the ruling pairs who played such influential roles in that set of institutions. For historians of early modern politics and women's roles in rule generally, the collection provides many points of entry, with clear ties to the evidence available.
