The publication of a volume of essays in English on medieval Germany is almost inevitably an event, on rarity grounds alone; when it boasts the breadth and insight, and the up-to-the-minute historiographical engagement evident in many of these papers, its appearance is more than that: it is something of a landmark. First some reservations, however. This is not, in its coverage, a conspicuously well-balanced collection. Nearly half of the essays are concerned wholly or mainly with the period before the year 1000, and another four with the central Middle Ages, while only two deal with Germany between Frederick ii and Luther. The two centuries between 1250 and 1450 are hardly touched upon at all. The concentration is overwhelmingly on the medieval western Empire, from Charlemagne to Maximilian i, with ten of the thirteen papers dealing, in one way or another, with the Carolingian, Ottonian, Salian and Hohenstaufen eras. Only two – by John Freed on the counts of Falkenstein and Mikhail Bojcov on the archbishops of Trier – are concerned with aspects of territorial lordship. None concentrates on the towns, the petty nobility, the Swiss, the Hansa or the Teutonic Order – let alone the peasantry, whose empowerment periodically found dramatic ‘representation’, particularly at the end of the Middle Ages. A further absentee, despite the volume's title, is ‘Germany’ itself. The imperial monarchy is glimpsed by turns in its neo-Roman, Christian, trans-Alpine, sub-Carolingian and multi-regnal guises, but hardly ever as a specifically ‘German’ power – another reflection, without doubt, of the weighting of these pieces towards the earlier period, as a later focus would surely have revealed a more obviously, sometimes explicitly, ethnocentric monarchy.

In a way, however, this comparative narrowness is merely the reverse side of the volume's real strength: its thematic, even methodological, unity – always elusive in a collection of papers, doubly so when they treat the fragmented German lands of the Reich. While this collection may not possess anything quite as crude as an ‘agenda’, it certainly has a clear historiographical hinterland, to which the contributors respond in broadly comparable ways. It comes at an interesting moment. For several decades now, a major theme in scholarship, German and Anglophone, on the Reich has been the face-to-face dealings of early- and high-medieval emperors with their secular and spiritual nobilities. It is an approach to which such luminaries as Leyser and Reuter pinned their colours. Its reigning German doyen, Gerd Althoff, insists that the empire's high politics are best viewed not through a concern with government or search for ‘the state’ but by reconstructing the ‘rules of the game’ governing the (highly ritualised) personal interactions of its ruling stratum. Recently, however, this powerful model has been challenged by Philippe Buc, who denies the very accessibility to historians of those truths which Althoff and others have claimed to discern in the written sources. The troubling yet – as it turns out – fruitful shades of Althoff and Buc alike flit constantly around these papers, which seem to be striving after a place incorporating, yet also transcending, the perspectives of both.

To a large extent they succeed, and in doing so adumbrate some important new questions and possibilities for exploration. A conspicuous strength is the openness of contributors to a wide range of sources, coupled with the imaginative exploitation of more traditional material. As a result, these pieces do much both to transcend the limitations of Althoff's political symbolism and to evade Buc's methodological objections. For Simon MacLean, it is precisely the contest of narratives around Charles the Fat's strange behaviour at Frankfurt in 873 which gives the key to that event's likely meaning (as an egregious and confusing breach of Althoff's ‘rules’). Eric Goldberg's essay uses a single artefact to illuminate the, conspicuously gendered, representational resources at the disposal of a Carolingian queen, as well as her probable motives for deploying them. As seamstress, and head of a royal household responsible for hospitality, Queen Emma was able through the gift of a belt – a deeply symbolic object – to make an eloquent ideological statement, with little recourse to (the male preserve of) political literacy. Jeffrey Ashcroft draws on vernacular lyric poetry to display the Hohenstaufen monarchy in a more intimate and altogether less masterful light than that familiar from more stately media. A number of papers effectively combine different kinds of ‘representation’ – through art objects, gestures, itineraries and written texts. Henry Cohn examines visual portrayals of the prince-electors as an index of their changing place in the empire's constitutional affairs at the end of the Middle Ages. For essays dealing with ideas and concepts, these often have a pleasingly concrete texture. We hear the clatter of Charles the Fat's sword-belt hitting the ground and his anguished cries of ‘woe, woe!’, as he renounces the world in MacLean's essay. David Warner's description of an imperial assembly (at Ravenna in 967) as ‘a kind of living ruler portrait’ (p. 135) is characteristic of the boldness with which these papers move conceptually between genres. Ideas too are treated as artefacts, ascribed a hard, material reality – an approach well displayed in Hans-Werner Goetz's essay, which argues forcefully for crediting Carolingian writers with a fully-formed conception of state (a forcefulness somewhat undercut, however, by that word's placing throughout in inverted commas!).

The contributors show an enterprising readiness to embrace the ‘multi-vocal approach’ to representation urged by Warner (p. 127). Messages from ‘the centre’ (wherever, in the intensely de-centralised Reich that was) had to subsist in a competitive economy of representation, in which others too had things to say and ways of saying them. Nor, as these papers repeatedly acknowledge, was ‘audience’ a mere inert mass. Warren Brown traces the impact of Carolingian imperialism in remote Bavaria, where scribes combined receptiveness to the court's shifting language with selective myopia, robust independence of mind and personal idiosyncrasies. Archbishop Jakob of Trier's subject villagers and townspeople were, as Bojcov shows, well capable of bending the resources of ritual to their own agendas in their customary encounters with their lord. These are rewarding and thought-provoking studies. And it might even be, as Björn Weiler's paper (on Frederick ii in the north) tantalisingly suggests, that the notorious weakness of monarchy in Germany, far from diminishing German political culture on the traditional view, served in complex ways to heighten and enrich it.