In this shortened and updated version of his 2003 Habilitationsshrift, accepted by the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, Arno Strohmeyer analyzes in detail the written and physical gestures of obedience and opposition presented by representatives of the estates of Upper and Lower Austria to their Habsburg rulers from the late 1570s until the early 1620s, with some additional attention to the decades before and after. His analysis was the result of a research project funded by the Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft and hosted by the influential research institute Geisteswissenschaftliches Zentrum für Geschichte und Kultur Ostmitteleuropas (GWZO) in Leipzig.

The book provides an important and persuasive alternative to the widely accepted argument presented over half a century ago by the Upper Austrian archivist Hans Sturmberger in his biography of the Upper Austrian politician Georg Erasmus Tschernembl, Georg Erasmus Tschernembl. Religion, Libertät und Widerstand. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Gegenreformation und des Landes ob der Enns (Graz, 1953). In that classic work, Sturmberger argued that his protagonist, influenced as he was by Calvinist and other radical arguments, exercised decisive influence on the course of events leading to the coalition between the Upper Austrian estates and those in nearby Bohemia in the crucial years around the accession of the controversial Archduke Ferdinand in 1619. The Lutheran majority in the estates of Upper Austria and Lower Austria, it was presumed, were hamstrung by their theologically determined docility.

In contrast, Strohmeyer presents a nuanced picture of a rhetoric of politics that was both shifting and circumscribed. He read and analyzed the relevant volumes of the Annalen of the Upper Austrian estates, manuscript volumes of one thousand or more folia now in the Oberösterreichischen Landesarchiv in Linz, as well as the thousands of pages of the newly discovered Religionsbücher der Stände des Landes ob der Enns now in the Archiepiscopal Archive in Vienna. This analysis allowed Strohmeyer to follow the shifting emphases put forward by the rulers and especially by the estates' representatives in the debates over political power that characterized these crucial decades. He is able to convincingly argue that the resistance undertaken by the estates of Upper Austria (and their more conflicted neighbors in Lower Austria) was based not on foreign Western imports but on long-standing elements of a shared language of accommodation and reciprocity.

The core of the study is the analysis of the recorded discussions concerning the Huldigung of the representatives of the estates of Upper and Lower Austria in the later 1570s when Emperor Rudolf II took office, when Emperor Matthias was recognized as territorial ruler in 1608–09, and the particularly controversial decision to recognize the authority of Emperor Matthias's cousin Ferdinand over the emperor's surviving brother Albert in 1619–20. By looking closely at the language employed by the estates' representatives, Strohmeyer is able to identify some continuities, as well as some changes, that allow insight into the ways in which politics were negotiated in this period.

Strohmeyer sees a number of areas of agreement between both sides. These include a common acceptance of some type of contractual conception of authority, a recognition of hereditary rights, some influential and continuing acceptance of “altes Herkommen,” an acceptance of the idea of a common good, and the utilization of family metaphors, particularly as they relate to the role of the father (a mother figure is apparently never mentioned). Within this common arena, however, substantial room for disagreement existed. The estates' representatives also advocated independent positions when it came to the idea of the free exercise of religion—which normally meant the exercise of the religions agreed on at Augsburg in 1555—and a right to self-defense that grew out of the disputed transition of authority around 1620.

Strohmeyer has convincingly shown that there was more to the nobles' resistance to their Habsburg rulers than a Calvinist-influenced ideology. He points out that “customary law,” as well as the past or tradition, was created, constructing entities whose shape shifted according to the specific needs of the moment. The appeal to the past, which was so important to many of the estates' representatives' arguments, was what Strohmeyer describes as “historical alchemy,” but it was also a pragmatic, secular type of history that still stands as the foundation for what “History” is today. The negotiations of the past have led to the past of the present, and Strohmeyer's Habilitationsschrift provides help in understanding some significant steps along this way.