R. J. W. Evans and Peter H. Wilson have gathered a distinguished international group of scholars for a volume of essays that approach the early modern Holy Roman Empire from a consciously transnational perspective. The book is divided into five main sections—Turning Points (with essays by Lothar Höbelt, Peter Schröder, and Wolfgang Burgdorf); Habsburg Governance (Olivier Chaline, Jeroen Duindam, Jaroslav Pánek, Petr Mat'a, Thomas Winkelbauer); Cores and Peripheries (Sven Externbrink, Nicolette Mout, Blythe Alice Raviola); Neighbours (Robert Frost, Géza Pálffy, Adam Perłakowski, Thomas Munck); and Imperial Culture and Identity (Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Kim Siebenhüner, Friedrich Polleroß)—bookended by the editors' introduction and a brief epilogue by Heinz Duchhardt.

The editors have given their authors considerable autonomy in crafting their contributions, which is a both a strength and a weakness of the volume. On the one hand, the separate essays are almost without exception interesting and highly competent pieces of scholarship that offer insight on a wide array of issues related to the Empire. The ability of a single volume to speak intelligently on topics ranging from military history and foreign relations to literature and visual culture and to deal in detail with countries stretching from Spain to Poland-Lithuania, from Denmark-Norway to Italy, is a welcome asset of the collection and a testament to the richness and diversity of its subject. On the other hand, however, the freedom given to the authors to go in their own directions and set their own parameters has resulted in a set of individual essays that differ—sometimes significantly—in scope and intention and don't always succeed in coming into dialogue with one another to take advantage of the range of expertise on hand to produce a whole larger than the sum of its individual parts. The essays as a group never quite coalesce into a collective voice that advances broader conclusions about the Empire. Though the editors correctly state in their introduction (p. 12) that their volume points to the need to address deeper questions about the Empire through consideration of its non-German portions and relations with its neighbors, the essays themselves provide muted and at times contradictory suggestions on how one would go about doing so. The volume as a whole, for instance, makes little collective effort to wade into the heated debate of what exactly the early modern Empire was—perhaps the central question that has engaged scholars of the Empire over the past decade. When at other points the essays do deal explicitly with hot-button historiographical questions, such as the significance of the Westphalian settlement of 1648, their conclusions are as likely to be at odds with one another as they are to produce a new understanding. When taken as a group, the essays in the volume appear to lack a center of gravity, and a reader comes away from the book feeling as if s/he has learned a good deal about a variety of things but also hard-pressed to articulate exactly how these things would help him or her understand the Empire itself in a different and better way. That this volume does not on its own solve the historiographical conundra attached to something as notoriously complicated as the Empire is no fair criticism, but that it does not marshal its impressive body of scholars into a more coherent intervention into these debates is a sign of untapped potential.

The need for a slightly firmer editorial touch appears in more technical matters as well. The majority of the authors were responsible for producing their own English-language texts, and though all of the essays are readable, several could have benefited from closer editorial and stylistic assistance. The same can be said about the volume's copyediting, including an error in an essay's title that is repeated on its title page, in the table of contents, and on the page headers, and the failure to number the images in the illustrations section despite the fact that they are referenced by number in the essays.

These concerns aside, a series of important themes and positions can be drawn out of the essays that provide students of the Empire with a good deal to think about. First and foremost is the claim that, despite its often negative historiographical reputation, the Empire was both functional and important, and retained its importance—as well as the allegiance of those living in it (Burgdorf)—to the end of its days (it seems no coincidence that the editors chose a map of the Empire in the early nineteenth century for the volume's cover—an atypical and provocative choice). The transnational and comparative elements of the volume are included not to stress the Empire's anachronistic deficiencies in a world of rapidly forming nation-states, but rather to show the Empire as an effective system of collective security (Frost) and vibrant and compelling cultural model (Munck) that could serve as the inspiration for laudable projects (Schröder) and might even have been ahead of rather than behind its times (Duchhardt). The Empire as presented in this volume is dynamic, elastic, flexible, adaptive, and resilient—culturally (Kaufmann) as well as legally and politically—with its unique ability to remain relevant grounded in its protean skill in blurring lines between categories and combining elements in new and creative ways. The volume presents, on balance, a valorizing image of the Empire, contrasted with the selfishness of Prussia that placed its own private good above that of the whole, and with the flawed teleologies of Prussocentric kleindeutsch historiography that misrepresents or overlooks entirely important phenomena regarding the Empire. With this move the volume turns one of the oldest historiographical narratives of the Empire on its head, and contributes to its ongoing historiographical reevaluation.

In many ways, then, this book itself resembles its often confounding subject: composed of diverse and not always easily matched parts that sometimes pull in opposite directions, marked by certain inconsistencies and arcane twists that can leave an observer flustered, having flaws that could have and should have been ironed out, but somehow working surprisingly well in the end.