An Empire of Communication

Joachim Whaley’s two volumes on the Holy Roman Empire constitute what is undoubtedly the best work on the topic currently available on the European market. Of course, we already have a wide variety of historical accounts of the Empire, but Whaley surpasses all of them. Research into the history of the Holy Roman Empire has a long tradition, in particular after it experienced a surge of interest in the 1970s thanks to Karl Otmar von Arentin, Peter Moraw and Volker Press. Subsequent research has focused on institutions such as the Imperial Diet, the Imperial Courts and the Imperial Circles. Between the late 1990s and the early 2000s, new impetus was lent to the history of the Empire by Georg Schmidt and, above all, by Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger. Whereas Schmidt, following in the footsteps of earlier constitutional historical research, conceived of a new model of complementary statehood in the case of the old Empire, 1 Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger’s Des Kaisers alte Kleider adopted a cultural historical approach. 2 Building on the concept of symbolic communication, Stollberg-Rilinger argues that the constitution of the old Empire was grounded in public, ritual deeds and that the Empire itself was held together by attendance at these ceremonial ritual occasions. Compared with these groundbreaking new interpretations of the Empire, Whaley pursues a different path. His primary concern is to provide an overview of ‘the evolution of German-speaking Central Europe within the framework of the Holy Roman Empire from the late fifteenth to the early nineteenth century’ (vol. 1, p. 1).

Ancient history · Archaeology · Byzantine studies · Constitution · Empire · Fifteenth · German · Political science · Roman Empire · Sociology · Classics · Historical Geopolitical and Social Dynamics · Historical, Literary, and Cultural Studies · History · Law · Medieval Literature and History