Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yair Mintzker
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Roman Empire ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Political Organization ◽  
The Political ◽  
Entire Life ◽  
Historical Figure ◽  
German Nation ◽  
German Speaking

This introductory chapter discusses how the historical figure of Joseph Süss Oppenheimer—also known as Jew Süss—is incredibly elusive, and any understanding of him must begin with the political and legal regimes under which he lived and died. Oppenheimer spent almost his entire life in the southwest corner of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. In the eighteenth century, the Holy Roman Empire was the general political organization that connected the hundreds of more or less sovereign polities in German-speaking central Europe. Especially important for understanding Oppenheimer's case is the fact that the Empire's members shared a common legal system scholars term “inquisitorial.”

A case of empire envy? German Jesuits meet an Asian mystic in Spanish America

2007 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ulrike Strasser
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Spanish America ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Colonial Mexico ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
German Nation ◽  
German Speaking ◽  
Catarina De San Juan

This essay deals with the hagiographic afterlife of Catarina de San Juan, the seventeenth-century slave from Asia who became a renowned mystic in colonial Mexico, in writings by German Jesuits, notably Joseph Stöcklein’s popular Welt-Bott. Why and how was Catarina de San Juan’s story told for a German-speaking audience in Central Europe? The specific German appropriations of her vita suggest that missionary writings could serve as a transmission belt for ‘colonial fantasies’, linking the early modern period when the Holy Roman Empire did not have colonies to the modern period when the German Nation acquired colonial holdings in the Pacific.

STILL A MONSTROSITY? SOME REFLECTIONS ON EARLY MODERN GERMAN STATEHOOD

2006 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 565-576 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER H. WILSON
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Development ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Political Organization ◽  
The Political ◽  
German History ◽  
Political Scientist ◽  
Nation State ◽  
History Of

The German political scientist and philosopher, Samuel von Pufendorf, described the Holy Roman Empire in 1667 as a ‘monstrosity’, because it did not fit any of the recognized definitions of a state. The issue of the Empire's statehood has been the most important consideration in its historiography in recent decades: was it a state? If so, what kind? This review addresses these questions by examining how the debate on the Empire is related to wider controversies surrounding German history, the contemporary process of European integration, and about political organization in general. It explains how these debates are rooted in the political and religious disputes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that still influence how the history of the Empire is written today. The four principal modern interpretations are identified and assessed: the Empire as a ‘failed nation state’, as a federation, and, more recently, as an ‘Empire-State’ or a ‘Central Europe of the Regions’. The piece concludes by offering a new explanatory framework to assess the Empire's political development.

Lessing's Creative Misinterpretation of Aristotle

1967 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. A. Dickson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Roman Empire ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Cultural Tradition ◽  
German Enlightenment ◽  
German Speaking ◽  
German Life

German life and letters in the earlier eighteenth century were dominated almost exclusively by French influences. The fragmentation of the German-speaking world within the clumsy and largely imaginary framework of the Holy Roman Empire, the appalling devastation of the Thirty Years War, and the consequent dearth of a living autochthonic cultural tradition had led German intellectuals to look to the impressive achievements of Versailles as the only alternative to barbarism. Leibniz, the greatest philosopher of the German Enlightenment, wrote in Latin and French; Gottsched, an ardent admirer of the Grand Siècle, translated Corneille and Racine and urged imitation of their style upon his fellow countrymen; Frederick the Great, whose indifferent French verse Voltaire had the irksome privilege of correcting, possessed at his palace of Sanssouci (itself an imitation of Versailles) a magnificent library which contained not a single work in German, and though he is said to have had an eloquent command of German expletives, spoke only French at court.

The Law of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Oestmann
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Political Power ◽  
German Law ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
The Political ◽  
Court System ◽  
Ius Commune ◽  
German Nation ◽  
The Status ◽  
Harmonization Of Law

The Holy Roman Empire had no written constitution, but only some basic laws. Seven prince-electors elected the emperor but the political power shifted increasingly to the territories with their secular or ecclesiastical rulers. The empire passed only a few formal laws; however, the Constitutio Criminalis Carolina (1532) became one of the most important criminal codes of early modern Europe. In general, there was a mixture of ius commune, territorial statutes, and local customs. On the other hand, a well-developed court system with the Imperial Chamber Court and the Imperial Aulic Council symbolized the status of Germany as a formal country of rule of law. The harmonization of courts via the privilegia de non appellando and the harmonization of law due to the transmission of files contributed to a relatively homogeneous region of German law even if the political power was split between territories of vastly differing sizes.

Borders and Freedom of Movement in the Holy Roman Empire

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luca Scholz
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Human Mobility ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Free Movement ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
Territorial Expansion ◽  
Freedom Of Movement ◽  
German Nation ◽  
New Perspective

Abstract: Borders and Freedom of Movement in the Holy Roman Empire tells the history of free movement in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, one of the most fractured landscapes in human history. The boundaries that divided its hundreds of territories make the Old Reich a uniquely valuable site for studying the ordering of movement. The focus is on safe conduct, an institution that was common throughout the early modern world but became a key framework for negotiating free movement and its restriction in the Old Reich. The book shows that attempts to escort travellers, issue letters of passage, or to criminalize the use of ‘forbidden’ roads served to transform rights of passage into excludable and fiscally exploitable goods. Mobile populations—from emperors to peasants—defied attempts to govern their mobility with actions ranging from formal protest to bloodshed. Newly designed maps show that restrictions upon moving goods and people were rarely concentrated at borders before the mid-eighteenth century, but unevenly distributed along roads and rivers. In addition, the book unearths intense intellectual debates around the rulers’ right to interfere with freedom of movement. The Empire’s political order guaranteed extensive transit rights, but apologies of free movement and claims of protection could also mask aggressive attempts of territorial expansion. Drawing on sources discovered in more than twenty archives and covering the period between the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth century, the book offers a new perspective on the unstable relationship of political authority and human mobility in the heartlands of old-regime Europe.

COMMUNICATING EMPIRE: THE HABSBURGS AND THEIR CRITICS, 1700–1919

2009 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 117-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. J. W. Evans
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Roman Empire ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
The Other ◽  
Current Debate ◽  
Free Standing ◽  
Power Base ◽  
The One ◽  
At Home

ABSTRACTIn the vibrant current debate about European empires and their ideologies, one basic dichotomy still tends to be overlooked: that between, on the one hand, the plurality of modern empires of colonisation, commerce and settlement; and, on the other, the traditional claim to single and undividedimperiumso long embodied in the Roman Empire and its successor, the Holy Roman Empire, or (First) Reich. This paper examines the tensions between the two, as manifested in the theory and practice of Habsburg imperial rule. The Habsburgs, emperors of the Reich almost continuously through its last centuries, sought to build their own power-base within and beyond it. The first half of the paper examines how by the eighteenth century their ‘Monarchy’, subsisting alongside the Reich, dealt with the associated legacy of empire. After the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806 the Habsburgs could pursue a free-standing Austrian ‘imperialism’, but it rested on an uneasy combination of old and new elements and was correspondingly vulnerable to challenge from abroad and censure at home. The second half of the article charts this aspect of Habsburg government through an age of international imperialism and its contribution to the collapse of the Dual Monarchy in 1918.

scholarly journals Der nordische Fremde: Historische Untersuchung des medialen Schwedenbildes im Heiligen Römischen Reich (1500–1721)

Nordlit ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tobias E. Hämmerle
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
Northern Region ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Northern Regions ◽  
German Speaking ◽  
Modern Mass ◽  
Great Northern War

Until to the beginning of the 17th century the North was rather an unknown and abstract space for the average German-speaking recipient of early modern mass media (for example illustrated broadsheets, newspapers, pamphlets). In the course of the 17th century due to Denmark’s and Sweden’s participation in the Thirty Years War, the northern regions became a central topic in the early modern mass media and therefore forced the recipient to be more aware of it. In the course of the second half of the 17th century the northern kingdoms became less important for the publicists in the Holy Roman Empire and instead they laid their focus on the politics of French and the Ottoman Empire. Thus, the image of the northerners and their stereotypes, which had been introduced to the German speaking readers in the course of the Thirty Years War, lived on until the beginning of the 18th century. Nevertheless, the Great Northern War (1700–1721) brought the people from the northern regions back to the media landscape of the Holy Roman Empire and about the same time the illustrated broadsheet – an almost antiquated genre of mass media that had struggled with the upcoming of the new modern genre ‘newspaper’ – experienced a kind of a renaissance. The aim of this article is to describe how the northern region, with a focus on Sweden, was depicted in early modern mass media between the 15th and the 18th centuries. I will show continuities and changes of the visual and textual representation of ‘northerners’ and ‘Sweden’ in early modern mass media, which were published in the Holy Roman Empire between around 1500 until the end of the Great Northern War in 1721.

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