Associative Political Culture in the Holy Roman Empire: Upper Germany, 1346–1521

In this stimulating and thought-provoking book, Duncan Hardy seeks to reshape how we conceptualize the Holy Roman Empire as a political entity. With particular reference to Upper Germany—the Upper Rhine region stretching (roughly) from Lorraine to Franconia west to east, and from Mainz to Lake Constance north to south—Hardy argues that the Empire can be best understood through the lens of associative political culture, a model which emphasizes associations and horizontal and contractual connections rather than vertical relationships. In a sharp and concise introduction, Hardy makes the value of this approach clear. He identifies the two dominant approaches to conceptualizing the Empire as a political unit: the first, characterizing the Empire as a patchwork of atomized and discreet constitutional territories, that would eventually develop into modern institutional states; the second, presenting the Empire within the framework of an overarching ‘imperial constitution’ (Reichsverfassung), with different elements in society—the ‘emperor’, the ‘princes’, the ‘cities’ and so forth—neatly reified into socio-political groupings (‘estates’), cooperating with and opposing each other as appropriate. In contrast, Hardy uses the framework of associative political culture to highlight the manifold social, political and geographical connections, that sliced vertically and horizontally across the Empire connecting actors and perforating the territorial and societal divides so salient in the historiography, reconfiguring our understanding of the nature of this important polity in the process. Hardy notes that he is not the first historian of Germany to adopt such an approach, emphasizing that scholars have already applied such models to the early medieval and early modern periods, but he is the first to apply the framework to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.