ISBN10: 0199693072, ISBN13: 9780199693078, [publisher: Oxford University Press, Oxford] Hardcover Hardcover. Germany and the Holy Roman Empire offers a new interpretation of the development of German-speaking central Europe and the Holy Roman Empire or German Reich, from the great reforms of 1495-1500 to its dissolution in 1806 after the turmoil of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Going against the notion that this was a long period of decline, Joachim Whaley shows how imperial institutions developed in response to the crises of the sixteenth andseventeenth centuries, notably the Reformation and Thirty Years War, and assesses the impact of international developments on the Reich. Central themes are the tension between Habsburg aspirations to create aGerman monarchy and the desire of the German princes and cities to maintain their traditional rights, and how the Reich developed the functions of a state during this period. The first single-author account of German history from the Reformation to the early nineteenth century since Hajo Holborn's study written in the 1950s, it also illuminates the development of the German territories subordinate to the Reich. Whaley explores the implications of the Reformation andsubsequent religious reform movements, both Protestant and Catholic, and the Enlightenment for the government of both secular and ecclesiastical principalities, the minor territories of counts and knightsand the cities. The Reich and the ...
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