Nahbeziehungen bei Hof—Manifestationen des Vertrauens. Karrieren in reichsfürstlichen Diensten am Ende des Mittelalters by Jan Hirschbiegel, and: The Emperor's Old Clothes: Constitutional History and the Symbolic Language of the Holy Roman Empire by Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger

Abstract

Reviewed by: Nahbeziehungen bei Hof—Manifestationen des Vertrauens. Karrieren in reichsfürstlichen Diensten am Ende des Mittelalters by Jan Hirschbiegel, and: The Emperor's Old Clothes: Constitutional History and the Symbolic Language of the Holy Roman Empire by Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger Heikki Lempa Nahbeziehungen bei Hof—Manifestationen des Vertrauens. Karrieren in reichsfürstlichen Diensten am Ende des Mittelalters. By Jan Hirschbiegel. Cologne: Böhlau, 2015. Pp. 417. Cloth €52.90. ISBN 978-3412223317. The Emperor's Old Clothes: Constitutional History and the Symbolic Language of the Holy Roman Empire. By Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger. New York: Berghahn, 2015. Pp. x + 332. Cloth $120.00. ISBN 978-1782388050. The early modern era is like another country, and as with any country it is the foreignness and difference that makes it so attractive, awarding it a special place in historical and sociological imagination. The theories of Max Weber, Norbert Elias, Michel Foucault, and Jürgen Habermas were impossible to conceive without deep interventions into the early modern. For students of modern Germany the works of George Mosse (The Image of Man, 1996), Bob Scribner (For the Sake of Simple Folk, 1981), and Lyndal Roper (Oedipus and the Devil, 1994) have become permanent sources of inspiration. It is not only the fascination with the other but also the theoretical acumen of the authors that has drawn the students of the modern era and modernity to the early modern. Jan Hirschbiegel's and Barabara Stollberg-Rilinger's books contribute to this steady stream of interest in the early modern. Written by a historian of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this review focuses on their theoretical and larger methodological contributions for a more general reader. The focus of both authors' attention is on the transformation of German courts in the Holy Roman Empire between 1500 and 1800. Their ambition is to reexamine the very foundations of the courts through the microstructure of human behavior. In fact, rather than sites of political action, the courts appear in their studies as laboratories of interpersonal relationships expressed in symbols and rituals. The common theme is the accumulation of social capital (Bourdieu, Distinction, 1984) and its transformation into political power. The actors acquire and lose status or honor; they negotiate and use the relationship of trust. In short, their attention centers on the emotional economies of individual actors and courts. But here end the commonalities between these two works. The authors approach their source materials quite differently. Whereas Hirschbiegel's study attempts an exhaustive synchronic account of German courts around 1500, Stollberg-Rilinger's is a sweeping diachronic analysis of four cases that represent important junctures in the development of the Holy Roman Empire between 1495 and 1765. Hirschbiegel argues that in early modern culture trust was a foundational category for "reciprocally constituted social exchange" (56), and it was not an invention of [End Page 407] the modern era (77). It retains its status in modern society as the social capital of an individual (68), although the intimacy of personal trust has been replaced with the formality of trust in a system (329). Hirschbiegel's theoretical framework borrows from Norbert Elias (The Court Society, 1983), Ute Frevert (Vertrauensfragen, 2013), Pierre Bourdieu (Distinction, 1984), and especially Niklas Luhmann (Vertrauen, 1968). The author begins with an exhaustive discussion of the conceptual dimensions of trust, useful for any work on the historical development of trust and other close relations (Nahbebeziehungen). Yet the promise of the introduction leaves the reader with a certain sense of disappointment when reading the subsequent chapters as a result of his prosopographical approach. He delineates a carefully selected and researched group of individuals from the courts in the Holy Roman Empire. The systematic analysis covers first the courts of the electors and then moves to the courts of the princes of the church, to the royal and imperial courts, and finally to the courts of the princes of the empire. Here the discussion comes across as a systematic record of individual trust relationships in courts. A deeper analysis is missing and Hirschbiegel provides no links to the sophisticated theoretical framework developed in the introduction. The author then offers two case studies in which trust relationships are discussed in detail...