Abstract
William D. Godsey, Jr., has already established himself as a leading authority of the central European nobility during the revolutionary age. In this new study, he adds substantially to his reputation with an acute analysis of the divergent paths that German and Habsburg nobles took in redefining the “nation” with which they identified. For a vehicle he has selected a cross-section of the 350 families of imperial knights that played such a pivotal role in Franconian, Rhenish, and Swabian imperial circles during the prerevolutionary era. The resulting prosopographical analysis makes extensive use of manuscript collections from a score of archives scattered across Germany, Austria, and the Czech Republic as well as a plethora of published primary and secondary sources. The result is a detailed reconstruction of the cultural ambience of the Reichsritterschaft, several of whose families he features as examples of a cultural odyssey that spanned the course of the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars.
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