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Parliaments, Estates and

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Ritual and Ceremonial in Early Modern

European Politics as a Dimension of
a Cultural History of Representative
Institutions and Constitutional
Government: An introduction to the
scholarship of Barbara Stollberg-
Rilinger on representative institutions
in early modern Germany with its
inclusion of symbolic-expressive
communication through ritual and
ceremonial in a cultural history of
politics
Joachim Stieber
Published online: 30 Nov 2012.

To cite this article: Joachim Stieber (2012) Ritual and Ceremonial in Early Modern European Politics
as a Dimension of a Cultural History of Representative Institutions and Constitutional Government:
An introduction to the scholarship of Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger on representative institutions in
early modern Germany with its inclusion of symbolic-expressive communication through ritual and
ceremonial in a cultural history of politics, Parliaments, Estates and Representation, 32:2, 171-187,
DOI: 10.1080/02606755.2012.719700

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 REVIEW ARTICLE

Ritual and Ceremonial in Early Modern European

Politics as a Dimension of a Cultural History of
Representative Institutions and Constitutional
Government: An introduction to the scholarship of
Downloaded by [The University of Manchester Library] at 13:53 10 October 2014

Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger on representative

institutions in early modern Germany with its
inclusion of symbolic-expressive communication
through ritual and ceremonial in a cultural history of
politics

JOACHIM STIEBER

The introduction to the scholarship of Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger that follows was

prompted by the papers of a conference, Zelebrieren und Verhandeln, edited by Tim
Neu, Michael Sikora and Thomas Weller, held in March 2007 at the Netherlands
Institute for Advanced Study in Wassenaar. The conference volume, reviewed
below, reflects the research of Section C1, ‘Zur symbolischen Konstituierung von
Rang und Stand in der Frühen Neuzeit’, directed by Professor Barbara Stoll-
berg-Rilinger of the University of Münster as part of the ‘Sonderforschungsbereich’
(Special Research Project) SFB 496: ‘Symbolische Kommunikation und
gesellschaftliche Wertesysteme vom Mittelalter bis zur Französchen Revolution’
from 2000 through 2011. The three editors of Zelebrieren und Verhandeln express
in the preface their thanks to Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger for her support of the
conference, indirectly also paying tribute to her scholarship in defining and
demonstrating how the study of symbolic-expressive communication in ritual
and ceremonial accompanying negotiation and decision-making can enhance the
understanding of representative institutions in early modern Europe.

Parliaments, Estates & Representation 32, November 2012. Published for the International Commission
for the History of Representative & Parliamentary Institutions by Routledge/Taylor & Francis. # 2012
International Commission for the History of Representative and Parliamentary Institutions/Commission
Internationale pour l’ Histoire des Assemblées d’ États. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02606755.2012.719700
 172 Joachim Stieber

This makes it appropriate that a review of Zelebrieren und Verhandeln should

begin with an introduction to Stollberg-Rilinger’s scholarship on representative
institutions in the early modern Empire which, in her later work, integrates the
interpretation of ritual and ceremonial in a cultural history of politics that has
recently become better known outside of Germany through her chapter ‘On the
Function of Rituals in the Holy Roman Empire’ in The Holy Roman Empire
1495 – 1806 (2011).1 In that chapter, based on her book Des Kaisers alte Kleider
(2008), Stollberg-Rilinger interprets disputes over ritual and ceremonial involving
members of the estates at the imperial diets (Reichstage) as acts of symbolic com-
munication in which the participants affirmed their constitutional rank and status
in the Empire. Stollberg-Rilinger presents the analysis of ritual and ceremonial
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in her later scholarship as a complement to traditional perspectives such as consti-

tutional law by contract or legislation, the constitutional praxis of collective
decision-making, and the theoretical and discursive interpretation of such acts by
scholars of law and politics, which together comprise a cultural history of early
modern politics.2

HISTORY IN THE TRADITIONAL MODE: RATIONAL STATE-BUILDING –

REPRESENTATIVE INSTITUTIONS IN POLITICAL THOUGHT AND
CONSTITUTIONAL LAW IN THE EMPIRE
Stollberg-Rilinger began her career as a historian with a dissertation Der Staat als
Maschine (1986) on the mechanistic conception of political institutions in the writ-
ings of eighteenth-century German theorists of a more rational political order, such
as Christian Wolff and J.H.G. Justi, who wrote from the perspective of principali-
ties like Brandenburg Prussia, the Habsburg domains in Austria and Electoral
Saxony.3 This was followed by her habilitation thesis Vormünder des Volkes?
(1994) on the concept of representation in the territorial estates (Landstände) of
the Empire in the eighteenth century.4 In that work, published in 1999, Stoll-
berg-Rilinger delineates two forms (or ‘languages’) of legal and political discourse
in the eighteenth-century Empire. The first was the discourse of public law which
sought to legitimate contemporary issues of constitutional law by citing historical
precedents from the medieval Empire, a methodological approach based on
Hermann Conring’s demonstration (1643) that the medieval emperors, their title
notwithstanding, had never claimed to rule by Roman law as defined in the
Justinian codification.5 The second form of discourse was the conceptual language
of secularized natural law which provided the norms of reference for the

1
B. Stollberg-Rilinger, ‘On the Function of Rituals in the Holy Roman Empire’, in R.J.W. Evans,
M. Schlaich and P.H. Wilson (eds), The Holy Roman Empire 1495– 1806, (Oxford 2011), pp. 359–73.
The chapter is an epitome of her book Des Kaisers alte Kleider: Verfassungsgeschichte und Symbolsprache
des alten Reiches (Munich, 2008), of which a French translation will be published in 2012.
2
Stollberg-Rilinger, ‘Function of Rituals’, p. 360; idem., Kaisers alte Kleider, p. 18.
3
B. Stollberg-Rilinger, Der Staat als Maschine: Zur politischen Metaphorik des absoluten Fürstenstaates (His-
torische Forschungen 30) (Berlin, 1986).
4
B. Stollberg-Rilinger, Vormünder des Volkes? Konzepte landständischer Repräsentation in der Spätphase des
Alten Reiches (Historische Forschungen 64) (Berlin, 1999).
5
Stollberg-Rilinger, Vormünder, pp. 80, 235 –6.
 Review article 173

contemporary political order. With lucid strokes Stollberg-Rilinger indicates how

the writings of Thomas Hobbes on the construction of sovereign political authority
to form civil society out of a prehistoric state of nature were adapted in the Empire
by Samuel Pufendorf (1672) and Christian Thomasius (1705) to legitimate and
strengthen, on the grounds of reason, the power of the territorial prince in establish-
ing the peace necessary for civil society.6 The new conception of a secularized
natural law did not at once completely replace older models of political order
derived from the Bible or from classical antiquity, particularly Aristotle’s Politics.
However, by the 1740s Stollberg-Rilinger notes a growing concern to limit the
power of territorial princes. Citing jurists like Christian Wolff and his followers,
she points to their shift of approach to historical institutions like the Landstände
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of the principalities of the Empire, whose origins and status they began to interpret
in the ‘language’ of natural law as based on agreements.7
In her systematic account of the extensive literature of German public law with
respect to the territorial estates in the mid-eighteenth century, Stollberg-Rilinger
particularly discusses David Georg Strube, the author of De statuum provincialium
origine (1735), whose influential defence of the corporate rights of the Landstände
was still cited with approval by Johann Jakob Moser in his Neues teutsches Staatsrecht
(1769) and by Johann Stephan Pütter in his Beyträge zum Teuschen Staats- und
Fürsten-Rechte (1777) in the next generation.8 These jurists – with careers in the
universities, as well as in the service of territorial princes and of the Landstände
– did not, however, invoke natural law to challenge the historic rights of the
princes and of the territorial estates. As Stollberg-Rilinger points out, the hereditary
landed nobility and prelates in the Landstände had traditionally claimed to rep-
resent the people based on the legal fiction of medieval corporate representation
theory that, as the pre-eminent members of the territory, they were considered,
pars pro toto, to be identical with it.9 Accordingly, the hereditary nobility and pre-
lates in the Landstände often claimed a role as defenders of the common good and
as guardians of the people (Vormünder des Volkes) – doing so as members of a cor-
poration of traditional landlords, rather than on the basis of a mandate from the
people.

THE DEBATE OVER THE STATUS OF THE LANDSTÄNDE AND THE RISE
OF A POLITICAL ‘PUBLIC SPHERE’ IN THE EMPIRE
The claim of the members of the Landstände to be the traditional guardians of the
people came to be defended on new grounds in the second half of the eighteenth
century. As Stollberg-Rilinger makes evident, under the growing influence of
natural law theories that political power was derived from the people, German
jurists of public (constitutional) law began to attribute to the privileged members

6
Stollberg-Rilinger, Vormünder, pp. 112– 4.
7
Stollberg-Rilinger, Vormünder, pp. 115– 20.
8
Stollberg-Rilinger, Vormünder, pp. 56–76; Strube, De statuum provincialium origine, pp. 77–84, 100;
Moser reiterating Christian Wildvogel (1711) and Strube; Pütter, Beyträge, pp. 98–9.
9
Stollberg-Rilinger, Vormünder, III.2: ‘Repräsentation in der Korporationstheorie’, pp. 81–91,
especially, pp. 82– 5.
 174 Joachim Stieber

of the Landstände a silent primordial mandate from the people to represent

them.10 Once the link between representation and mandate had become
common coin, this led to debates for a reform of the composition of the territorial
estates, stimulated by the revolutions in Brabant and in France in 1789.11 As Stoll-
berg-Rilinger notes, the transformation of the Estates-General in France through
the ‘doubling’ of the representatives of the Third Estate and subsequent incorpor-
ation of those of the Estates of the Clergy and the Nobility to form the National
Assembly was followed with keen interest. However, in the Empire the traditional
members of the territorial estates resisted all proposals to broaden their member-
ship, especially as the German princes, nobles and segments of the educated
public reacted against the French Revolution in its anti-monarchical phase.12 Stoll-
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berg-Rilinger concludes her analysis of these developments in the last decade of

the Empire by noting that the Landstände established in the German states
after 1815 retained only the name but no longer the corporate independence vis-
à-vis the princes that had characterized them in the old Empire.
In Vormünder des Volkes? Stollberg-Rilinger adds also a new dimension to the
thesis of Jürgen Habermas on the emergence of a ‘bourgeois’ public sphere in
eighteenth-century Germany.13 Focusing on discourse over public (constitutional)
law, she distinguishes three stages: (1) At the beginning of the century, public law
jurists like Thomasius and Strube still published their works in Latin, primarily for
other academics. (2) After the middle of the century, renowned jurists like Moser
and Pütter began to publish their works in German, but still intended for other
jurists as their readers. (3) Only in the late 1780s, when the reform of the territorial
estates was at issue, August Ludwig Schlözer, author of the Allgemeines StatsRecht
und StatsVerfassungslere (1793) and Carl Friedrich Häberlin, author of the Handbuch
des Teutschen Staatsrechts (1794), began to address in periodicals not only other jurists
but also a wider educated public.14 As Stollberg-Rilinger put it in a subsequent
summary, these jurists of public law shared a common professional ‘language’ in
which they referred to secularized natural law pragmatically to systematize the his-
torical positive law of the Empire, avoiding a confessional stance.15 In an Empire
where the Emperor was regularly a member of a Catholic dynasty, the writings of
these jurists contributed an implicitly Protestant element of confessional neutrality
to the constitutional balance of power and culture that characterized early modern
Germany between the Peace of Westphalia and the French Revolution.

10
Stollberg-Rilinger, Vormünder, pp. 120– 6. See also her distillation of this thesis at a colloquium in
2001: Stollberg-Rilinger,‘Vom Volk übertragene Rechte? Zur naturrechtlichen Umdeutung ständischer
Verfassungsstrukturen im 18. Jahrhundert’, in D. Klippel and E. Müller-Luckner (eds) D. Klippel and
E. Müller-Luckner (eds), Naturrecht und Staat: Politische Funktionen des europäischen Naturrechts (17.–19.
Jahrhundert) (Schriften des Historischen Kollegs. Kolloquien 57) (Munich, 2006), pp. 103 –17, esp.
pp. 109–16. See also Stollberg-Rilinger, ‘Kontinuitätsfiktion’, note 16, infra.
11
Stollberg-Rilinger, Vormünder, pp. 140–151, 152–88.
12
On the defence by the members of the old Landstände of their traditional personal prerogatives in
the 1790’s, see the summary in B. Stollberg-Rilinger, ‘Was heißt landständische Repräsentation?’ in Zeit-
sprünge: Forschungen zur Frühen Neuzeit 4 (2000), pp. 120– 35, esp. pp. 131–4.
13
Stollberg-Rilinger, Vormünder, pp. 40– 44.
14
Stollberg-Rilinger, Vormünder, pp. 40– 44, 213– 20, 190–200.
15
Stollberg-Rilinger, ‘Vom Volk übertragene Rechte?’, as in note 10, supra, pp. 104–108, 117.
 Review article 175

Stollberg-Rilinger’s analysis of the theories and practices of representation in

the German territorial estates between the Peace of Westphalia and the end of
the old order is a major achievement. Based on an enormous body of public law lit-
erature and discourse on political theory, with due attention to their context, the
argument is clearly presented and enlivened by metaphor. In 2006, the year of
the 200th anniversary of the end of the Empire, Stollberg-Rilinger revisited the
issue of a supposed continuity between the Landstände before 1806 and those
after 1815.16 After a condensed analysis of their composition and status in the
old Empire, she notes that by contrast the representative bodies in most of the
German states after 1815 had elected deputies. At the same time, Stollberg-Rilin-
ger rejects historical narratives that seek to establish the historical ‘roots’ of modern
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parliamentary institutions, since they tend to project modern conceptions of politi-

cal representation into the past. Instead, she cites the ‘cultural turn’ in the historical
sciences as a methodological model which she herself had by then adopted. The
institutional discontinuity between the older Landstände and those after 1815 not-
withstanding, the tradition of institutional limits to the power of the prince symbo-
lized by the old Landstände remains as a possible influence on the development of
the new representative institutions after 1815 – for example, in the kingdom of
Württemberg.

THE SHIFT TO THE ANALYSIS OF RITUAL AND CEREMONY AND THE

EXPLORATION OF ANALYTICAL MODELS
In the preface of her habilitation thesis Vormünder des Volkes? (December 1998),
Stollberg-Rilinger indicates that her research interests had by then taken a differ-
ent direction. She had outlined these in the preceding year in the article ‘Zeremo-
niell als politisches Verfahren: Rangordnung und Rangstreit als Strukturmerkmale
des frühneuzeitlichen Reichstags’, which focused on the political function of cer-
emony and ritual in the proceedings of the imperial diet in early modern
times.17 The new perspective and topic of that article resulted 10 years later in
her book Des Kaisers alte Kleider (2008), with its nuanced methodological introduc-
tion and an analysis of changes in the role of ritual over time. This conceptual
refinement of her line of enquiry was the result of exploring models from sociology
and anthropology (ethnography) and evolved into a ‘cultural history of political
phenomena’. The setting for elaborating this approach was the University of
Münster from which Stollberg-Rilinger accepted a call as professor in 1997, and
where she organized conferences that explored interpretative models for her

16
B. Stollberg-Rilinger, ‘Ständische Repräsentation – Kontinuität oder Kontinuitätsfiktion?’ in Zeits-
chrift für Neuere Rechtsgeschichte 28 (2006), pp. 279– 98. See also in this remarkable issue of the ZNR the
article by Martin Heckel on the changes in the status of the established churches in the Empire in the
period 1806–20.
17
B. Stollberg-Rilinger, ‘Zeremoniell als politisches Verfahren: Rangordnung und Rangstreit als
Strukturmerkmale des frühneuzeitlichen Reichstags’, in J. Kunisch (ed.), Neue Studien zur
frühneuzeitlichen Reichsgeschichte (Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung. Beiheft 19) (Berlin, 1997),
pp. 91– 132; followed by a review of new literature on ceremony and ritual: B. Stollberg-Rilinger, ‘Zer-
emoniell, Ritual, Symbol: Neue Forschungen zur symbolischen Kommunikation in Spätmittelalter und
Früher Neuzeit’, Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung 27 (2000), pp. 389 –405.
 176 Joachim Stieber

research. In particular as director of the Section ‘Symbolische Konstituierung von

Stand und Rang’ of the special research project SFB 496 ‘Symbolische Kommuni-
kation und gesellschaftliche Wertesysteme’ at Münster from 2000 until 2011, she
invited younger colleagues and her students to share in the process of exploring
and refining a conceptual framework of her own as well as their research. The
volume Verhandeln und Zelebrieren, to be reviewed below, is a product of this
shared scholarly inquiry.
The conceptual framework of Stollberg-Rilinger’s study of political processes
and institutions in early modern Empire is of general interest, and its development
will be illustrated here by selected publications from her work.18 In the paper Ver-
fassung und Fest on the celebration of constitutional events (1999), she notes that
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the ‘cultural turn’ in historical studies over the preceding 20 years had enriched
the understanding of constitutional acts such as a coronation, a solemn inaugural
entry of a prince, or the opening of a diet by drawing on interpretative models
developed in cultural anthropology.19 Using the inaugural entry of the young Arch-
duke Charles of Habsburg and Burgundy into Bruges in 1515 as an example, Stoll-
berg-Rilinger shows that such ritual celebrations of the public confirmation of
privileges by the prince, and the reciprocal pledges of fealty by vassals and oaths
of obedience by subjects continued to serve in the sixteenth century as a consti-
tution in actu of the links between rulers and their subjects.20 Yet she also points
to changes in attitude on the part of the princes and their ministers brought
about by the increasing use of writing in all aspects of government, so that by
the eighteenth century the succession of princes came to be seen primarily as a
bureaucratic routine at which the people were spectators rather than participants
in a reciprocal confirmation of a constitutional relationship.21
Stollberg-Rilinger’s overview of the changing role of ritual and ceremony
accompanying public political acts in early modern Europe was followed by sys-
tematic exploration of models for the analysis of processes of political decision-
making and of their symbolic communication. This was intended to complement
the traditional focus on constitutional texts and institutions, not to replace it.
The first step was a conference at Münster in 1999 on Vormoderne politische Verfah-
ren, that is, on political modes of procedure in ‘pre-modern’ Europe, a period Stoll-
berg-Rilinger defines as extending ’from the High Middle Ages to the French
Revolution’, whereas she uses ‘early modern’ (Frühe Neuzeit) for the period from
the 1490s to the French Revolution, reflecting the two predominant conceptualiz-
ations of the period.22 The historical topics of the conference on Vormoderne

18
For a curriculum vitae of Prof. Dr. B. Stollberg-Rilinger, with a list of her publications, see http://
www.uni-muenster.de/Geschichte/hist-sem/NZ-G/L1/personen/stollberg-rilinger.html.
19
B. Stollberg-Rilinger, ‘Verfassung und Fest. Überlegungen zur festlichen Inszenierung vormoder-
ner und moderner Verfassungen’, in H.-Jürgen Becker (ed.), Interdependenzen zwischen Verfassung und
Kultur: Tagung der Vereinigung für Verfassungsgeschichte in Hofgeismar vom 22. 3. – 24. 3. 1999. (Der Staat.
Beiheft 15) (Berlin, 2003), pp. 7 –49.
20
Stollberg-Rilinger, ‘Verfassung und Fest’, pp. 17– 22.
21
Stollberg-Rilinger, ‘Verfassung und Fest’, pp. 26– 30.
22
B. Stollberg-Rilinger (ed.), Vormoderne politische Verfahren (Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung.
Beiheft 25) (Berlin, 2001). The editor’s definition of pre-modern is at p. 14, note 13. For the recent
 Review article 177

politische Verfahren ranged from the election of bishops and city councillors to
decision-making in the English Parliament and the States General of the
United Provinces of the Netherlands. In addition, there was a paper by
Michael Sikora on the proposition by the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann
in his book Legitimation durch Verfahren that since the mid-nineteenth century
judicial, legislative and administrative decisions in European states are accepted
as legitimate on the basis of what Luhmann calls their ‘autonomy of procedure’,
defined as fixed rules for deliberation and decision-making by majority vote in
a body with a defined number of members.23 Legitimacy as used by Luhmann
refers to the de facto acceptance of a decision as legal – independently of any
claim to validity on the basis of moral or political principle. In her introduction
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to the conference volume Vormoderne politische Verfahren Stollberg-Rilinger

discusses Luhmann’s concept of ‘legitimacy through autonomy of procedure’,
drawing out his distinction between the ‘instrumental-technical’ and the
‘symbolic-expressive’ dimensions of procedure.24 She finds such a distinction
especially suitable for the analysis of politics in pre-modern Europe, where
the ‘symbolic-expressive’ dimension of procedure enacted in ritual and ceremo-
nial that confirmed (and ‘represented’) the status of a given participant were
often more important to him than the ‘instrumental-technical’ dimension of
the political decision that he rendered legitimate by taking part in it.25 As an
example, she cites the election of prince-bishops in the Empire at which the
freedom of choice of the canons of the cathedral chapter was often limited,
but who participated nonetheless, observing the prescribed ritual as a way of
confirming their status in canon law and their customary privileges as
members of their chapter.
At a colloquium Imperium Romanum – Irregulare Corpus – Teutscher Reichs-Staat,
held at Mainz in September 2001, on conceptions of the Empire in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, Stollberg-Rilinger presented her study of ritual and
ceremony at the imperial diets as an enquiry into the constitution of the Empire
as enacted by its contemporaries. Acknowledging that such a perspective does
not lend itself to creating a usable historical image for the construction of a
German political identity in the present, Stollberg-Rilinger argues for a perspective
of ‘otherness’ (Fremdheit) adopted from anthropology, in the manner of the new cul-
tural history.26 To illustrate such an approach to the study of the constitutional

debate on the period concepts ‘pre-modern’ (1200-1790s), ‘early modern’ (1490s-1790s), and less fre-
quently ‘Óld Europe’ (1200-1800), see: C. Jaser, U. Lotz-Heumann, M. Pohlig (eds), Alteuropa, Vormo-
derne, Neue Zeit: Epochen und Dynamiken der europäischen Geschichte (1200-1800) (Zeitschrift für Historische
Forschung. Beiheft 46) Berlin, 2012.
23
M. Sikora, ‘Der Sinn des Verfahrens. Soziologische Deutungsangebote’, in Vormoderne politische Ver-
fahren, pp. 25–51, esp. pp. 31–51. For Luhmann‘s discussion of ‘autonomy of procedure’, particularly in
courts of law, but implicitly also in legislative bodies, see N. Luhmann, Legitimation durch Verfahren
Frankfurt/Main 1978, 1983), II. ‘Gerichtsverfahren’: 2. ‘Autonomie’, pp. 69–81.
24
Stollberg-Rilinger, ‘Einleitung’, Vormoderne politische Verfahren, pp. 11–23, esp. 16–19.
25
Stollberg-Rilinger, ‘Einleitung’, Vormoderne politische Verfahren, pp. 12, 20–21.
26
B. Stollberg-Rilinger, ‘Die zeremonielle Inszenierung des Reiches, oder: Was leistet der kulturalis-
tische Ansatz für die Reichsverfassungsgeschichte?’, in M. Schnettger (ed.), Imperium Romanum – Irre-
gulare Corpus – Teutscher Reichs-Staat: Das Alte Reich im Verständnis der Zeitgenossen und der Historiographie
 178 Joachim Stieber

order of the Empire, she cites a conflict over precedence at the continuing diet in
Regensburg in 1713 involving the envoy of the estate of the counts (Grafenstand)
who insisted on being treated in the manner accorded to the envoys of princes. Evi-
dently, such an episode – rooted in the hierarchical social order of the pre-modern
Empire – points to differences rather than similarities with present-day social and
political norms. Stollberg-Rilinger posits that clarifying such differences through
the analysis of symbolic-expressive modes of communication will not only lead
to a better understanding of the constitutional order in actu of the early modern
Empire, but also contribute to a better understanding of other periods, including
the present.
Elaborating the foregoing argument two years later (2003) at a conference on
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the diets of the Empire between 1486 and 1613, Stollberg-Rilinger proposed a
‘reversal of perspective’, calling for more attention to the ‘symbolic’ as opposed
to the ‘instrumental’ dimension of political actions. At the same time, she conceded
that such distinctions are adopted for the sake of analysis, while empirically a par-
ticular action and its communication often has both an instrumental and a symbolic
dimension.27 In this context, she noted that whereas modern historians have
focused primarily on the instrumental dimension of decisions taken, recorded
only briefly in the sources, contemporaries reported the symbolic dimension of
the proceedings often at greater length, focusing on who was there and how they
represented their status as individuals (ut singuli) and as members of the Empire
as a whole (ut universi).
In her introduction to Vormoderne Politische Verfahren, Stollberg-Rilinger had
emphasized the link between the ‘instrumental-technical’ and the ‘symbolic-
expressive’ aspects of procedure, by playing on their common semantic root in
German: making (herstellen) a decision and at the same time through that act repre-
senting (darstellen) constitutional status.28 Four years later, she reiterated this con-
ceptual vocabulary of ‘making’ decisions while ‘representing’ status, illustrating it
with reference to a session of the territorial estates (Landtag) of the Electorate and
Archbishopric of Cologne.29 In this context, she notes that in view of the general
absence of ‘autonomy of procedure’ in pre-modern Europe (that is, of decision-
making by majority vote in bodies with a defined number of members), the ‘instru-
mental-technical’ mode of procedure rarely existed in pre-modern representative
institutions. Thus, necessary but controversial decisions that required a consensus

(Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für Europäische Geschichte Mainz – Beiheft 57) (Mainz, 2002),
pp. 233–46, esp. 233–35, 243– 6 on the approach of cultural history and its relevance to the history of
the pre-modern Empire.
27
B. Stollberg-Rilinger, ‘Die Symbolik der Reichstage: Überlegungen zu einer Perspektivenumkehr’,
in M. Lanzinner and A. Strohmeyer (eds), Der Reichstag 1486– 1613: Kommunikation – Wahrnehmung –
Öffentlichkeiten (Schriftenreihe der Historischen Kommission bei der Bayerischen Akademie der Wis-
senschaften 73) (Göttingen, 2006), pp. 77– 93; on the ‘reversal of perspective’, pp. 89– 90.
28
Stollberg-Rilinger, ‘Einleitung’, Vormoderne politische Verfahren, p. 12.
29
B. Stollberg-Rilinger, ‘Herstellung und Darstellung politischer Einheit: Instrumentelle und symbo-
lische Dimensionen politischer Repräsentation im 18. Jahrhundert’, in J. Andres, A. Geisthövel and
M. Schwengelbeck (eds), Die Sinnlichkeit der Macht: Herrschaft und Repräsentation seit der Frühen Neuzeit
(Frankfurt/Main 2005), pp. 73–92, esp. 77, 88.
 Review article 179

could not be decided by a simple vote, but often had to be reached through
extended negotiation accompanied by the ‘symbolic expression’ of collegial
participation.

THE SFB 496 ON SYMBOLIC COMMUNICATION AND SOCIAL VALUE

SYSTEMS AND THE DEFINITION OF A CULTURAL HISTORY OF
POLITICAL PHENOMENA
Having participated in the special research project SFB 496 ‘Symbolische Kommu-
nikation und gesellschaftliche Wertesysteme’ at Münster since its inception in
2000, Stollberg-Rilinger became its leading member (Sprecher) in 2003. In this
role, she published an article in 2004 in which she presented the concepts, presup-
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positions and direction of research of the SFB 496, together with a critical bibli-
ography.30 At the start, she notes that our understanding of the role played by
symbolic communication in establishing the social order was greatly facilitated
by theoretical models developed by phenomenology, the philosophy of symbolic
forms, linguistics, anthropology and sociology.31 In keeping with this, Stollberg-
Rilinger adopts a definition of communication as a reciprocal act in which a
message is conceptualized, sent, and understood. The message may be conveyed
by speech (oral or written), gesture, conduct, pictorial image or other symbolic
signs that are coded in symbolic ‘languages’ or social norms established in a
given society. She notes that these symbolic ‘languages’ are normally confirmed
or adjusted, but that they can also be undermined in revolutionary times.32 When-
ever an act of speech or other form of symbolic communication is particularly
emphatic, it may be described as a ‘performance’.
Stollberg-Rilinger’s article outlining the research program of the SFB 496 on
‘symbolic communication’ had been preceded in 2004 by a conference she had orga-
nized in October 2003, entitled ‘Was heißt Kulturgeschichte des Politischen’, held
under the auspices of the SFB 496.33 In her introduction to the papers of that con-
ference, published in 2005, Stollberg-Rilinger cites the variety of approaches to a
‘new cultural history’ initially gathered by Lynn Hunt in English and subsequently
discussed in an extensive literature in German.34 Adopting the broad definition of

30
B. Stollberg-Rilinger, ‘Symbolische Kommunikation in der Vormoderne: Begriffe – Thesen – For-
schungsperspektiven’, Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung 31 (2004), pp. 489–527. French translation in
Trivum: Revue franco-allemande de sciences humaines et sociales 2 (2008); ‘La communication symbolique
à l’époque pré-moderne. Concepts, thèses, perspectives de recherche’. URL http://www.trivium.
revues.org.html. Spanish translation in S. Hensel (ed.), Constitución, poder y representacion: Dimensiones
simbolicas del cambio politico en la época de la Independencia mexicana (Madrid, 2011), pp. 33–77. See
also a ‘Kurzfassung’ for the feuilleton-reading public: B. Stollberg-Rilinger and G. Althoff, ‘Zeichen
nicht Wunder: Weshalb wir symbolische Kommunikation erforschen’, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 20–21
March 2004, p. 22.
31
Stollberg-Rilinger, ‘Symbolische Kommunikation’, pp. 490 –3, with notes 3– 8, 13–14, citing the
works of A. Schütz, E. Cassirer, F. de Saussure, E. Durkheim, M. Weber and N. Luhmann, as well as
the literature on the ‘performative turn’ in historical studies since the 1980s.
32
Stollberg-Rilinger, ‘Symbolische Kommunikation’, pp. 494– 5, with notes 15–17.
33
B. Stollberg-Rilinger, ‘Einleitung: Was heißt Kulturgeschichte des Politischen?’, in B. Stollberg-
Rilinger (ed.), Was heißt Kulturgeschichte des Politischen? (Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung, Beiheft
35), (Berlin, 2005), pp. 9–24.
 180 Joachim Stieber

culture derived in the ‘new cultural history’ from anthropology, implicitly including
her own focus on the symbolic-expressive dimension of politics, Stollberg-Rilinger
proposes a definition of ‘cultural history’ not in terms of its subject, but in terms
of its perspective of ‘otherness’ (Perspektive der Fremdheit) in which all values, insti-
tutions and actions are viewed as constructed by symbolic communication in social
interaction. The dimension of ‘symbolic communication’ of the SFB 496 is implicitly
placed in 2005 under the heading of the ‘new cultural history’, with references to the
philosophy of symbolic forms, phenomenological sociology, and theories of
symbolically meaningful actions in sociology and anthropology.35
Stollberg-Rilinger regards such a mode of inquiry as particularly suited to the
study of a pre-modern society in which the institutional structure is only partially
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established in written form and continually reconstituted and implicitly confirmed

through public ceremonial acts of a legislative, judicial or administrative nature
which function as a constitution in actu. As a result, she rejects the definition of a
cultural history of political phenomena as concerned only with the incidental and
ornamental aspects of politics or with unmasking staged deception through pre-
modern or modern forms of communication.36 In a concluding overview of the
role of symbolic communication during the transition from medieval to modern
times, Stollberg-Rilinger notes that even after the adoption of written constitutions
at the end of the eighteenth century, these texts were celebrated in symbolic forms
reminiscent of the treatment of texts in the Middle Ages.37

THE CULTURAL HISTORY OF POLITICAL PHENOMENA AND

COMMUNICATION THEORY
Reflecting on the variety of approaches current under the labels of ‘cultural history
of the political phenomena’ and ‘new political history’, Stollberg-Rilinger observes
that they share the perspective that modes of procedure in politics are not to be
taken as self-evident but require analysis as reciprocal processes of communication
and attributions of meaning that normally maintain – but, on occasion, also under-
mine – the political and social order.38 The foregoing presuppositions and perspec-
tives for a new cultural history of political institutions and processes initially
delineated between 2003 and 2005 in German were summarized by Stollberg-
Rilinger in English in 2009 in her article ‘The Impact of Communication
Theory on the Analysis of the Early Modern Statebuilding Processes’.39 Here,
she adopts the term ‘communication theory’ to refer to the analysis of institutions

34
Stollberg-Rilinger, ‘Kulturgeschichte des Politischen’, pp. 9 –14; p. 9, note 1; L. Hunt (ed.), The New
Cultural History (Berkeley, 1989) and comparable literature in German.
35
Stollberg-Rilinger, ‘Symbolische Kommunikation’, pp. 490– 1, notes 3– 9; Stollberg-Rilinger, ‘Kul-
turgeschichte des Politischen’, pp. 10–11, notes 5– 6, with references to seminal texts by E. Cassirer,
A. Schütz, M. Weber and C. Geertz.
36
Stollberg-Rilinger, ‘Kulturgeschichte des Politischen’, pp. 15– 16.
37
Stollberg-Rilinger, ‘Symbolische Kommunikation’, pp. 516– 17.
38
Stollberg-Rilinger, ‘Kulturgeschichte des Politischen’, pp. 22– 4.
39
B. Stollberg-Rilinger, ‘The Impact of Communication Theory on the Analysis of the Early Modern
Statebuilding Processes’, in W. Blockmans, A. Holenstein and J. Mathieu (eds), Empowering Interactions:
Political Cultures and the Emergence of the State in Europe 1300– 1900 (Farnham, 2009), pp. 313 –18.
 Review article 181

as constantly constructed and re-adapted by attributions of validity communicated

not only by spoken and written language but by symbolic communication in signs,
rituals, and ceremonies.40 The reader will be struck by the multifaceted interactive
nature of the process of political communication and state-building that Stollberg-
Rilinger has articulated since her publication of Der Staat als Maschine (1986) in
which she had delineated the mechanistic perspective on politics of major archi-
tects of the early modern state in Europe.

‘VALUE SYSTEMS’ IN PRE-MODERN EUROPEAN SOCIETY: A PROCESS OF

EXCHANGE?
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In her presentation of the research program of the SFB 496 in 2004, Stollberg-
Rilinger had focused predominantly on ‘symbolic communication’ before turning
to the dimension of ‘value systems in society’ (gesellschaftliche Wertesysteme), noting
that these, like language, are constructed in social interaction. Here, she empha-
sizes the value of hierarchy in pre-modern European society, accompanied by an
all-pervasive pressure for consensus, though mitigated in theology by the insis-
tence on the equality of all believers before God, a principle that came more
fully to the fore in the discourse of radical reformers by the seventeenth century.
In her introduction to the papers of a SFB 496 conference on ‘Conflicts of
Values – Conflicts of Interpretation’, held in 2005, Stollberg-Rilinger subsequently
cautioned that values as the motive for an action can rarely be reconstructed in the
pre-modern era and that the historian can only analyze the discourse concerning
values.41 Continuing this line of argument in her paper ‘Historians and Values’
(‘Die Historiker und die Werte’), published in 2007, Stollberg-Rilinger proposes
that historians study concepts of value in a given society as a ‘comprehensive
societal process of the exchange (Austauschprozess) of material and moral goods of
value (Güter)’. Instead of studying values in the abstract, historians should
focus their research on how values are articulated in discourse and made manifest
in deeds.42 As models she cites E.P. Thompson’s study of the ‘moral economy’ of
the English crowd and Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of social and cultural capital as
an extension of economic capital.43 Stollberg-Rilinger’s use of the term ‘process

40
Stollberg-Rilinger, ‘Communication Theory’, pp. 314 –15.
41
B. Stollberg-Rilinger and T. Weller (eds), Wertekonflikte – Deutungskonflikte. Internationales Kollo-
quium des Sonderforschungsbereiches 496 an der Westfälischen Wilhelmsuniversität Münster 19.–20. Mai 2005
(Münster, 2007), ‘Einführung’, pp. 9 –20, particularly pp. 9– 10, 15–18 proposing a distinction
between desired values and normative motives for action.
42
B. Stollberg-Rilinger, ‘Die Historiker und die Werte’, in M.L. Allenmeyer, K. Behrens and K.U.
Mersch (eds), Eule oder Nachtigall? Tendenzen und Perspektiven kulturwissenschaftlicher Werteforschung
(Göttingen, 2007), pp. 35–48; on the exchange of material and moral goods of value and the futility of
attempting to attribute values as motive, pp. 43–45:. ‘Historiker (zumindest der Vormoderne) sollten
. . . ethische und ökonomische Werte . . . in ihrem ursprünglichen Zusammenhang zu rekonstruieren ver-
suchen, als umfassenden gesellschaftlichen Austauschprozess materieller und immaterieller Güter. . . .
Statt sie [Werte] als Handlungsmotive zu unterstellen, sollte man sie in ihren symbolischen Erscheinungs-
formen und in ihrer diskursiven Wirksamkeit beschreiben; sozusagen als Tun, nicht als Sein.’
43
Stollberg-Rilinger, ‘Die Historiker und die Werte’, p. 44, note 22, suggesting as models: E.P.
Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’, in id, Customs in
Common (London, 1991), pp. 185– 351, P. Bourdieu, La Distinction: Critique sociale du jugement (Paris,
 182 Joachim Stieber

of exchange’ (Austauschprozess) draws on a paper by Jean-Claude Schmitt at

the conference on ‘Conflicts of Values – Conflicts of Interpretation’ who had
pointed out that in pre-modern Europe Wert, valeur, or value had only a
material meaning related to economic exchange and not an abstract or moral
meaning.44
Yet is the concept of an ‘exchange of material and moral goods of value’, devel-
oped in the modern social sciences, the only or the most appropriate way to assess
the role of moral values in the lives of men and women in pre-modern Latin Chris-
tendom? To point out that the word Wert, valeur, or value had primarily a material or
economic meaning before the nineteenth century does not establish that the
concept of moral value was unknown. Indeed, bonum (as a substantive) was used
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in classical, medieval and early modern Latin to designate a moral or abstract

good and bona for material or economic goods – comparable to the use of Wert,
valeur, or value in modern usage.45 Bonum had been introduced in theological
discourse in Latin by Augustine who referred to God as the summum bonum and
continued to be analyzed as a metaphysical concept. By the thirteenth century
scholastic theologians regularly came to use bonum commune as a social and political
norm, particularly with reference to the civitas or urban commune of pre-modern
Europe. Although it was also invoked by princes when seeking financial support
from their subjects, bonum commune continued to be particularly part of the political
discourse in self-governing urban and rural communes where equality before the
law and personal freedom became the norm.46 While the role of city states in
pre-modern Europe cannot be taken up here, it is relevant to note that bonum
commune or bonum publicum as a social and political norm was particularly associated
with self-governing cities and rural communes in an age in which kingship and
lordship pre-dominated.47

1979) and id, ‘Ökonomisches Kapital, kulturelles Kapital, soziales Kapital’ [first published in German
translation], in R. Kreckel (ed), Soziale Ungleichheiten (Göttingen, 1983), pp. 183–98.
44
Stollberg-Rilinger and Weller (eds), Wertekonflikte – Deutungskonflikte, Stollberg-Rilinger, ‘Einlei-
tung’, pp. 15– 16 and J.-C. Schmitt, ‘Welche Geschichte der Werte?’, pp. 21– 35.
45
Cfr ‘bonum’ as a substantive in an abstract and a material sense, in Lexicon Latinitatis Nederlandicae
Medii Aevi. I: A- B (Leiden, 1977), pp. 509–512; theologically in Thomas Aquinas: ‘bonus’, in L. Schütz,
Thomas-Lexikon, 2. Auflage (Paderborn, 1895), pp. 83– 92; and passim in both senses still in the writings
of Hugo Grotius. For theological discourse on bonum, bonum commune and its related communis utilitas in
Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas and Remigio dei Girolami, Dante’s teacher, see M. S. Kempshall,
The Common Good in Late Medieval Political Thought (Oxford, 1999).
46
‘E. Lecupre-Desjardin and A.-L. Van Bruaene (eds), De Bono Communi’: the Discourse and Practice of
the Common Good in the European City (13th –16th c.) – Discours et pratique du Bien Commun dans les villes
d’Europe (XIIIe au XVIe siècle) (Studies in European Urban History [1100– 1800] 22) (Turnhout, 2010),
in which several contributions make evident that ‘common good’, ’public good’, or ‘public utility was
used by princes as well as by cities to justify a particular policy. H. Münkler and H. Bluhm (eds), Gemein-
wohl und Gemeinsinn: Historische Semantiken politischer Leitbegriffe (Forschungsberichte der interdiszipli-
nären Arbeitsgruppe ‘Gemeinwohl und Gemeinsinn’ der Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der
Wissenschaften 1) (Berlin, 2001), particularly, the contributions by O. G. Oexle, P. Blickle, G. Naegle
and T. Simon. See also the conference volume of the Centro Italiano di Studi sul Basso Medioevo –
Accademia Tudertina, Il Bene Comune: Forme di governo e gerarchie sociali nel basso medioevo Atti del
XLVIII Convegno storico internazionale, Todi 9 –12 ottobre 2011 (Spoleto 2012).
 Review article 183

Stollberg-Rilinger had noted in her article ‘Historians and Values’ that defining
what constituted the bonum commune or iustitia meant in a particular case was often
in dispute, proposing that values be studied as a ‘societal process of the exchange of
material and moral goods of value’. Not all moral values are, however, as open to
dispute as iustitia or as the bonum commune. Were not peace and charity, for
example, almost universally acknowledged as values in medieval and early
modern Latin Christendom? Neither was only an abstract value or product of a
‘social process of exchange’, rather they were religious values sanctioned by the
words of Christ in the Gospel: ‘blessed are the peacemakers’ and ‘as you have
done it unto one of the least . . . you have done it to me’. 48 Understood as religious
precepts, these values manifested themselves in political and social deeds. The
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first, ‘peace’ was the basis in the eleventh- and twelfth-century for reducing the
level of internal violence in the aristocratic warrior society of Latin Christendom.
By prohibiting warfare among Christians and in theory limiting it to the pursuit
of legal claims, it reduced the scope of violence, led to the beginnings of laws of

47
In the sixteenth century respublica or commonwealth was on occasion also used to designate heredi-
tary monarchies like France or England. In what follows, republic and republicanism refer to self-
governing urban communes or city-states in which the magistrates or governing council were elected.
Antony Black, “Republicanism as a European Phenomenon”, in A. Black, Church, State and Community:
Historical and Comparative Perspectives (Aldershot, Hampshire, 2003), VIII, originally published
in German translation, in P. Dubach (ed.), Verborgene republikanische Traditionen in Oberschwaben (Obersch-
waben – Geschichte und Kultur 4) (Tübingen, 1998), pp. 13– 24; further: L. Schorn-Schütte (ed.),
Aspekte der politischen Kommunikation im Europa des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts: Politische Theologie – Res
Publica-Verständnis – konsensgestützte Herrschaft (Historische Zeitschrift. Beihefte NF: 39) (Munich,
2004), with a surveys by W. Mager of conceptions of early modern ‘republicanism’ in the work of
John G.A. Pocock, Quentin Skinner, Heinz Schilling, and Peter Blickle (pp. 13– 122) and by L.
Schorn-Schütte on consent-supported lordship in a ‘politica christiana’, and articles by Thomas
Maissen and Martin van Gelderen on Swiss and Dutch early modern republican forms of government,
respectively. A major work: P. Blickle, Kommunalismus: Skizzen einer gesellschaftlichen Organisationsform.
Band I: Oberdeutschland, Band II: Europa (Munich, 2000), especially, Band II. 8 ‘Der gemeine Nutzen
der Kommune – Das Bonum commune der Res publica’; also P. Blickle (ed.), Resistance, Representation,
and Community (The Origins of the Modern State in Europe, 13th to 18th Centuries E) (Oxford, 1997),
papers by various authors, including a discussion by Eberhard Isenmann of the ’common good’ as a norm
in urban politics (p. 190), and a conclusion by Peter Blickle. For the history of the law and political insti-
tutions of self-governing rural and urban communes (cities) in the pre-modern Empire: K. S. Bader and
G. Dilcher, Deutsche Rechtsgeschichte: Land und Stadt – Bürger und Bauer im Alten Europa (Berlin, 1999), to
be supplemented by two reviews by Dilcher: the first, a review of Christian Meier, Die okzidentale Stadt
nach Max Weber (1994), entitled: “Max Webers Stadt und die historische Stadtforschung der Med-
iävistik”, in Historische Zeitschrift, 267 (1998), pp. 91– 125, especially p. 102 on equality of access to
the eucharist in Christianity as a model for the openness of the Latin Christian urban community,
and the second, a review of Peter Blickle’s Kommunalismus (2000), entitled “Die Kommune als euro-
päische Verfassungsform”, in Historische Zeitschrift, 272 (2001), pp. 667– 74. On early modern ‘republican-
ism’ in cities of Calvinist Reformed confession in the Empire and in the Low Countries, see: H.
Schilling, Ausgewählte Abhandlungen zur europäischen Reformations- und Konfessionsgeschichte. Ed. by L.
Schorn-Schütte, O. Mörke (Berlin, 2002). On anti-monarchical republicanism, see for Italy (1420s–
1520s): J. Hankins (ed.), Renaissance Civic Humanism: Reappraisals and Reflections (Cambridge,
England, 2000), and for England and the Netherlands (17th century): M. van Gelderen and Q. Skinnner
(eds.), Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage. Volume I: Republicanism and Constitutionalism; Volume
2: The Values of Republicanism(Cambridge, England, 2002).
48
Matthew 5,9 and 25,40.
 184 Joachim Stieber

war, and by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries gave rise to theories of inter-
national law - values and goals still acknowledged today.49 Similarly, ‘charity’ as a
normative social value led throughout Latin Christendom to the founding of hos-
pitals for the infirm and the poor, and of hospices for strangers, particularly pil-
grims.50 While the establishment of such institutions often also involved a
‘process of exchange’ in the form of the founder’s hope of spiritual benefits in
return for his generosity, this does not suffice as an explanation for the widespread
establishment of urban charitable institutions.
Acts like the foundation of hospitals reflected social solidarity as a dimension of
the bonum commune on the part of burghers who considered their city a religious as
well as a political community. In the sixteenth century, such a conception of the
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urban community was dramatically evident in the role played by self-governing

cities in Germany, Switzerland, and the Low Countries in controlling and sanction-
ing religious change.51 The arguments justifying Protestant political resistance

49
Selected references: R. Kaiser, ‘Gottesfrieden’, in Lexikon des Mittelalters, 4 (Munich, 1988), cc.
1587– 1592; T. Head and R.A. Landes (eds), The Peace of God: Social Violence and Religious Response in
France around the Year 1000 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1992); A. Buschmann and E. Wadle (eds), Landfrieden: Anspruch
und Wirklichkeit (Paderborn, 2002); K.-H. Ziegler, ‘Biblische Grundlagen des europäischen Völkerrechts’,
in Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte. Kanonistische Abteilung 86 (2000), pp. 1– 32; id, ‘Die
Bedeutung von Hugo Grotius für das Völkerrecht – Versuch einer Bilanz am Ende des 20. Jahrhun-
derts’, in Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung 23 (1996), pp. 355–71; K. Garber and J. Held (eds), Der
Frieden: Rekonstruktion einer europäischen Vision. 2 Vols (Munich, 2001); N. Brieskorn and M. Riedenauer
(eds), N. Brieskorn and M. Riedenauer (eds), Suche nach Frieden: politische Ethik in der frühen Neuzeit. 2
Vols. (Stuttgart, 2000– 2002). On efforts to limit violence against non-combattants and conventions on
the treatment of prisoners of war as part of the development of international law in medieval and
early modern Europe, cfr. the recent overviews: K.-H. Ziegler, Völkerrechtsgeschichte. 2. Auflage
(Munich, 2007)), M. Jucker, M. Kintzinger, R. C. Schwinges (eds), Rechtsnormen internationaler
Politik: Theorie, Norm und Praxis vom 12. bis 18. Jahrhundert (Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung.
Beiheft 45) (Berlin 2011), especially M. Jucker, ‘Mittelalterliches Völkerrecht als Problem: Befunde,
Methoden, Desiderate‘, pp. 27-46, and T. Marauhn and H. Steiger, (eds), Universality and Continuity
in International Law (The Hague, 2011), with references to the older literature.
50
Selected references: N. Bulst and K.-H. Spiess (eds), Sozialgeschichte mittelalterlicher Hospitäler
(Vorträge und Forschungen 65) (Ostfildern, 2007); M. Pauly, ‘Peregrinorum, pauperum ac aliorum transeun-
tium receptaculum’. Hospitäler zwischen Maas und Rhein im Mittelalter (Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und
Wirtschaftsgeschichte. Beihefte 190) (Stuttgart, 2007); G. Drossbach (ed.), Hospitäler in Mittelalter und
früher Neuzeit – Frankreich, Deutschland und Italien. Eine vergleichende Geschichte. – Hôpitaux au Moyen
Âge et aux Temps Modernes – France, Allemagne et Italie. Une histoire comparée (Pariser Historische
Studien 25) (Munich, 2007); and with a focus on Florence: J. Henderson, The Renaissance Hospital:
Healing the Body and the Soul (New Haven, Conn., 2006); M. Scheutz (ed), Europäisches Spitalwesen: Insti-
tutionelle Fürsorge in Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit – Hospitals and Institutional Care in Medieval and Early
Modern Europe (Mitteilungen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung. Ergänzungsband
51) (Vienna, 2008); id (ed), Quellen zur europäischen Spitalgeschichte in Mitelalter und Früher Neuzeit
(Vienna, 2010).
51
A recent overview: V. Isaiasz, U. Lotz-Heumann, M. Mommertz, M. Pohlig (eds.), Stadt und Religion
in der frühen Neuzeit; Soziale Ordnungen und ihre Representationen (Eigene und fremde Welten,
Repräsentationen sozialer Ornung im Vergleich 4) Frankfurt / Main, 2007, particularly the introduction
by Isaiasz and Pohlig, and the classic treatments by B. Moeller, Reichsstadt und Reformation (Berlin, 1987);
B. Hamm, ‘The Urban Reformation in the Holy Roman Empire’, in T. A. Brady, H.A. Oberman and J.T.
Tracy (eds), Handbook of European History 1400–1600: Late Middle Ages, Remnaissance and Reformation.
Volume II (Leiden, 1995), pp. 193– 227. Following the decisions for religious change in Zürich
(1525), Bern (1530), Geneva (1536), in Switzerland, see for France and the Low Countries in the
 Review article 185

against the Emperor were developed primarily in the imperial cities, where a reli-
gious dimension was added to the traditional assertion of collective political
freedom through self-government.52 Stollberg-Rilinger’s proposition that the
motives or values underlying such policies be reconstructed through the study of
discourse - in this case through preaching and the printed pamphlet - is apposite
here, together with her reminder that language and institutions are continuously
reconstituted through social interaction. However, her proposed paradigm to
study values in pre-modern Europe primarilyas a ‘societal process of the exchange
(gesellschaftlicherAustauschprozess) of material and moral goods of value (Güter)’ is less
convincing foran era in which religious precepts predominantly were regarded not
as objects of exchange but as binding norms.
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STOLLBERG-RILINGER’S DES KAISERS ALTE KLEIDER

Stollberg-Rilinger published her enquiry into symbolic communication and the
constitutional history of the Empire in 2008 under the title Des Kaisers alte
Kleider: Verfassungsgeschichte und Symbolsprache des Alten Reiches.53 As the title and
introduction indicate, it is a constitutional history of the Empire based on consti-
tutional texts but equally on constitutional symbolic language enacted in ritual
and ceremony. The chronological framework, from the precedent-setting Diet of
Worms in 1495 to the quiet dissolution of the Empire in 1806, is marked by
three major interstices: (1) the Diet of Augsburg in 1530, at which the Protestant
estates stood together for the first time against the Emperor and presented their
confession; (2) the Diet of Regensburg in 1653, which put into practice the pro-
visions of the Peace of Westphalia (1648) that confirmed and expanded the
terms of the Religious Peace of Augsburg (1555); and (3) the years 1764 – 5, after
the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War, marked by the election and coronation
of Joseph II as king and future emperor, and the new balance of power between
Austria and Prussia in the Empire. In her account of these major gatherings, Stoll-
berg-Rilinger distinguishes the instrumental decisions and the symbolic forms in
which the status and prerogatives of the Electors and princes were enacted in
ritual or ceremonial precedence.

1570s, notably in Ghent (1578–1584): M. Weis (ed), Des villes en révolte: les “Républiques urbaines” aux
Pays-Bas et en France pendant la deuxième moitié du XVIe siècle (Studies in European Urban History
[1100– 1800] 23) (Turnhout, 2010). On German cities as places of a ‘partial public political sphere’
already in the century before the Reformation, see P. Monnet “Die Stadt, ein Ort der politischen
Öffentlichkeit im Spätmittelalter? Ein Thesenpapier’, in M. Kintzinger and B. Schneidmüller (eds),
Politsche Öffentlichkeit im Spätmittelalter (Vorrträge und Forschungen 75) Ostfildern, 2011, pp. 287–359.
52
For example in the 1530s, the advice by Martin Bucer, the reformer of Strassburg, to Philip of Hesse
and the Schmalcaldic League justifying resistance to the Emperor in the name of ‘German liberty’and,
in 1550– 1551, by the preachers and magistrates of Magdeburg in their Confessio defending resistance by
elected magistrates on the ground of ‘true religion’. For the context: L Schorn-Schütte, “Beanspruchte
Freiheit: die politica christiana”, in G. Schmidt, M. van Gelderen and C. Snigula (eds), Kollektive Freiheits-
vorstellungen im frühneuzeitlichen Europa (1400–1850) (Jenaer Beiträge zur Geschichte 8) Frankfurt
/Main, 2006), pp. 329–52.
53
Des Kaisers alte Kleider: Verfassungsgeschichte und Symbolsprache des Alten Reiches (Munich, 2008).
 186 Joachim Stieber

In Chapter IV, the analysis shifts to the transformation of contacts among the
major princes in the Empire after the Diet of Regensburg in 1653, the last diet
attended by the Emperor and a substantial number of princes in person. Thereafter,
only their delegates and those representing the counts and the imperial cities
would be in session at Regensburg as a Continuing Imperial Diet (Immerwährender
Reichstag). Here, the delegates would insist on being treated as ambassadors with
the ceremonial (symbolic) honors due to their principals who, for their part,
focused on displaying status at their courts where the actual (instrumental) political
decisions were made. In Stollberg-Rilinger’s view, the Continuing Imperial Diet
which met after 1653 at Regensburg, acting in accord with norms defined by the
treaties of Westphalia, cannot be regarded as providing constitutional government
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in any modern sense for the Empire.54

By the early eighteenth century, the major secular princes were unwilling to
accept the ceremonial precedence accorded by the Golden Bull of 1356 to the
Spiritual Electors, and therefore from 1742 onwards refused to attend the corona-
tion of the emperor.55 This was also the case in 1764 at the coronation in Frankfurt
of Joseph II as designated successor of his father, described in Chapter V. In a fine
analysis of the letters – written in French – by the young Archduke Joseph to his
mother, the Empress Maria-Theresa on that occasion, Stollberg-Rilinger com-
ments on the mixture of rational detachment and sentimental attraction they
reveal toward the ritual of his coronation.56 Joseph II’s attitude and the absence
of most of the princes from the ceremonies in 1764 stand in contrast to the enthu-
siastic acclamation of the coronation by the people of the imperial city of Frankfurt.
Events between 1803 and 1806 preceding the dissolution of the Empire were to
confirm these contrasting attitudes at the courts of the princes and in the imperial
cities.57
Stollberg-Rilinger’s Des Kaisers alte Kleider demonstrates with conceptual clarity
and apt illustration from the sources her thesis of the importance of the symbolic
communication of the unwritten constitution of the Empire in actu through ritual
and ceremonial. Having in her earlier writing called for an anthropological ‘perspec-
tive of otherness’ (ethnologischen Blick, Perspektive der Fremdheit) in studying the pre-
modern Empire, she concedes in her introduction to Des Kaisers alte Kleider that this
is a methodological artifice to guard against taking the sources as self-evident and to
confront the challenge of interpreting the unfamiliar.58 She presents her own con-
tribution in doing so as a complement to a constitutional history that begins with texts
and treaties (Golden Bull, Treaties of Westphalia) which define the status of its
members, includes rules of procedure of its institutions (Reichstag, Reichskammerger-
icht, Reichshofrat) as well as the systematic analysis of its laws in learned jurispru-
dence. Des Kaisers alte Kleider succeeds in demonstrating the extent to which

54
Stollberg-Rilinger, Kaisers alte Kleider, pp. 224 and 364 with notes 277 and 278.
55
Stollberg-Rilinger, Kaisers alte Kleider, p. 242.
56
Stollberg-Rilinger, Kaisers alte Kleider, p. 244–5 and 364 with note 46.
57
Stollberg-Rilinger, Kaisers alte Kleider, pp. 314–8; see also B. Stollberg-Rilinger, Das Heilige Römische
Reic deutscher Nation: Vom Ende des Mittelalters bis 1806 (Munich, 2006), pp. 112– 15.
58
Stollberg-Rilinger, Kaisers alte Kleider, p. 16 and p. 324 with note 26.
 Review article 187

both written and unwritten rules of procedure depend for their meaning on con-
stant reaffirmation in practice. In a concluding note of thanks Stollberg-Rilinger
graciously acknowledges the stimulating critical exchanges with her colleagues
in the SFB 496 on Symbolic Communication at Münster that clarified issues
addressed in Des Kaisers alte Kleider, thus making the book also a tribute to that
scholarly enterprise. Finally, it is a pleasure to be able to note the clarity and ele-
gance of Stollberg-Rilinger’s writing, enlivened by metaphor and memorable
illustrative episodes.

THE CULTURAL HISTORY OF POLIICAL PHENOMENA – IN PARTICULAR

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PROCEDURES OF DECISION-MAKING AND CONSTIUTIONAL HISTORY

Since the publication of Des Kaisers alte Kleider, Stollberg-Rilinger has reaffirmed
her view that a ‘cultural history of political phenomena’ (Kulturgeschichte des Poli-
tischen) offers the most fruitful perspective on pre-modern European politics in
two articles: (1) The introduction to the papers of a conference in 2008 organized
together with André Krischer, Herstellung und Darstellung von Entscheidungen: Ver-
fahren, Verwalten und Verhandeln in der Vormoderne, explored further the modes of
making decisions (and their representation) that were first raised at the confer-
ence Vormoderne politische Verfahren in 1999.59 This was followed by (2) an
article ‘Verfassungsgeschichte als Kulturgeschichte’ based on a lecture at the
Deutsche Rechtshistorikertag in 2008.60 In both publications, Stollberg-Rilinger
makes the case for the ‘cultural turn’ in historical studies, particularly for
including the perspectives of the procedural dimension in politics and symbolic
communication as decisive complements for interpreting written texts in
pre-modern European history. Differentiating judicial, legislative, and public
administrative proceedings, she applies Luhmann’s concept of ‘legitimation
through autonomous procedure’ (based, admittedly, on modern political insti-
tutions), presenting it as a heuristic foil to make evident ex negativo how
decision-making processes differed in pre-modern societies.61 In her introduction
to the conference volume Herstellung und Darstellung von Entscheidungen,
Stollberg-Rilinger cites recent examples of the kind of ‘cultural history of political
phenomena’ she had outlined, including the papers of the conference Zelebrieren
und Verhandeln, to be considered in the review that follows this article.62

59
B. Stollberg-Rilinger, ‘Einleitung’, in B. Stollberg-Rilinger and A. Krischer (eds), Herstellung und
Darstellung von Entscheidungen: Verfahren, Verwalten und Verhandeln in der Vormoderne. (Zeitschrift für His-
torische Forschung, Beiheft 44) (Berlin, 2010), pp. 9 –31.
60
B. Stollberg-Rilinger, ‘Verfassungsgeschichte als Kulturgeschichte’, in Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung
für Rechtsgeschichte. Germanistische Abteilung 127 (2010), pp. 1– 32.
61
Stollberg-Rilinger, Herstellung und Darstellung, pp. 13, 15.
62
Stollberg-Rilinger, Herstellung und Darstellung, p. 10, note 4.