Chapter 5 offers a probing survey of late reflections on nationhood in the context of the German Empire, focusing on Engelbert of Admont, Dante Alighieri, and Marsiglio of Padua. By 1300, radical changes to the political landscape – especially the curtailing of imperial power and the rise of independent territorial kingdoms – prompted medieval thinkers to rethink and refine the principles of political order, resulting in two broad currents of thought: renewed imperialism and defenses of territorial monarchy. Medieval proponents of empire, despite their different argumentative approaches and strategies, treat a number of similar problems: the source of imperial authority, the end and purpose of world government, and the legitimacy of the empire’s claim to universal rule, that is, over all nations of the world. While Engelbert and Dante aim to reconcile national pluralism and political unity through some variant of legal pluralism, Marsiglio suggests that the various national communities that are part of the empire have to consent to imperial rule, offering explicit normative criteria for multinational politics.

Chapter 3 introduces Sigismund von Herberstein, Habsburg diplomat and humanist scholar. After two embassies to Muscovy (1517, 1526) where Herberstein assiduously observed his surroundings, he composed an account of Muscovy (Rerum moscoviticarum commentarii, 1549) that became the standard reference for the next half-century or more. This chapter explores how he composed his work as a “chorography,” and how he assembled sources, how he interpreted Russian rulers, religion and society.

Chapter 2 introduces the two places which were the most significant in Goethe’s life: Frankfurt, the city of his birth, and Weimar, the duchy where he lived from the age of twenty-six. The chapter explains the differing political weight of Frankfurt and Weimar – Frankfurt being the nearest that the Holy Roman Empire had to a capital city, Weimar being altogether more provincial, though nonetheless the capital of one of the more important ‘old principalities’. Moreover, it sets the two places in the context of the upheavals of the time, examining, for example, Weimar’s shifting geopolitical allegiances during and after the Napoleonic era.

Germany can serve as short-hand for the “Holy Roman Empire” in the eighteenth century. Long dismissed as a constitutional “monstrosity,” the Empire in reality proved a surprisingly durable fixture of Europe’s Old Regime political and dynastic firmament. Within its confines there existed a multiplicity of sub-units that ranged in size and importance from the Great Powers of Austria and Prussia, to tiny independent principalities and city states. Some of these might be considered vibrant, and others stagnant. Some were ruled by princes who deserved the label “enlightened,” whilst others were governed by despots. A generalization that holds for the Empire as a whole is that it encouraged a political culture distinguished by its legalism and its localism. These characteristics were hardly effective when confronting the challenges posed by the French Revolution, whose real impact on Germany began in 1792 with the outbreak of the French Revolutionary Wars. These wars ultimately destroyed the Empire, thereby paving the way for the transformation of Germany that occurred under the hegemony of Napoleon.

Since the nineteenth century, the Holy Roman Empire has occupied a central but often negative place in accounts of German nationhood. “In the beginning was the Reich,” declared Heinrich August Winkler in his monumental German history, which took as its starting point the empire’s abolition in 1806.1 It was with the empire that, in Winkler’s view fatally, “that which distinguishes German history from the history of the great western-European nations has … its origin.” Winkler’s judgment reflects a viewpoint which has been tenacious and highly influential: that at the heart of the problem of German nation-making lay the peculiar and deficient character of Germany’s premodern “state,” the empire itself. Whereas other European nations had developed within the framework of governments exercising sovereign power over firmly bounded populations, the Reich, after a promising start, had fallen prey to universalist fantasies, fragmentation, institutional atrophy, and the interference of foreign powers.

The chapter looks at the long-term structural importance associated with Napoleon’s win in Austerlitz and the ensuing formal end of the Holy Roman Empire. It defines modes of transformation but rather as evolutionary dynamics that pave the way for historical trajectories in which new social forms – such as European global empires or even the notion of global empire – borrow from previous forms, such as the way of organizing political authority in the Holy Roman Empire. In doing so, it identifies two pertinent modes of historicity, namely the presence of several temporal layers in social and political phenomena (‘complex temporalities’), as well as an evolutionary account of non-linear change. In this sense, the chapter is not only about the presence of a specific past in the contemporary structures of the system of world politics, but also to provide a methodological input into contemporary debates about global historical sociology.

The large territory of Northern and Central Europe covered in the Middle Ages by the Holy Roman Empire is considered in Chapter 9. We consider the music of mystics and visionaries, including St Hildegard of Bingen and the Dutch-speaking Hadewijch. Religious reform movements in northern areas and in Bohemia, including Modern Devotion and Utraquism, had important consequences for liturgical singing, and we observe the survival in these areas of polyphonic traditions apparently dating back to the centuries considered in Chapter 2. In the courtly environment, the Minnesingers took up the traditions of the troubadours, cultivating a distinctive approach to song in Middle High German and Middle Dutch. This chapter concludes with a manuscript of song whose name is well known but whose contents are difficult to classify: the thirteenth-century Carmina Burana juxtaposes Latin and vernacular, notated and un-notated, and the religious and secular, to a remarkable degree.

Underground Mathematics tells the story of subterranean geometry, a forgotten discipline that developed in the silver mines of early modern Europe. Seven case studies describe how an original culture of accuracy and measurement paved the way for technical and scientific innovations. Based on a variety of original manuscripts, maps and archive material, it recounts how knowledge was crafted and circulated among practitioners in the Holy Roman Empire and beyond. Specific chapters deal with the material culture of surveying, map-making, expertise and the political uses of quantification. By carefully reconstructing the religious, economic and cultural context of mining cities, Underground Mathematics argues that practical mathematics fruitfully interacted with the world of humanists, scholars and courts. In doing so, it contextualizes the rise of a culture of accuracy and quantification from 1500 to 1800. Subterranean geometry thus proves relevant to broader discussions in the history of science, technology, and knowledge.

Underground Mathematics tells the story of subterranean geometry, a forgotten discipline that developed in the silver mines of early modern Europe. Seven case studies describe how an original culture of accuracy and measurement paved the way for technical and scientific innovations. Based on a variety of original manuscripts, maps and archive material, it recounts how knowledge was crafted and circulated among practitioners in the Holy Roman Empire and beyond. Specific chapters deal with the material culture of surveying, map-making, expertise and the political uses of quantification. By carefully reconstructing the religious, economic and cultural context of mining cities, Underground Mathematics argues that practical mathematics fruitfully interacted with the world of humanists, scholars and courts. In doing so, it contextualizes the rise of a culture of accuracy and quantification from 1500 to 1800. Subterranean geometry thus proves relevant to broader discussions in the history of science, technology, and knowledge.

The name of Pufendorf is often associated with the phrase that appeared in his 1667 tract about the Holy Roman Empire: it was, he observed, ‘monstro simile’ (like a monster). To many generations of scholars from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, the phrase seemed appropriate since they viewed the Holy Roman Empire as an anachronism that was doomed for centuries before it expired in 1806. Yet Pufendorf himself denied that he wished to condemn the empire but rather claimed he wanted to improve it and to create a better understanding of it; indeed, he removed the phrase from the second edition of his text. This chapter examines Pufendorf’s writing about the empire in the context of the political situation of his time and considers his work as a constructive and positive contribution to a wide-ranging debate. This explains why his 1667 tract was regarded so highly in the eighteenth century as one of the best short guides to the nature and politics of the empire, which scholars have only recently begun to appreciate once more.

After 1450 the size and scope of more centralized government institutions increased in many parts of Europe. Rulers of larger states, beginning with the Ottoman sultans, established permanent standing armies and supported more professionalized naval forces. They developed new types of taxes and bureaucracies to pay for these increased military expenditures, and engaged in shrewd marital strategies to expand their holdings through marriage as well as warfare. The processes of consolidation followed similar patterns, but with local variations in England, France, Spain, Portugal, the Ottoman Empire, Poland–Lithuania, Muscovy, Denmark–Norway, and Sweden. In the Holy Roman Empire the Habsburg emperors were unable to establish a centralized nation-state because of political and religious divisions, and in Italy wealthy city-states ruled by merchants dominated politics. Everywhere lower levels of government, such as cities, villages, and parishes, also collected taxes, issued laws, and maintained courts, and traditional elites adapted to new circumstances very well. Rulers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries did not limit their activities to what we would consider politics but often attempted to shape the cultural and religious lives of their subjects as well, recognizing that these were integral to maintaining power.

This epilogue considers the afterlife of music theatre and the Holy Roman Empire as well as its relevance today.

The Introduction places the book into its historical and historiographic contexts. German-language music theatre often plays a supporting role in musical histories of Central Europe circa 1800, as does the Holy Roman Empire. The Holy Roman Empire was home to over 300 territories that were linked by politics and culture. Physically networking the Empire was Europe's first systematic postal system, which served as a precondition for the operation of the hundreds of theatre companies that performed within its territories . By first considering the contemporary and scholarly distinctions between German-language theatre and the 'Nationaltheater', this introduction draws on recent historiography to provide a musicological audience with the key features of, and concepts surrounding, the Holy Roman Empire. It then traces this long misunderstood polity's place in music historiography and ultimately posits it as an ideal framework to investigate the world of German music and theatre in the decades leading up to the turn of the nineteenth century.

The century between 1750 and 1850 was less a Sattelzeit than one of accelerating trends. Germans from a wide variety of provincial places gained an increasingly global consciousness— articulated in German science, travel, trade and the flows of information that accompanied Germans’ mobilities.Those mobilities, as historians of early-modern Germany have demonstrated, were much greater than we once supposed, and the circulation of knowledge about the world that accompanied it increased substantially with every decade.Germans during this period generally had little problem recognizing unity among their great variety, even if few of them felt the need to define it precisely. Merchants’ efforts, combined with those of naturalists, physicians, travelers, and scientists, stimulated discussions of Germanness and the German nation in scientific and medical circles as well as among artists, musicians, and philosophers. Moreover, as recent work on this period demonstrates, there was a great deal more inclusion, tolerance, and worldliness in German-speaking Europe than previous histories have taught us to expect.