Duncan Hardy's first book is a breath of fresh air and an extraordinary contribution to scholarship. It is nothing short of a comprehensive reconceptualization of the socio-political framework of the late medieval Holy Roman Empire, constructed from the evidence of practice mined in the archives, not the statements of theory coupled to the structural models of an imperial system imposed by the onerous tradition of German constitutional history. A series of thematic chapters, each examining a different aspect of that imperial framework—'imperial' so far as it was constitutive of the political fabric of the Empire, not in the sense of a formal system centred and dependent on the Emperor--is followed by four case-studies treating moments of especially intense interaction amongst the political actors of late medieval Germany, from the so-called Städtekrieg ("War of the Cities") in 1376-1389 through to the apparent institution of new central structures in the early sixteenth century.
The fundamental premise of Hardy's argument is that the political framework of the late medieval Empire is well characterized neither by the idea of an imperial 'system' constituted of a series of social strata, estates avant la lettre, often with mutually antagonistic positions towards one other; nor by the search for the roots of an increasingly intensive territorial lordship that, in the tradition established by the constitutional historian Peter Moraw, is understood as having given rise to the 'absolutist' princely states of early modern Germany. Instead it must be examined through the "shared and interconnective structures and practices" (so the sub-title to part I) that bound together actors from all putative socio-political strata, and did so routinely in an essentially uncomplicated and uncontroversial manner. Let us take just two examples of these interconnective practises.
First: justice and arbitration. Hardy argues that the evidence for formal structures of imperial courts and the understanding of their relative hierarchy--a subject of intense scrutiny amongst German constitutional historians--pales into insignificance alongside the far greater evidence for the much less well-studied practice of arbitration. In fact, arbitration and formal justice should not be seen as alternatives: when judicial decisions were sought from, for instance, the imperial Hofgericht in Rottweil, then as the court had no real way to enforce its decisions, it did not apply some kind of fixed legal code, but acted in effect as a formalized arbitrator. Arbitration was a complex and necessarily political process that operated in accordance with accepted norms to regulate matters such as the installation of acceptable arbiters in a suitably 'neutral' location (often in towns). The extensive and widespread culture of arbitration was overlaid in this vision--not underpinned--by a shared legalistic discourse, and served to interlock the political community writ broadly, not to affirm or entrench the identities and solidarities of discrete social strata.
Second: lordship and administration. There is undoubtedly a centripetal tendency to the accumulation of rights of lordship within the princely stratum in the later fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Yet rather than attempt to model a system with defined and discrete layers of lordship in descending levels, mapped on to the alleged fragmented complexity of the political geography of late medieval Germany, Hardy argues that we should understand lordship as it was understood in the documentary evidence of its operation in practice. That is, rights of lordship should be seen as a kind of property, quantifiable, alienable and divisible just as any other kind of property. These commodified rights--even supposedly 'high' rights--could be accumulated and exercised by political actors regardless of their particular social standing, and were not different in any fundamental sense as a consequence. From the fourteenth century onwards itemized rights of lordship, including technically 'feudal' rights, were traded across a socio-political spectrum of entangled actors; actors who were not organized into neat hierarchies. The most distinctive feature of this fragmented system of lordship was the transactional value associated with individual elements in its exercise, and indeed with shares in those elements. The 'associative' structures of government that result frustrate those who would like to describe neat and tidy frameworks, but it is imperative that we should not describe the situation instead as confusing or, worse, as a mess: the impression I have from my own archival work is that late medieval Germans were not remotely confused and quite capable of operating amongst such complexity.
It is associations which formed, in Hardy's vision, the fabric of the imperial framework. These associations are conventionally termed 'urban leagues', but this proves to be a misperception. Very few were ever exclusively urban, and the idea that they were so is a product of the highly selective publication of charters in modern editions (Urkundenbücher), almost all of which editions are focused on towns rather than rural lordships. The evidence of the archives again provides a different picture. Hardy rejects the possibility of establishing a typology of associations, whilst recognizing the existence of certain basic types that can be distinguished by their frequency. They served to regulate feuds, to leverage military assistance, and to organize the adjudication of as wide a spectrum of potential and actual sources of conflict as possible: in short, they were the primary means to defuse and resolve disputes. It is the exception, not the rule, that they developed an institutional character, as in the cases of the knightly Society of St George's Shield or the Swiss Confederation, and then for particular and contingent reasons. Their absence from the historiography is a product of their not seeming 'institutional' enough to warrant consideration, but the mass of archival evidence for their operation in practice enables Hardy to argue that associations were the principal frameworks by which the political culture and the discourse of the leading political actors in a given region were harnessed and channelled.
The central terms present in the arengae to the charters establishing and regulating leagues and associations--peace, common weal (res publica orgemeiner Nutz) and empire--are, Hardy argues, deployed together in only one other context: imperial treaties and the documentation associated with imperial assemblies (Tage). Charters of association express a sense of 'acting imperially', not in the sense of being part of an imperial system with distinct strata and hierarchical structures, but in the sense of maintaining the empire as an effective body politic. In this reading, the Holy Roman Empire becomes much more than the sum of its institutional parts. It was instead a powerful idea not just--and not principally--for those who sought to obtain the imperial title, but for those who bought into it as the overarching framework within which their political lives were bounded and laterally interconnected. The shift from c.1470 towards a more top-down and intensive form of imperial and territorial government should not be regarded as a break, but as a partial transition, which involved the co-option of associative solutions to political problems rather than their supplantation. Associative political culture was more broadly entrenched as the predominant form of late medieval German social organization, whether in the form of currency unions (Münzvereine), the prohibition of feud within a defined area (Burgfrieden), or the remarkably common phenomenon of joint lordship in all its different forms.
The case-studies explore how this associative political culture operated in practice, but serve much more than an illustrative purpose. The third study, for example, is that of the Burgundian wars of the 1470s: a series of sharp and intense conflicts that generated unusually high levels of contemporary commentary. Hardy draws out the clear difference between the top-down and centralized Burgundian structures of government that were introduced in the occupied Rhineland, and the associative structures of the imperial body politic that they displaced. The comparison is instructive to grasp just how distinctive that associative political culture really was--and, moreover, just how effective it could be. It was by contracting associations amongst constituent parties that, in the mid-1470s, enormous sums of money and vast military forces were raised collectively, and raised repeatedly, to inflict a series of defeats upon the aggressive Burgundian state, for all of its centralized might, and ultimately to drive it out and collapse it altogether. Not coincidentally, it was also in the 1470s that appeals to an idea of the 'German nation' can first be seen, which overlaid the concept of the Holy Roman Empire and introduced a new element into its political discourse.
There will need to be more work done to explain just what did take place in the decades around 1500, during the reigns of Maximilian and Charles V, to transform this imperial structure so sharply. Hardy rejects the idea that a new and more strictly hierarchical framework was imposed, arguing instead for the extension and regularization of pre-existing, associative forms of political interaction, such that the now more insistently 'German' imperial system was re-structured as a "contractual community" with tighter bonds between the princely elites. These observations are the start, rather than the end, of the scholarly discussion of this particular matter. I wonder too if the emphasis on documents that stress moments of association and positive engagement does not make the late medieval Empire seem rather more harmonious than it was. Associative treaties did indeed regulate inheritance and establish joint lordship in fifteenth-century Württemberg, for example (see pp. 168-169), but these treaties ought to be seen in the context of frequent open warfare that was concluded, or perhaps better occasionally interrupted, by the agreement of what were often quite asymetrically-balanced treaties. Yet in the final analysis one can only stand back and admire this fine and thoroughly incisive scholarly landmark.