Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Editor's note
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Editor's introduction
- PART I MODERN MENTALITIES: HISTORIOGRAPHIES, METHODOLOGIES, PRECONCEPTIONS
- PART II THE SYMBOLIC LANGUAGE OF MEDIEVAL POLITICAL ACTION
- PART III POLITICAL STRUCTURES AND INTENTIONS
- 11 Assembly politics in western Europe from the eighth century to the twelfth
- 12 Sex, lies and oath-helpers: the trial of Queen Uota
- 13 Plunder and tribute in the Carolingian empire
- 14 The end of Carolingian military expansion
- 15 The Ottonians and Carolingian tradition
- 16 The making of England and Germany, 850–1050: points of comparison and difference
- 17 King, nobles, others: ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’ in the Ottonian period
- 18 The ‘imperial church system’ of the Ottonian and Salian rulers: a reconsideration
- 19 Peace-breaking, feud, rebellion, resistance: violence and peace in the politics of the Salian era
- 20 The medieval German Sonderweg? The empire and its rulers in the high Middle Ages
- 21 Mandate, privilege, court judgement: techniques of rulership in the age of Frederick Barbarossa
- 22 All quiet except on the Western Front? The emergence of pre-modern forms of statehood in the central Middle Ages
- Index
22 - All quiet except on the Western Front? The emergence of pre-modern forms of statehood in the central Middle Ages
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 August 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Editor's note
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Editor's introduction
- PART I MODERN MENTALITIES: HISTORIOGRAPHIES, METHODOLOGIES, PRECONCEPTIONS
- PART II THE SYMBOLIC LANGUAGE OF MEDIEVAL POLITICAL ACTION
- PART III POLITICAL STRUCTURES AND INTENTIONS
- 11 Assembly politics in western Europe from the eighth century to the twelfth
- 12 Sex, lies and oath-helpers: the trial of Queen Uota
- 13 Plunder and tribute in the Carolingian empire
- 14 The end of Carolingian military expansion
- 15 The Ottonians and Carolingian tradition
- 16 The making of England and Germany, 850–1050: points of comparison and difference
- 17 King, nobles, others: ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’ in the Ottonian period
- 18 The ‘imperial church system’ of the Ottonian and Salian rulers: a reconsideration
- 19 Peace-breaking, feud, rebellion, resistance: violence and peace in the politics of the Salian era
- 20 The medieval German Sonderweg? The empire and its rulers in the high Middle Ages
- 21 Mandate, privilege, court judgement: techniques of rulership in the age of Frederick Barbarossa
- 22 All quiet except on the Western Front? The emergence of pre-modern forms of statehood in the central Middle Ages
- Index
Summary
The relationship between this subject and the present writer is not a new one. About five years ago, I published a longer paper on a very closely related theme, the medieval German Sonderweg. So, in the following remarks, the content and argument of that earlier paper will for the most part be implicitly taken as read, except for when it is explicitly cited or corrected. But not only is the relationship between subject and writer not new: the subject itself is very old. The questions of why and – unfortunately less often asked, though no less crucial – how far the development of Germany in the central medieval period was or seemed to be different from what happened in the rest of Europe, and the related discussion over whether this ought, on the whole, to be assessed in negative or positive terms, are both almost as old as the professional study of medieval history in Germany. They have their roots in the reciprocal links between history as a subject and state development in Europe, and especially in the German-speaking lands, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Then as now, it was a matter of making sense of a current situation, but the particular significance of medieval history for the German-speaking lands was fundamentally greater then than now.
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- Medieval Polities and Modern Mentalities , pp. 432 - 458Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006
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