Despite its broad transmission and its influence on vernacular chronicle writing in the German Middle Ages, the Kaiserchronik has not received the attention from historians that it deserves. This article describes some of the ideological, historical, and literary contexts that shaped the original composition of the chronicle in the middle of the twelfth century: Christian salvation history, the revival of interest in the Roman past, the consolidation of a vernacular literature of knowledge, and the emergence of a practice of writing history as “serious entertainment” by authors such as Geoffrey of Monmouth and Godfrey of Viterbo. Placed in these multiple contexts, which have a European as well as a specifically German dimension, the Kaiserchronik emerges as an important document of the uses of the past in fostering a sense of German identity among secular and ecclesiastical elites in the high Middle Ages.

The success of the treaties of Westphalia in preserving the religious peace in the Holy Roman Empire after 1648 has been a popular scholarly theme. Many historians also realize, however, that confessional tensions and confrontations persisted well into the eighteenth century. Exploring an early eighteenth-century German confessional crisis centered in the Palatinate, this article focuses on the degree to which judicial, political, and diplomatic mechanisms successfully regulated and deescalated confessional strife. In short, it looks at the “juridification” of confessional conflict in the Empire. In so doing, it addresses a number of underresearched themes, such as the reactions of the Catholic princes and the Emperor, the internal dynamics within the Corpus Evangelicorum, as well as the international dimension of European great power politics. This not only provides a multiangle analysis of a crisis that saw the emergence of a new regime in the politics of religion, but also offers greater insight into the relationship between the powerful, militarized Protestant territorial-states of northern Germany and the Habsburg emperorship, specifically with regard to the judicial authority of the latter.

In anticipation of the upcoming five-hundreth anniversary in 2017 of the start of the Reformation, this article addresses the memory of this event in Central Europe by focusing on the tricentennial celebrations of 1817. The jubilees that took place that year were unique in that they were the first ones characterized by an ecumenical spirit. The article focuses on the Habsburg lands, where the 1817 jubilees were especially significant because of the recent dismantling of the Counter-Reformation by Emperor Joseph II and the favorable policies for Protestants pursued by his conservative successors. Using sermons and state records from archives in Vienna and Budapest, the article argues that the Austrian government used this event to display its newfound policies of religious toleration. Although the Austrian celebrations mirrored, in many respects, the ones in the German states, the infamous censorship regime of the pre-1848 Habsburg government paradoxically promoted an atmosphere of toleration that ensured the ecumenical nature of the celebrations in the Habsburg Empire.

The politics of sexuality in modern Germany was complicated, contradictory, and multivalent. Reflecting on how to conceptualize that complexity is worthwhile, for doing so allows us to formulate multiple interpretive perspectives. After briefly sketching two of the most common scholarly interpretations, this article explores the usefulness of a third model, one in which the political dynamic of the broad and complex debate about sexuality is neither univalent (i.e., moving toward greater freedom or greater repression) nor binary (moving toward both), but “trivalent.” This perspective reveals the usefulness of seeing a political dynamic set up by conflicts and contrasts among three loose groupings that stand out among the many voices debating the nature and meaning of sexuality. At the same time, it uncovers and defines the productivity of multiple contradictions and conflicts, as well as the contingent coherences, they generated. Making use of particular readings of Foucauldian theory and the theory of complex systems, the article suggests the value of thinking about the politics of sexuality in terms of processes of change, as well as structures of power.