BA History

How do communities cohere across and within the boundaries of a highly fragmented political landscape, and how can these communities’ particular rights be defended by an authority that is both imperial in name and lacking the modern state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of force in practice? These are questions that confront historians of the late medieval Holy Roman Empire, a political entity that has often been dismissed by later generations as a kind of ‘failed state’ but which was seen by many of its inhabitants as the guarantor of their specific corporate and communal privileges and ‘freedoms’. 

The Empire was often invoked to legitimate the many alliances, societies and fraternities that were formed by all social ranks and estates to uphold their rights and freedoms. But group formation also depended on exclusion and stigmatization, and the Empire’s associational political culture was built around antagonism and persecution as much as cooperation. This unit will examine these structures and processes through lenses including national identities; revolutionary movements and attempts to form new kinds of community; religious communities, in particular female monasticism; regional communities and the problem of public order; urban communities and fraternities; Jewish communities; rural communes and the ‘common man’.

• Analyse different (late medieval and modern) ways of understanding the Holy Roman Empire, particularly those that frame it as a guarantor of corporate and communal freedoms 
• Analyse processes of collective identity formation in the context of the late medieval Holy Roman Empire 
• Explore ways to analyse the internal social and political dynamics of a range of different communities (both geographically concentrated and dispersed) 
• Analyse the interactions between internal community dynamics and larger social and political structures in the late medieval Holy Roman Empire
 

Seminars will be focused on analysis of primary sources (in translation). Each 3-hour seminar (after the first) will involve a plenary discussion of key secondary literature to provide context, a discussion of primary sources selected in whole or in part by the students leading the discussion, and a presentation as preparation for the following week’s seminar.

Students will need to work collaboratively and decide how to lead each week’s primary source discussion as a team. 

The final assessment task will be structured so that students must answer with reference to more than one type of community (i.e. based on more than one of the seminar topics). Students will need to identify and analyse themes that cut across the seminar structure, and will do so by devising an information management strategy including a list of keywords or themes that can be used to add a further layer of structure to note-taking. Suggestions for free software that can help with this mark-up process will be provided (e.g. Zotero, Obsidian), and time will be allocated in the seminars for peer-review of progress with information management techniques

Digital literacy will be enhanced through reinforcement and extension of knowledge of online search tools and methods, e.g. for discovering new literature, and through the mark-up process and the various types of software that can be used for this (including reference management software). Students will also develop their digital presentation skills, through both digital written assignments (and feedback on these) and the opportunity to present to the seminar group using PowerPoint or other presentation software.

• Analyse the politics and society of the Holy Roman Empire, c.1350–1500 

• Assess different models of processes of collective identity formation 

• Explore the dynamics of social relations (horizontal and vertical) in a politically decentralized environment 

• Assess the evidentiary basis for claims about the past 

• Evaluate different viewpoints on historical events and structures 

• Test hypotheses and differentiate within and between key concepts 

• Use a variety of online sources to find information 

• Gather and organize significant quantities of data 

• Present complex ideas cogently in oral and written forms 

• Manage time effectively 

• Build analyses from raw evidence 

• Engage in constructive and respectful debate 

Turnitin, plus peer-review and discussion in seminars for formative assessment.

Bell, Dean, Sacred Communities: Jewish and Christian Identities in Fifteenth-Century Germany (Brill, 2001) 

Blickle, Peter (ed.), Resistance, Representation, and Community (Oxford University Press, 1997) 

Brunner, Otto, Land and Lordship: Structures of Governance in Medieval Austria, trans. by Howard Kaminsky and James Van Horn Melton (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) 

Fudge, Thomas A., The Magnificent Ride: The First Reformation in Hussite Bohemia (Ashgate, 1998) 

Hardy, Duncan, Associative Political Culture in the Holy Roman Empire. Upper Germany, 1346–1521 (Oxford University Press, 2018) 

Jackson, William H., ‘Tournaments and the German Chivalric renovatio: Tournament Discipline and the Myth of Origins’, in Chivalry in the Renaissance, ed. by Sydney Anglo (Boydell, 1990), pp. 77–91 

Kümin, Beat, The Communal Age in Western Europe, c.1100–1800 (Palgrave, 2013) 

Ninness, Richard J., German Imperial Knights: Noble Misfits Between Princely Authority and the Crown, 1479–1648 (Routledge, 2020) 

Rubin, Miri, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (Yale University Press, 1999) 

Scales, Len, The Shaping of German Identity. Authority and Crisis, 1245–1414 (Cambridge University Press, 2012) 

Scott, Tom, Society and Economy in Germany 1300–1600 (Palgrave, 2002) 

—— The City-State in Europe, 1000–1600: Hinterland—Territory—Region (Oxford University Press, 2012) 

Stollberg-Rilinger, Barbara, The Emperor’s Old Clothes: Constitutional History and the Symbolic Language of the Holy Roman Empire, translated by T. Dunlap (Berghahn, 2015) 

Strauss, Gerald, Manifestations of Discontent in Germany on the Eve of the Reformation (Indiana University Press, 1971) (translated sources) 

Wilson, Peter, The Holy Roman Empire (Penguin, 2017) 

Winston-Allen, Anne, Convent Chronicles: Women Writing about Women and Reform in the Late Middle Ages (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004) 

Wunderli, Richard, Peasant Fires: The Drummer of Niklashausen (Indiana University Press, 1992) 

Zmora, Hillay, The Feud in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge University Press, 2011)

Students will develop their ability to apply techniques of analytical and critical thinking at a high level and using qualitative primary sources, a core skill for employment in almost any graduate or professional career. This will be achieved through a combination of individual, self-directed work and collaborative working, including responsibility for leading the discussion in part of a seminar, developing study practices from L1 and L2 in the direction of likely working patterns beyond undergraduate study. Students will also learn to approach the course unit as an integrated semester-long project, through the use throughout the semester of the mark-up process and through turn-taking as members of the ‘leadership group’ in each seminar—this will also create a bridge between L1/2 study and postgraduate or professional environments.

The module is concerned with fundamental processes of collective identity formation, including concepts of alterity, stigmatization and scapegoating. Students will be able to apply these ideas and models to understand processes of (hegemonic) inclusion and exclusion in other contexts, and possible parallels will be discussed in the seminars. Particular religious and ethnic groups (especially Jews and Utraquist ‘Hussites’) will be highlighted in contexts that emphasize their communal and cultural creativity as well as conflict with majority or hegemonic groups. Gender will be a category of analysis in all seminars, with a particular focus on female religious houses as both autonomous and creative communities and in their conflicts with male civic and religious authorities.