The Holy Roman Empire 1495-1806 by Peter H. Wilson

The Holy Roman Empire 1495-1806 Reviews

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  Becca Milsom

  as a book that is meant to help explain the holy Roman empire in the years 1495-1806 it doesn't do a very good job
  hated Wilson's writing, felt the structure of the book was all out of place and found it a very hard, very confusing read and had to use Wikipedia multiple times to help me understand things that Wilson was trying to explain- which I did not except to have to do from a book I was assigned as a core text to the holy Roman empire.
  if you have to read this for a uni course, Wikipedia the holy Roman empire instead-much more useful at explaining things
• 
  Doris Raines

  NICE BOOK.
• 
  Michael

  More about historiography than giving a summary of the period. It was still interesting and makes me want to tackle "Heart of Europe" !
• 
  Randy Wilson

  This is a slender volume that reviews various strands of historiography related to the Holy Roman Empire.  Mr. Wilson is the author of the lively and revisionist much longer volume, 'Heart of Europe.'
  
  This book anticipates his work and reflects his thinking about why it even matters to study the Holy Roman Empire.  Afterall, as he explains in the opening pages the Empire never had clear territorial boundaries, nor encompassed a single language nor national group.  At one time this blurriness could strike us as making a pointless entity that's loss is for the good.
  
  But now we live in a time where diversity of language, cultures, national identifications are all around us, inescapable, enriching but also capable of generating fear and fomenting violence.  There maybe lessons to take away from the Holy Roman Empire we never dreamed would apply to the modern world.
  
  The Holy Roman Emperor along with the Pope share a sacred anointment but are both elected roles.  This sacred quality is based on the role of God's representative on Earth which in modern statehood is a charged and questionable quality.  In the U.S., we invest our constitution with a seemingly sacred gloss which is questionable because it isn't expressed.  The constitution isn't sacred and originalism is a phony doctrine based on a dubious belief that the founding fathers were creating a framework that was eternal.  Better we invest an office with an eternal quality that allows for the framework to maintain a flexibility that changes in cultural, population, technology and economics demands.