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The Holy Roman Empire emerged in the Middle Ages as a loosely integrated union of German states and city-states under the supreme rule of an emperor. Around 1500, it took on a more formal structure with the establishment of powerful institutions--such as the Reichstag and Imperial Chamber Court- that would endure more or less intact until the empire´s dissolution by Napoleon in 1806. Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger provides a concise history of the Holy Roman Empire, presenting an entirely new interpretation of the empire´s political culture and remarkably durable institutions. In a narrative spanning three turbulent centuries, she takes readers from the reform era at the dawn of the sixteenth century to the crisis of the Reformation, from the consolidation of the Peace of Augsburg to the destructive fury of the Thirty Years´ War, from the conflict between Austria and Prussia to the empire´s downfall in the age of the French Revolution

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"This important book advances a new interpretation of the Holy Roman Empire that promises to free analyses of the empire´s inner workings from the burdens of contemporary political memory. Stollberg-Rilinger makes the imperial political system, endlessly complex though it was, accessible and comprehensible to a wider audience."--David M. Luebke, author of Hometown Religion: Regimes of Coexistence in Early Modern Westphalia

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Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger is professor and chair of early modern history at the University of Münster in Germany. Her many books include her acclaimed biography of Maria Theresa, which won Germany´s prestigious Leipzig Book Fair Prize in 2017, and The Emperor´s Old Clothes: Constitutional History and the Symbolic Language of the Holy Roman Empire.

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