The illuminated Reich: memory, crisis and the visibility of monarchy in late medieval Germany

Scales, L.

Abstract

Writing towards the close of the thirteenth century, the German polemicist Alexander von Roes returned a dismal judgement on his times. In the half century between Frederick II’s imperial coronation and the Council of Lyon in 1274, the ‘Roman Empire’ had so much declined as to pass almost out of remembrance. In fact it had reached a point from which ‘it cannot decrease any further without being completely destroyed’. The image of a Reich stunted and diminished after its ostensible heyday in a high-medieval Kaiserzeit remains an all-too-familiar one, nourished in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by the nationalist longings and anxieties of a German historiography morbidly preoccupied with false turnings. Yet it is a difficult image to banish altogether, and perhaps we should not try. A chronicler observed of one of the kings of Alexander’s calamitous half-century, Richard of Cornwall (1257-72), that he ‘came nowhere in the German lands except to the Rhine, and was in fact impotent in the Reich’. Richard’s reign may have marked a particular low point, yet the chronicler’s words point towards a theme which might be inscribed above the entire late medieval history of the imperial monarchy: the problem of presence.

Citation

Scales, L. (2010). The illuminated Reich: memory, crisis and the visibility of monarchy in late medieval Germany. In J. Coy, B. Marschke, & D. Sabean (Eds.), The Holy Roman Empire, reconsidered (73-92). Berghahn Journals

• Publication Date: Oct 1, 2010
• Deposit Date: Feb 3, 2011
• Publicly Available Date: Mar 6, 2015
• Publisher: Berghahn Journals
• Pages: 73-92
• Book Title: The Holy Roman Empire, reconsidered.
• Chapter Number: 4
• ISBN: 9781845457594
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1683704
• Publisher URL: http://www.berghahnbooks.com/title.php?rowtag=CoyHoly