This book studies the connections between the political reform of the Holy Roman Empire and the German lands around 1500 and the sixteenth-century religious reformations, both Protestant and Catholic. It argues that the character of the political changes (dispersed sovereignty, local autonomy) prevented both a general reformation of the Church before 1520 and a national reformation thereafter. The resulting settlement maintained the public peace through politically structured religious communities (confessions), thereby avoiding further religious strife and fixing the confessions into the Empire's constitution. The Germans' emergence into the modern era as a people having two national religions was the reformation's principal legacy to modern Germany.

The Golden Bull of 1356 (German: Goldene Bulle, Latin: Bulla Aurea) was a decree issued by the Imperial Diet at Nuremberg and Metz (Diet of Metz (1356/57)) headed by the Emperor Charles IV which fixed, for a period of more than four hundred years, important aspects of the constitutional structure of the Holy Roman Empire. It was named the Golden Bull for the golden seal it carried.

This study of the Catholic Prince-Bishopric of Bamberg and its largely Protestant aristocracy demonstrates that shared family ties and traditional privilege could reduce religious based conflict. These findings raise fundamental questions about current interpretations of the Reformation era. Prince-bishops regularly appointed Lutheran nobles to administrative positions, and those Lutheran appointees served their Catholic overlords ably and loyally. Bamberg was a center for social interaction, business transactions, and career opportunities for aristocrats. As these nobles saw it, birthright and kinship ties made them suitable for service in the prince-bishopric. Catholic leaders concurred, confessional differences notwithstanding. This study tells the complicated story of how Lutheran nobles and their Catholic relatives struggled to maintain solidarity and cooperation during an era of religious strife and animosity

... A three-volume reassessment of the last five centuries of German history ...

Medieval civilization came of age in thunderous events like the Norman Conquest and the First Crusade. Power fell into the hands of men who imposed coercive new lordships in quest of nobility. Rethinking a familiar history, Thomas Bisson explores the circumstances that impelled knights, emperors, nobles, and churchmen to infuse lordship with social purpose. Bisson traces the origins of European government to a crisis of lordship and its resolution. King John of England was only the latest and most conspicuous in a gallery of bad lords who dominated the populace instead of ruling it. Yet, it was not so much the oppressed people as their tormentors who were in crisis. The Crisis of the Twelfth Century suggests what these violent people—and the outcries they provoked—contributed to the making of governments in kingdoms, principalities, and towns.