Gerald Strauss offers a comprehensive study of a phenomenon of great interest to scholars of early modern Europe: the widespread opposition to Roman law and lawyers in sixteenth-century Germany. Originally published in 1986. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

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

These essays, comprising case-studies and broader surveys, deal with town-country relations and regional systems and identities in late medieval and early modern Germany, especially in their impact on social and religious change in the age of the Reformation.

In this new account of the emergence of a distinctive territorial state in early modern Germany, Robert von Friedeburg examines how the modern notion of state does not rest on the experience of a bureaucratic state-apparatus. It emerged to stabilize monarchy from dynastic insecurity and constrain it to protect the rule of law, subjects, and their lives and property. Against this background, Lutheran and neo-Aristotelian notions on the spiritual and material welfare of subjects dominating German debate interacted with Western European arguments against 'despotism' to protect the lives and property of subjects. The combined result of this interaction under the impact of the Thirty Years War was Seckendorff's Der Deutsche Fürstenstaat (1656), constraining the evil machinations of princes and organizing the detailed administration of life in the tradition of German Policey, and which founded a specifically German notion of the modern state as comprehensive provision of services to its subjects.

In The Politics of the Reformation in Germany, Thomas A. Brady, Jr. constructs a new understanding of the Protestant Reformation through the biography of a little-known figure, the urban politician Jacob Sturm (1489-1553) of Strasbourg. At once a man of the late Middle Ages, the Reformation and the Renaissance, Sturm's political career cut through every one of the levels of the complex political life of Germany in this era - the city, the province, the region, the Protestant movement, and the Holy Roman Empire - and examination of it reveals why Protestantism, which began as a radical movement, quickly allied with local and regional government to become a conservative force. Professor Brady places the Reformation in the context of the political pluralism of the late Middle Ages and in so doing provides an interpretation that does not see it as the beginning of Germany's movement towards national statehood. Rather it gives full play to the popular movements, the largest and richest in Europe before the French Revolution, and to local interests and traditions. This perspective also allows for a reassessment of the impact of the Reformation on the political culture and government of the Holy Roman Empire and its potential for altering the future course of German history.