An Exploration of the Political-Administrative Written Language of the Holy Roman Empire in the Early Modern Period (Eine Exploration zur Politisch-Administrativen Schriftsprache des Frühneuzeitlichen Reiches)
Author : Wolfgang E.J. Weber
Abstract :
Did the early modern German empire develop a political-administrative written language that not only brought the members of the empire to obedience according to their respective status, but also provided them with something like a collective identity? The corresponding analysis of the most important imperial documents as well as significant contributions of the contemporary discourse on the subject yields an ambivalent result. A clearly definable, recognizable imperial language or a formal imperial style did not come into being. This was mainly due to the fact that the Reformation and confessionalization as well as the sovereignty aspirations of the large territories meant that imperial communication also became legalized on the one hand and increasingly became an intergovernmental discourse on the other. The broad mass of subjects were therefore less and less affected by the content-related messages of the imperial leadership, although their diffuse docility, grounded in isolated iconographic and linguistic elements of imperial representation, remained.
Keywords :
Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, political-administrative language, imperial language style, German imperial recesses, German politial grammar
