The Power of Originals
Manuscripts as Building Blocks of Political Cooperation in Early Modern Central Europe
2023–2025
RFC07
The political history of early modern Europe is often focused on kings and princes. Nevertheless, the complex political communities within the monarchic structures should not be overlooked. Leagues and alliances, for instance, coordinated the activities of their equal members, especially towns. It proves difficult, however, to grasp how exactly these cooperative political communities worked: they did not rely on a constitution, did not form a government, or displayed other typical features of statehood. Rather, they were founded during the meetings of their members. Records of these meetings thus formed the essence of the cooperative political communities.
This project sheds new light on non-hierarchical cooperation in Central European politics by analysing how manuscripts formed and structured such communities. The power of manuscripts to keep cooperation going was highly dependent on their status as originals: since they were invested with a certain authority, they could exert normative power. The project studies mainly one famous example of such a cooperative political community which was formed, ordered, and legitimised by the originals produced by its members: the Hanse.
The records of the diets of representatives from Hanse towns, so called Rezesse, can be regarded as the building blocks of the cooperation between towns: Rezesse testified that the Hanse existed, and the rules and agreements written down in them governed the towns’ interrelations. Analysing the power that Rezesse exacted is especially interesting for the 16th and 17th centuries. The study of these manuscripts sheds a light on the fate of the Hanse during this period of great transformations in the European political arena: were Rezesse still used as a repository for practical information, or did they merely attest the former glory of the Hanse? Since the way that Rezesse were and are stored is important for identifying the character of the manuscripts, this project is also connected to ‘Archiving Artefacts’ (Research Field E).
People
Project lead: Ulla Kypta
Research Associate: Justin Reimers
Preceeding Project
Multiplicities of Originals: How the Manuscripts of Urban Meeting Records Were Used and Transformed (2021–2022)
Project lead: Ulla Kypta