Agricultural History Review, Volume 54 Part 2 (2006), p. 358

This splendid study might be characterized as a work of cultural archaeology, which seeks to reconstruct the vanished ‘geo-cultural landscape’ (p.72) occupied by the central European nobility of the early modern era. The book’s protagonists are the one hundred families of the free imperial knights of Electoral Mainz – the stronghold of the imperial knighthood of the Holy Roman Empire. They were denizens of a world ‘that stretched from the North Sea to Vienna, that was suffused by corporate, dynastic, local, and religious allegiances, and that was characterized by a common, cosmopolitan culture’ (p.13); and they shared an ‘early modern ideal of nobility that prized purity above antiquity, quarterings above patrocliny, and virtue above ethnicity’ (p.1). But with the dissolution of the imperial knighthood in 1803, and of the Holy Roman Empire itself three years later, this traditional vision of nobility came under assault, and the members of these families struggled to recast their claims to pre-eminence in a world of nascent n ation states.

Godsey’s book illuminates the various ways in which the imperial knights of Mainz sought to reinvent their identities during the revolutionary era and its aftermath. In the early nineteenth century, some leading Protestant aristocrats began to define themselves as pillars of the Uradel (‘ancient nobility’) of the German nation. Most notable among this group was Karl Freiherr vom Stein, Prussia’s first minister in 1807–1808 and hero of the Prussian resistance to Napoleon, whom Godsey dubs ‘the first noble German’ (p.248). By contrast, most Catholic knights, who had held a monopoly on economic resources and political influence associated with the ‘noble Church’ (Adelskirche) in Germany, rejected the new ethnic nationalism of the revolutionary era. After the outbreak of the revolutionary wars in 1792, many Catholic nobles from Mainz, including the future Austrian Chancellor Clemens von Metternich, moved to the Habsburg Empire, where they found a more congenial cultural and political milieu.

Those who neither emigrated nor embraced ethnic nationalism struggled to come to terms with their new circumstances. Godsey notes that ‘the revolutionary era resulted in a spatial sea-change for the imperial nobility, which in the end found itself confined in all but incidental ways to the territory of the German Confederation’ (p.78). He cites the example of Prince-Primate Baron Carl Dalberg, who came to be viewed by subsequent generations as a ‘traitor’ to the German nation for having allied himself with Napoleon (pp.72–3). Before the French Revolution, nobles like Dalberg had held estates scattered across modern-day Germany and France; they had ‘lacked modern cultural loyalties,’ instead espousing an ‘imperial patriotism’ exalting the traditional c orporate structures of the Holy Roman Empire.

Perhaps the book’s most fascinating dimension is its account of the rise of the concept of the German Uradel – a term coined at the end of the eighteenth century referring to ‘nobility traceable in the male line to a progenitor in medieval times or earlier’ (p.59). In early-modern central Europe, Godsey writes, nobility had been conceived as reflecting ‘virtue’, which stemmed from the purity of aristocratic extraction in both the paternal and maternal lines, rather than from the antiquity of the male line alone. Hence aristocratic lineage was equally prized on the mother’s side of the family as on the father’s. The most exclusive eighteenth-century aristocratic institutions had required their members to possess thirty-two ‘quarterings’ – i.e. at least five generations of purely noble ancestry. The new noble ideal reflected a ‘decisive masculinization’. In the words of one treatise from the 1790s, ‘The fair sex obtains and loses nobility only through marriage ... because the woman is only a zero, whose worth depends on the number set in front of her. This number is the man’. Godsey concludes, ‘Here, the noble trend paralleled or perhaps anticipated developments already noted for bourgeois women, whose social and legal position deteriorated in the transition to the late modern era’ (pp.59–60).

The concept of the Uradel was equally significant for politics as for gender relations. By establishing ‘a connection between the “national” and the noble past’, this concept ‘offered the nobility a fresh and valuable form of legitimacy’, enabling aristocrats to justify themselves ‘in national-historical and national-cultural terms rather than those of a discredited society of estates or the old noble nation’ (p.59). Godsey thus persuasively refutes the argument of scholars such as Heinz Reif that the German ‘concept of nobility underwent no fundamental alteration around 1800’ (p.13).

Although the nobility of the Habsburg Empire continued to profess ‘the traditional corporate and pedigreed understanding of their estate’ (p.253), aristocratic identities elsewhere in German-speaking Europe underwent a profound transformation during the early nineteenth century. Those nobles who accepted the new German nation as their ‘lodestar’, Godsey declares, found themselves ‘trapped within boundaries that they did not determine’. He concludes provocatively: ‘As the meaning of “nation” continued to mutate, so did that of “noble”, such that by the twentieth century the quality of nobility had fatally come to depend not on quarterings or even culture, but on race’ (p.254).