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Christopher W. Close is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Saint Joseph's University. He has received several prestigious research grants from organizations including the German Academic Exchange Service and the American Philosophical Society. He is the author of The Negotiated Reformation: Imperial Cities and the Politics of Urban Reform, 1525-1550 (2009) and numerous articles in The Sixteenth Century Journal and European History Quarterly.
'In his pathbreaking study, Christopher W. Close analyzes federations as an integral and in many respects indispensable part of the Holy Roman Empire's political culture. He shows how they shaped the Empire's face and provided the framework for its dynamic and open development for more than 150 years. Without understanding their traditions and their frictions, their common values and their complex disputes neither the empire's civil wars nor its capability to provide for domestic peace is comprehensible.' Thomas Lau, University of Freiburg 'A meticulously researched, carefully argued contribution to early modern politics. The role of the enforced confessional orthodoxy of centralized states recedes far into the background. The vitality and resilience of small actors, buttressed by the Reformation and entangled in leagues whose filaments reached across Europe, rises to the fore. The corporate alliance becomes the central figure in state building. This is an important book.' Christopher Ocker, Australian Catholic University 'This well-researched and well-written monograph is a recent addition to the mass of scholarship that represents the Holy Roman Empire as a real, living, breathing entity … Recommended.' C. Ingrao, Choice
