Territorial Weirdness Circa 1700
Oddly enough, to our modern sensibilities, the Holy Roman Empire encompassed parts of Prussia, Denmark, Austria-Hungary, and France, while leaving other parts of each country outside the empire.
"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness
I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
I wonder how the legal norm ever developed that some countries could be partly in and partly outside of the Holy Roman Empire.
ReplyDeleteI suppose it is comparable to the status of the Angevin Empire (England + Normandy + Aquitaine + etc.) in the 12th century, large chunks of which were theoretically vassals of the king of France & other chunks not. HRE failed to develop incipient proto-nation state model of other European powers and so retained the full weirdness of the high Middle Ages political system as an archaism up to the beginning of the 19th century. Especially weird since the Holy Roman Emperor (unlike the 12th century kings of France) himself possessed large territories that were theoretically outside of his own empire.