William D. Godsey, Jr. is Tenured Research Fellow of the Historical Commission at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna. He is the author of Aristocratic Redoubt: The Austro-Hungarian Foreign Office on the Eve of the First World War (1999).
Introduction
1. Wealth and noble autonomy: the free imperial knights in Maine on the eve of revolution
2. Nobles becoming Germans: the transformation of a concept
3. Nobles becoming Germans: the destruction of a 'geo-cultural landscape'
4. Between destruction and survival: knights on the Middle Rhine 1750-1850
5. The past recaptured: knights in the Habsburg Empire 1792-1848
6. From cathedral canons to priests: the Coudenhoves and the 'Catholic revival'
7. The beginnings of conservative German nationalism: the 'naturalization' of Baron Carl vom und zum Stein (1757-1831)
Conclusion
Appendix. Families of Free Imperial Knights (1797).
