Joachim Whaley was brought up bilingually in English and German. He studied History at Christ's College, Cambridge, has taught at Cambridge since 1976, and is currently a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College. He is the author of several books on religious toleration in early modern Germany and on the Holy Roman Empire in the early modern period, all of which have been translated into German. He has written numerous articles on the religious and intellectual history of the German lands in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 2015.
By analysing and narrating the essentials of one of the most complex and long-lived of all European institutions, and moreover doing it lucidly and entertainingly, Whaley has performed something of a miracle. * Tim Blanning, University of Cambridge * A crisp, authoritative and notably accessible introduction to the Holy Roman Empire, which occupied a central place in Europe's history for an entire millennium before its dissolution in 1806. * Professor Hamish Scott, FBA, Jesus College, Oxford. *