Marketing Maximilian

Long before the photo op, political rulers were manipulating visual imagery to cultivate their authority and spread their ideology. Born just decades after Gutenberg, the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I (1459-1519) was, Larry Silver argues, the first ruler to exploit the propaganda power of printed images and text. Marketing Maximilian explores how Maximilian used illustrations and other visual arts to shape his image, achieve what Max Weber calls "the routinization of charisma," strengthen the power of the Hapsburg dynasty, and help establish the Austro-Hungarian Empire. A fascinating study of the self-fashioning of an early modern ruler who was as much image-maker as emperor, Marketing Maximilian shows why Maximilian remains one of the most remarkable, innovative, and self-aggrandizing royal art patrons in European history. Silver describes how Maximilian--lacking a real capital or court center, the ability to tax, and an easily manageable territory--undertook a vast and expensive visual-media campaign to forward his extravagant claims to imperial rank, noble blood, perfect virtues, and military success. To press these claims, Maximilian patronized and often personally supervised and collaborated with the best printers, craftsmen, and artists of his time (among them no less than Albrecht Dürer) to plan and produce illustrated books, medals, heralds, armor, and an ambitious tomb monument.

This “elegant and engaging” biography dramatically reinterprets the life and reign of the sixteenth-century Holy Roman Emperor: “a masterpiece” (Susannah Lipscomb, Financial Times). The life of Emperor Charles V (1500–1558), ruler of Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, and much of Italy and Central and South America, has long intrigued biographers. But capturing the nature of this elusive man has proven notoriously difficult—especially given his relentless travel, tight control of his own image, and the complexity of governing the world’s first transatlantic empire. Geoffrey Parker, one of the world’s leading historians of early modern Europe, has examined the surviving written sources in Dutch, French, German, Italian, Latin, and Spanish, as well as visual and material evidence. In Emperor, he explores the crucial decisions that created and preserved this vast empire, analyzes Charles’s achievements within the context of both personal and structural factors, and scrutinizes the intimate details of the ruler’s life for clues to his character and inclinations. The result is a unique biography that interrogates every dimension of Charles’s reign and views the world through the emperor’s own eyes.

As the first book-length examination of the role of German print culture in mediating Europe's knowledge of the newly discovered people of Africa, South Asia, and the Americas, this work highlights a unique and early incident of visual accuracy and an unprecedented investment in the practice of ethnography.

In H2H Marketing the authors focus on redefining the role of marketing by reorienting the mindset of decision-makers and integrating the concepts of Design Thinking, Service-Dominant Logic and Digitalization. It’s not just technological advances that have made it necessary to revisit the way everybody thinks about marketing; customers and marketers as human decision-makers are changing, too. Therefore, having the right mindset, the right management approach and highly dynamic implementation processes is key to creating innovative and meaningful value propositions for all stakeholders. This book is essential reading for the following groups: Executives who want to bring new meaning to their lives and organizations Managers who need inspirations and evidence for their daily work in order to handle the change management needed in response to the driving forces of technology, society and ecology Professors, trainers and coaches who want to apply the latest marketing principles Students and trainees who want to prepare for the future Customers of any kind who need to distinguish between leading companies Employees of suppliers and partners who want to help their firms stand out. The authors review the status quo of marketing and outline its evolution to the new H2H Marketing. In turn, they demonstrate the new marketing paradigm with the H2H Marketing Model, which incorporates Design Thinking, Service-Dominant Logic and the latest innovations in Digitalization. With the new H2H Mindset, Trust and Brand Management and the evolution of the operative Marketing Mix to the updated, dynamic and iterative H2H Process, they offer a way for marketing to find meaning in a troubled world.

The German imperial knights were branded disobedient, criminal, or treasonous, but instead of finding themselves on the wrong side of history, they resisted marginalization and adapted through a combination of conservative and progressive strategies. The knights tried to turn the elite world on its head through their constant challenges to the princes in the realms of both culture and governance. They held their own chivalric tournaments from 1479-1487, and defied the emperor and powerful princes in refusing to obey laws that violated custom. But their resistance led to a series of disasters in the 1520s: their leaders were hunted down and their castles destroyed. Having failed on their own, they turned to Emperor Charles V in the 1540s and the imperial knighthood was formed. This new status stabilized their position and provided them with important rights, including the choice between Lutheranism and Catholicism. During the Reformation era (1517-1648), no other German group embraced diversity in religion like the imperial knights. Despite the popularity of Protestantism in the group, they stood up to their princely adversaries, now Protestant, becoming champions of the Catholic Church and proved themselves just as staunch defenders of the Church as the Habsburg and Wittelsbach dynasties.

Art historians have long looked to letters to secure biographical details; clarify relationships between artists and patrons; and present artists as modern, self-aware individuals. This book takes a novel approach: focusing on Albrecht Dürer, Shira Brisman is the first to argue that the experience of writing, sending, and receiving letters shaped how he treated the work of art as an agent for communication. In the early modern period, before the establishment of a reliable postal system, letters faced risks of interception and delay. During the Reformation, the printing press threatened to expose intimate exchanges and blur the line between public and private life. Exploring the complex travel patterns of sixteenth-century missives, Brisman explains how these issues of sending and receiving informed Dürer’s artistic practices. His success, she contends, was due in large part to his development of pictorial strategies—an epistolary mode of address—marked by a direct, intimate appeal to the viewer, an appeal that also acknowledged the distance and delay that defers the message before it can reach its recipient. As images, often in the form of prints, coursed through an open market, and artists lost direct control over the sale and reception of their work, Germany’s chief printmaker navigated the new terrain by creating in his images a balance between legibility and concealment, intimacy and public address.

Reference entries, overview essays, and primary source document excerpts survey the history and unveil the successes and failures of the longest-lasting European empire. The Holy Roman Empire endured for ten centuries. This book surveys the history of the empire from the formation of a Frankish Kingdom in the sixth century through the efforts of Charlemagne to unify the West around A.D. 800, the conflicts between emperors and popes in the High Middle Ages, and the Reformation and the Wars of Religion in the Early Modern period to the empire's collapse under Napoleonic rule. A historical overview and timeline are followed by sections on government and politics, organization and administration, individuals, groups and organizations, key events, the military, objects and artifacts, and key places. Each of these topical sections begins with an overview essay, which is followed by alphabetically arranged reference entries on significant topics. The book includes a selection of primary source documents, each of which is introduced by a contextualizing headnote, and closes with a selected, general bibliography.