Historians who study early modern Germany used to regard "the confessional age" as a stagnant era characterized by religious conflicts and wars; however, recently the age is regarded more and more as a time of the establishment of coexistence between a number of confessions. Now the task is to shed light on the problem of how this "confessional pluralism" was concretely formed. Furthermore, the research has begun to take notice of inter-confessional communication as the basis of that "pluralism". Following these recent arguments, this article examines inter-confessional negotiations in the city of Cologne during the congress for the Peace of Westphalia. Though Cologne was ruled by Catholic magistrates, the city was also inhabited by Protestants. Between 1647 and 48, three Calvinist communities of Cologne who were impressed by the progress being achieved by the Peace Congresses in Munster and Osnabruck, attempted to negotiate with the magistrates. The Calvinists sought the right to attend services in neighboring territories, which was forbidden, and consequently succeeded in winning this right from the magistrates. After the conclusion of the Peace of Westphalia, these Calvinist communities tried to obtain the right to hold services inside the city and also attain civil rights for Protestants. This time, however, instead of negotiating with the magistrates, the Calvinists petitioned the Evangelical estates of the Empire for those rights at a conference of the Holy Roman Empire. The magistrates brought this action into serious question, because it damaged their right to make decisions regarding religious issues inside the city. Consequently, the magistrates hardened their attitude toward Protestants in the city, and the Calvinists failed to accomplish their goals. When magistrates subsequently threatened the Protestants by issuing a decree to expel them, the Calvinist communities recognized the need to change their approach, deciding to respect the inviolable right of the magistrates regarding religious issues inside the city. Consequently, a framework for "confessional pluralism" in Cologne arose, in which all internal religious problems would be negotiated with the magistrates first. Thereafter, the magistrates expressed the intention to permit Protestants to live inside the city provided that they respect their authority to adjudicate internal religious issues. The author concludes that the series of subsequent negotiations that followed these events formed the foundation of "confessional pluralism" in Cologne.

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The research to date on the formation process of the Taira Family's (Heike) rise to power has emphasized both rapprochements and opposition between Taira-no-Kiyomori and retired Emperor Goshirakawa-In. However, the factors determining the political choices made by Kiyomori cannot be thoroughly explained by such a dichotomy in relation to Goshirakawa-In. In this paper, the author argues the need to reexamine Kiyomori's political choices and the rise of the Heike to power from the perspective of the Family's territory and the nature of its proprietorship over it, based on recent research being done on the political history of the shoen 荘園 estate system. The author begins with the formation process of the Heike's Tomoda-no-Sho 鞆田荘 estate and concludes that 1) Heike control was realized by confirming the estates boundaries through negotiations and adjustments on the central political scene and 2) both Kiyomori and Taira-no-Tadamori were able to expand those boundaries within the process of establishing their own political positions. In other words, rather than marking any new development in the system of local land proprietorship, the formation of Tomoda-no-Sho owed more to the political process at the time. Next, the author turns to Ota-no-Sho 大田荘 and Yatabe-Gun 八部郡, which are considered the Heike's most typical proprietary estates, and argues that they, too, were formed through the same kind of negotiations and adjustments at the political center as with Tomoda-no-Sho, concluding that the structure of all Heike land ownership was greatly influenced by the political process. Then, in order to put the relationship between politics and proprietorship in more concrete terms, the author examines the problem of inheritance of the property held by the Heike as imperial regents (sekkanke 摂関家), which was the direct cause of the coup d'etat of 1179, concluding that through his involvement in the unrest, Goshirakawa-In was able to visualize the possibilities for his own intervention in all of the Heike's property, making him conscious of the danger Kiyomori actually posed and motivating him to begin taking steps to dismantle the institution of the retired emperor's household. From the above conclusions, the author argues that the political choices made by Kiyomori could not have been limited by any power struggle with Goshirakawa-In, but were rather determined by the proprietary structure of the territory controlled by the Taira Family. Based on this argument, the author attempts to reexamine the Heike's rise to power from the perspective of that proprietary structure, indicating first that the Heike established its military institutions within the framework of policing operations necessary to protect the shoen estate system. Secondly, he shows that although the Heike's territory was based mainly on negotiations and adjustments conducted at the political center, the actual formation of that territory on the local level would never be realized if it met with opposition from administrator's on the ground (zaicho kanjin 在庁官人). This is one structural feature that made it necessary for Heike proprietorships to be formed within the framework of the shoen estate system. Finally, the author argues that any further examination of the development of Heike political power after the 1179 coup will have to take into serious consideration the structural determinants of the Family's feudal proprietorships.

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This aim of this article is to consider the workings of the late premodern Japanese state through an investigation of the elements of ranked status among the shoguns, emperors and shognate lord (daimyo 大名) and the cort noble (kuge 公家) families, using manuals of letter writing etiquette kept by the great feudal families (daimyoke 大名家). The standards for the aristocratsamurai ranked status order were complicated, involving both bureaucratic status and family pedigree among the aristocracy and bureaucratic status and stipends (kokudaka 石高) among the daimyo, in addition to the factors of each family's complex historical tradition, all of which determined a ranked order letter writing styles. The letter writing styles of the daimyo families were not only influenced by such factors as their position as "other families" (besides the shogunate and emperor) and the letter writing style of the shogunate itself, but also family pedigree and the social mobility that occurred in the kuge-daimyo ranked status order, which each family was constantly trying to improve. While the different styles of letter writing during the Enpo (1673-81) and Kyoho (1716-36) Eras were formed by ranking along the lines of a fixed emperor-shogun order, followed by a kuge-daimyo order, the standards for the ranking became more numerous and the system lacked uniformity, as the status distinctions between aristocrats and daimyo becoming gradually clearer, reflecting the present situation. However, at the same time the kuge-daimyo order came to possess to some extent a coordinated interrelationship. Although the period's kuge-daimyo ranked status order was an issue linked to the state, power structure, as well as political problems and foreign relations, the way in which it was supposed to work was by no means fixed or self-evident. In addition, the problems taken up in this article form an important starting point for examining the changes which occurred in the kuge-daimyo (kobu 公武) order during the Meiji Restoration and when taking up the cases of families other than the Maeda and Tsugaru Clans.

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