This paper is a version of a contribution to a volume of essays which will appear in connection with the major international exhibition on the Ottonians being mounted in Magdeburg in 2001. There has already been an international colloquium linked with the exhibition, Ottonische Neuanfänge (Ottonian New Beginnings), which took place in May of last year – it's perhaps significant for the place of history in German cultural life that this colloquium got a full-page review in the German equivalent of The Times – but the exhibition itself will have what in Germany are the usual accompaniments to a major historical exhibition: a lavish catalogue, probably in several volumes, and an accompanying volume of essays by the experts in the field, destined to sit on the coffee tables of the educated German bourgeoisie for the next few years, but perhaps also to be read. The title was set for me when I was invited to participate. I accepted it without problems because it seemed to me to offer opportunities to reflect on a number of issues which crop up repeatedly in doing the kind of cultural political history which I specialise in.

First, there is the question of the nature of ruling dynasties: how their members perceived themselves (and how and how far we can know anything about that), and how modern historians perceive them, which is by no means always the same thing; linked to this is the question of how ruling dynasties perceived each other (and the extent to which they consciously did this).