In 1992, Professor Erik Midelfort, in an essay entitled ‘Curious Georgics: the German nobility and their crisis of legitimacy in the late-sixteenth century’, demonstrated how the attacks of prominent writers such as Sebastian Franck, Nicodemus Frischlin and Cyriakus Spangenberg, upon the legitimacy of the German aristocracy resulted in the foundation of academies for the nobility and in an increasing self-consciousness among nobles concerning the purity of their Christian ancestral blood-lines or Ahnenprobe as a means of proving the legitimacy of their claims to noble privilege. Midelfort set this essay in the context of similar or parallel concerns for purity of blood among the nobilities of Spain and France during the same period, and began with reference to Otto Brünner's remarkable study Adeliges Landleben und europäischer Geist: Leben und Werk Wolf Helmhards von Hohberg, 1612–1688. Brünner's exposition of the life and work of this seventeenth-century Austrian aristocrat and poet revealed how a traditional rural-based noble culture came under threat from the increasing centralisation of power in the early modern Habsburg state and from the rise of what he called a ‘bureaucratic bourgeoisie’ who would later become the noblesse de robe and would displace or eclipse the ancient noblesse d'épée. Central to Brünner's and Midelfort's works is the idea of ‘crisis of the nobility’. The old orders in Spain, the Holy Roman Empire and France felt threatened by the pretensions of a centralising state which claimed the right to ennoble and enfranchise at will.