The volume by a team of authors offers entirely new perspectives on topics that have hitherto been reflected only marginally in the study of noble elites. It attempts to capture certain problems in the nobility's existence between the 17th and 20th century - from a regional probe of the development of noble tenure in the northern Bohemia, through legal issues related to the identity and careers of the Silesian nobility, the influence of roads on the shaping and transformation of the landscape and noble estates, insights into the world of the nobility on the basis of egodocuments, issues of family strategies and illegitimate children, and the abolition and withdrawal of noble titles, to the involvement of the nobility in the SS during the Nazi Third Reich.