A study of the discourse of gender in 16th-century German popular literature.Writers of sixteenth-century German popular literature took great interest in describing, debating, commenting on, and prescribing gender roles, and discourses of gender can be traced in texts of all kinds from this period. This book focuses on popular works by Georg Wickram, Jakob Frey, Martin Montanus, and Johann Fischart, all of whom published novels, joke books, plays and/or moral treatises on marriage and family life in Strasbourg in the sixteenth century. Their works express not only their own ideas on women's roles as wives and mothers, but also societal values at a time of religious, political, and cultural change. The view of gender issues provided by these writers is nota simple one, as they ascribed widely varying characteristics to "woman" and her relationship to "man." The book thus analyzes the social and cultural construction of the concept of "woman" as indicated not only by the narrators'comments, but also by the relationships and roles of men and women characters in the narratives. Overall, the focus is on the disparities that persisted in the sixteenth-century discourse of gender, confusing all attempts to arrive at definitive gender roles. In the end, the study argues for something that can best be described as a "flowing continuity" or a "continuous flow" in the discourses that form the sixteenth-century concepts of "woman" and "man." Elisabeth Wåghäll-Nivre is associate professor of German at Växjö University, Sweden.ationships and roles of men and women characters in the narratives. Overall, the focus is on the disparities that persisted in the sixteenth-century discourse of gender, confusing all attempts to arrive at definitive gender roles. In the end, the study argues for something that can best be described as a "flowing continuity" or a "continuous flow" in the discourses that form the sixteenth-century concepts of "woman" and "man." Elisabeth Wåghäll-Nivre is associate professor of German at Växjö University, Sweden.ationships and roles of men and women characters in the narratives. Overall, the focus is on the disparities that persisted in the sixteenth-century discourse of gender, confusing all attempts to arrive at definitive gender roles. In the end, the study argues for something that can best be described as a "flowing continuity" or a "continuous flow" in the discourses that form the sixteenth-century concepts of "woman" and "man." Elisabeth Wåghäll-Nivre is associate professor of German at Växjö University, Sweden.ationships and roles of men and women characters in the narratives. Overall, the focus is on the disparities that persisted in the sixteenth-century discourse of gender, confusing all attempts to arrive at definitive gender roles. In the end, the study argues for something that can best be described as a "flowing continuity" or a "continuous flow" in the discourses that form the sixteenth-century concepts of "woman" and "man." Elisabeth Wåghäll-Nivre is associate professor of German at Växjö University, Sweden.niversity, Sweden.

The study takes the received view among scholars that women in the Middle Ages were faced with sustained misogyny and that their voices were seldom heard in public and subjects it to a critical analysis. The ten chapters deal with various aspects of the question, and the voices of a variety of authors - both female and male - are heard. The study opens with an enquiry into violence against women, including in texts by male writers (Hartmann von Aue, Gottfried von Straßburg, Wolfram von Eschenbach) which indeed describe instances of violence, but adopt an extremely critical stance towards them. It then proceeds to show how women were able to develop an independent identity in various genres and could present themselves as authorities in the public eye. Mystic texts by Hildegard of Bingen, Marie de France and Margery Kempe, the medieval conduct poem known as Die Winsbeckin, the Devout Books of Sisters composed in convents in South-West Germany, but also quasi-historical documents such as the memoirs of Helene Kottaner or Anna Weckerin's cookery book, demonstrate that far more women were in the public gaze than had hitherto been assumed and that they possessed the self-confidence to establish their positions with their intellectual and their literary achievements.

With the growth of printing in early modern Germany, crime quickly became a subject of wide public discourse. Sensational crime reports, often featuring multiple murders within families, proliferated as authors probed horrific events for religious meaning. Coinciding with heightened witch panics and economic crisis, the spike in crime fears revealed a continuum between fears of the occult and more mundane dangers. In Crime and Culture in Early Modern Germany, Joy Wiltenburg explores the beginnings of crime sensationalism from the early sixteenth century into the seventeenth century and beyond. Comparing the depictions of crime in popular publications with those in archival records, legal discourse, and imaginative literature, Wiltenburg highlights key social anxieties and analyzes how crime texts worked to shape public perceptions and mentalities. Reports regularly featured familial destruction, flawed economic relations, and the apocalyptic thinking of Protestant clergy. Wiltenburg examines how such literature expressed and shaped cultural attitudes while at the same time reinforcing governmental authority. She also shows how the emotional inflections of crime stories influenced the growth of early modern public discourse, so often conceived in terms of rational exchange of ideas.

Over the past three decades scholars have transformed the study of women and gender in early modern Europe. This Ashgate Research Companion presents an authoritative review of the current research on women and gender in early modern Europe from a multi-disciplinary perspective. The authors examine women’s lives, ideologies of gender, and the differences between ideology and reality through the recent research across many disciplines, including history, literary studies, art history, musicology, history of science and medicine, and religious studies. The book is intended as a resource for scholars and students of Europe in the early modern period, for those who are just beginning to explore these issues and this time period, as well as for scholars learning about aspects of the field in which they are not yet an expert. The companion offers not only a comprehensive examination of the current research on women in early modern Europe, but will act as a spark for new research in the field.

Sexuality is one of the most influential factors in human life. The responses to and reflections upon the manifestations of sexuality provide fascinating insights into fundamental aspects of medieval and early-modern culture. This interdisciplinary volume with articles written by social historians, literary historians, musicologists, art historians, and historians of religion and mental-ity demonstrates how fruitful collaborative efforts can be in the exploration of essential features of human society. Practically every aspect of culture both in the Middle Ages and the early modern age was influenced and determined by sexuality, which hardly ever surfaces simply characterized by prurient interests. The treatment of sexuality in literature, chronicles, music, art, legal documents, and in scientific texts illuminates central concerns, anxieties, tensions, needs, fears, and problems in human society throughout times.

During a career lasting nearly half a century, Meister Frantz Schmidt (1554-1634) personally put to death 392 individuals and tortured, flogged, or disfigured hundreds more. The remarkable number of victims, as well as the officially sanctioned context in which they suffered at Schmidt’s hands, was the story of Joel Harrington’s much-discussed book The Faithful Executioner. The foundation of that celebrated work was Schmidt's own journal--notable not only for the shocking story it told but, in an age when people rarely kept diaries, for its mere existence. Available now in Harrington’s new translation, this fascinating document provides the modern reader with a rare firsthand perspective on the thoughts and experiences of an executioner who routinely carried out acts of state brutality yet remained a revered member of the local community, widely respected for his piety, steadfastness, and popular healing. Based on a long-lost manuscript thought to be the most faithful to the original journal, this modern English translation is fully annotated and includes an introduction providing historical context as well as a biographical portrait of Schmidt himself. The executioner appears to us not as the frightening brute we might expect but as a surprisingly thoughtful, complex person with a unique voice, and in these pages his world emerges as vivid and unforgettable. Studies in Early Modern German History

Despite popular opinions of the ‘dark Middle Ages’ and a ‘gloomy early modern age,’ many people laughed, smiled, giggled, chuckled, entertained and ridiculed each other. This volume demonstrates how important laughter had been at times and how diverse the situations proved to be in which people laughed, and this from late antiquity to the eighteenth century. The contributions examine a wide gamut of significant cases of laughter in literary texts, historical documents, and art works where laughter determined the relationship among people. In fact, laughter emerges as a kaleidoscopic phenomenon reflecting divine joy, bitter hatred and contempt, satirical perspectives and parodic intentions. In some examples protagonists laughed out of sheer happiness and delight, in others because they felt anxiety and insecurity. It is much more difficult to detect premodern sculptures of laughing figures, but they also existed. Laughter reflected a variety of concerns, interests, and intentions, and the collective approach in this volume to laughter in the past opens many new windows to the history of mentality, social and religious conditions, gender relationships, and power structures.