This series champions novel and fresh approaches to German history during the early modern period, spanning approximately 1400-1800. It includes both translated works from German and original English scholarship, introducing readers to some of the most innovative books available. The subjects are far from conventional, exploring topics like the history of madness and witchcraft, the culture of drinking, prominent Renaissance merchant families, and early German responses to the discovery of America. This collection highlights the dynamism and breadth within the historiography of the Holy Roman Empire.
During the 16th century, close to 30 German noblemen were known as mad. This work studies these princes (and a few princesses) as a group and in context - illuminating the history of Renaissance medicine and psychiatry, German politics in the Reformation and Renaissance definitions of madness.
This book chronicles one of the wealthiest German merchant families of the sixteenth century and their business interests in long-distance trade, mining, state finance, and overseas ventures. Their family story provides a glimpse into the social mobility, cultural patronage, religion, and values during the Renaissance and Reformation.
Chonrad Stoeckhlin and the Phantoms of the Night
Set in a 16th-century Bavarian alpine village, the narrative explores the life of Chonrad Stoeckhlin, a horse wrangler whose vivid visions of the afterlife and involvement in the occult incite fear and hysteria. This panic leads to tragic consequences, including his execution and the deaths of several women accused of witchcraft. Wolfgang Behringer, a distinguished historian of German witchcraft, skillfully weaves together historical detail with compelling storytelling, shedding light on the era's superstitions and societal tensions.
Current historiography suggests that European nations regarded the New World as an inassimilable "other" that posed fundamental challenges to the accepted ideas of Renaissance culture. The German Discovery of the World presents a new interpretation that emphasizes the ways in which the new lands and peoples in Africa, Asia, and the Americas were imagined as comprehensible and familiar. In chapters dedicated to travel narratives, cosmography, commerce, and medical botany, Johnson examines how existing ideas and methods were deployed to make German commentators experts in the overseas world, and how this incorporation established the discoveries as new and important intellectual, commercial, and scientific developments. Written in an engaging and accessible style, this book brings to light the dynamic world of the German Renaissance, in which humanists, cartographers, reformers, politicians, botanists, and merchants appropriated the Portuguese and Spanish expeditions to the East and West Indies for their own purposes and, in so doing, reshaped their world. Studies in Early Modern German History
Marcus Hellyer's accessible translation from the Latin makes it available to English-speaking audiences for the first time.Studies in Early Modern German History
Focusing on the role of drinking and tavern culture, the book explores social and cultural dynamics in Germany from 1500 to 1700. Ann Tlusty reconstructs Augsburg's social history, revealing insights into urban identity, sociability, and power structures. She examines a range of topics, including social rituals, gender roles, and civic concerns like public health and poverty. The study argues that behaviors perceived as disorderly, such as drunkenness and dueling, reflect a society operating under its own established norms.
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.
Inspired by recent efforts to understand the dynamics of the early modern witch hunt, Johannes Dillinger has produced a powerful synthesis based on careful comparisons. Narrowing his focus to two specific regions--Swabian Austria and the Electorate of Trier--he provides a nuanced explanation of how the tensions between state power and communalism determined the course of witch hunts that claimed over 1,300 lives in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Germany. Dillinger finds that, far from representing the centralizing aggression of emerging early states against local cultures, witch hunts were almost always driven by members of the middling and lower classes in cities and villages, and they were stopped only when early modern states acquired the power to control their localities.Situating his study in the context of a pervasive magical worldview that embraced both orthodox Christianity and folk belief, Dillinger shows that, in some cases, witch trials themselves were used as magical instruments, designed to avert threats of impending divine wrath. "Evil People" describes a two-century evolution in which witch hunters who liberally bestowed the label "evil people" on others turned into modern images of evil themselves.In the original German, "Evil People" won the Friedrich Spee Award as an outstanding contribution to the history of witchcraft.
Wie keine andere Familie verkörpern die Fugger wirtschaftlichen Erfolg und soziale Aufstiegschancen des süddeutschen Bürgertums an der Wende vom Mittelalter zur Neuzeit. Unter der Leitung Jakob und Anton Fuggers baute die Familienfirma binnen weniger Jahrzehnte das größte europäische Handels- und Bergbauunternehmen seiner Zeit auf. Als Geldgeber des Kaisers und als Bankiers der römischen Kurie spielten die Fugger eine wichtige Rolle bei der Finanzierung der europäischen Politik. Ihr Erfolg ermöglichte ihnen den Kauf großer Landgüter in Schwaben und den Aufstieg in den Reichsadel. Als überzeugte Anhänger der alten Kirche exponierten sie sich in den konfessionellen Auseinandersetzungen der Reformationszeit. Als Stifter, Sammler und Mäzene prägten sie die Kultur der süddeutschen Renaissance.
Containing chapters that deal with travel narratives, cosmography, commerce, and medical botany, this book examines how ideas and methods are deployed to make German commentators experts in the overseas world, and how this incorporation established the discoveries as important intellectual, commercial, and scientific developments.