Throughout the many political and social upheavals of the early modern era, names were words to conjure by, articulating significant historical trends and helping individuals and societies make sense of often dramatic periods of change. Centered on onomastics—the study of names—in the German-speaking lands, this volume, gathering leading scholars across multiple disciplines, explores the dynamics and impact of naming (and renaming) processes in a variety of contexts—social, artistic, literary, theological, and scientific—in order to enhance our understanding of individual and collective experiences.

When this volume first appeared in German it inspired a whole generation of young scholars. Schindler recreates the lives of both the poor and excluded; the milieu of the burghers; and the rumbustuous lifestyles of the Counts von Zimmern. A true archivist, he evokes the lost worlds of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century people. He investigates popular nicknames, snowball fights, carnival rituals, even what people did at night-time before the advent of lighting. A final essay deals with an extraordinary late set of trials for witchcraft, in which over 200 people died. Translated into English for the first time, the volume contains a new Foreword by Natalie Zemon Davis and a new introductory essay setting out the key influences of Schindler's work. Norbert Schindler is the leading exponent of historical anthropology in the German-speaking world. A founding member of the German journal Historische Anthropologie, Schindler teaches at the University of Salzburg.

Frankfurt am Main, in common with other imperial German cities, enjoyed a large degree of legal autonomy during the early modern period, and produced a unique and rich body of criminal archives. In particular, Frankfurt’s Strafenbuch, which records all criminal sentences between 1562 and 1696, provides a fascinating insight into contemporary penal trends. Drawing on this and other rich resources, Dr. Boes reveals shifting and fluid attitudes towards crime and punishment and how these were conditioned by issues of gender, class, and social standing within the city’s establishment. She attributes a significant role in this process to the steady proliferation of municipal advocates, jurists trained in Roman Law, who wielded growing legal and penal prerogatives. Over the course of the book, it is demonstrated how the courts took an increasingly hard line with select groups of people accused of criminal behavior, and the open manner with which advocates exercised cultural, religious, racial, gender, and sexual-orientation repressions. Parallel with this, however, is identified a trend of marked leniency towards soldiers who enjoyed an increasingly privileged place within the judicial system. In light of this discrepancy between the treatment of civilians and soldiers, the advocates’ actions highlight the emergence and spread of a distinct military judicial culture and Frankfurt’s city council’s contribution to the quasi-militarization of a civilian court. By highlighting the polarized and changing ways the courts dealt with civilian and military criminals, a fuller picture is presented not just of Frankfurt’s sentencing and penal practices, but of broader attitudes within early modern Germany to issues of social position and cultural identity.

Editing Music in Early Modern Germany argues that editors played a critical role in the transmission and reception of Italian music outside Italy. Like their counterparts in the world of classical learning, Renaissance music editors translated texts and reworked settings from Venetian publications, adapting them to the needs of northern audiences. Their role is most evident in the emergence of the anthology as the primary vehicle for the distribution of madrigals outside Italy. As a publication type that depended upon the judicious selection and presentation of material, the anthology showcased editorial work. Anthologies offer a valuable case study for examining the impact of editorial decision-making on the cultivation of particular styles, genres, authors and audiences. The book suggests that music editors defined the appropriation of Italian music through the same processes of adaptation, transformation and domestication evident in the broader reception of Italy north of the Alps. Through these studies, Susan Lewis Hammond's work reassesses the importance of northern Europe in the history of the madrigal and its printing. This book will be the first comprehensive study of editors as a distinct group within the network of printers, publishers, musicians and composers that brought the madrigal to northern audiences. The field of Renaissance music printing has a long and venerable scholarly tradition among musicologists and music bibliographers. This study will contribute to recent efforts to infuse these studies with new approaches to print culture that address histories of reading and listening, patronage, marketing, transmission, reception, and their cultural and political consequences.

A Companion to Late Medieval and Early Modern Augsburg introduces readers to major political, social and economic developments in Augsburg from c. 1400 to c. 1800 as well as to those themes of social and cultural history that have made research on this imperial city especially fruitful and stimulating. The volume comprises contributions by an international team of 23 scholars, providing a range of the most significant scholarly approaches to Augsburg’s past from a variety of perspectives, disciplines, and methodologies. Building on the impressive number of recent innovative studies on this large and prosperous early modern city, the contributions distill the extraordinary range and creativity of recent scholarship on Augsburg into a handbook format. Contributors are Victoria Bartels, Katy Bond, Christopher W. Close, Allyson Creasman, Regina Dauser, Dietrich Erben, Alexander J. Fisher, Andreas Flurschütz da Cruz, Helmut Graser, Mark Häberlein, Michele Zelinsky Hanson, Peter Kreutz, Hans-Jörg Künast, Margaret Lewis, Andrew Morrall, Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer, Barbara Rajkay, Reinhold Reith, Gregor Rohmann, Claudia Stein, B. Ann Tlusty, Sabine Ullmann, Wolfgang E.J. Weber.

This book examines the practice of toleration and the experience of religious diversity in the early modern world. Recent scholarship has shown the myriad ways in which religious differences were accommodated in the early modern era (1500–1800). This book propels this revisionist wave further by linking the accommodation of religious diversity in early modern communities to the experience of this diversity by individuals. It does so by studying the forms and patterns of interaction between members of different religious groups, including Christian denominations, Muslims, and Jews, in territories ranging from Europe to the Americas and South-East Asia. This book is structured around five key concepts: the senses, identities, boundaries, interaction, and space. For each concept, the book provides chapters based on new, original research plus an introduction that situates the chapters in their historiographic context. Early Modern Toleration: New Approaches is aimed primarily at undergraduate and postgraduate students, to whom it offers an accessible introduction to the study of religious toleration in the early modern era. Additionally, scholars will find cutting-edge contributions to the field in the book’s chapters.

Panaceia’s Daughters provides the first book-length study of noblewomen’s healing activities in early modern Europe. Drawing on rich archival sources, Alisha Rankin demonstrates that numerous German noblewomen were deeply involved in making medicines and recommending them to patients, and many gained widespread fame for their remedies. Turning a common historical argument on its head, Rankin maintains that noblewomen’s pharmacy came to prominence not in spite of their gender but because of it. Rankin demonstrates the ways in which noblewomen’s pharmacy was bound up in notions of charity, class, religion, and household roles, as well as in expanding networks of knowledge and early forms of scientific experimentation. The opening chapters place noblewomen’s healing within the context of cultural exchange, experiential knowledge, and the widespread search for medicinal recipes in early modern Europe. Case studies of renowned healers Dorothea of Mansfeld and Anna of Saxony then demonstrate the value their pharmacy held in their respective roles as elderly widow and royal consort, while a study of the long-suffering Duchess Elisabeth of Rochlitz emphasizes the importance of experiential knowledge and medicinal remedies to the patient’s experience of illness.

This volume honors the work of a scholar who has been active in the field of early modern history for over four decades. In that time, Susan Karant-Nunn’s work challenged established orthodoxies, pushed the envelope of historical genres, and opened up new avenues of research and understanding, which came to define the contours of the field itself. Like this rich career, the chapters in this volume cover a broad range of historical genres from social, cultural and art history, to the history of gender, masculinity, and emotion, and range geographically from the Holy Roman Empire, France, and the Netherlands, to Geneva and Austria. Based on a vast array of archival and secondary sources, the contributions open up new horizons of research and commentary on all aspects of early modern life. Contributors: James Blakeley, Robert J. Christman, Victoria Christman, Amy Nelson Burnett, Pia Cuneo, Ute Lotz-Heumann, Amy Newhouse, Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer, Helmut Puff, Lyndal Roper, Karen E. Spierling, James D. Tracy, Mara R. Wade, David Whitford, and Charles Zika.

This text brings together eleven important pieces by Merry Wiesner, several of them previously unpublished, on three major areas in the study of women and gender in early modern Germany: religion, law and work. The final chapter, specially written for this volume addresses three fundamental questions: "Did women have a Reformation?"; "What effects did the development of capitalism have on women?"; and "Do the concepts 'Renaissance' and 'Early Modern' apply to women's experience?" The book concludes with an extensive bibliographical essay exploring both English and German scholarship.

This anthology assembles cross-disciplinary perspectives on the experience of and responses to forms of material and spiritual loss in early modern Germany, tracing how individuals and communities registered, coped with, and made sense of such events as war, religious reform, bankruptcy, religious marginalization, the death of spouses and children, and the loss of freedom of movement through a spectrum of activities including writing poetry, keeping diaries, erecting monuments, collecting books, singing, painting, reconfiguring space, repeatedly migrating, and painting, and thereby not only turned loss into gain but self-consciously made history. Emerging from the 2008 interdisiplinary conference of Frühe Neuzeit Interdisziplinär, the essays reveal how loss helped to create identity and gave rise to agency and creativity on the cusp of modernity. Contributors are Rosalind J. Beiler, Claudia Benthien, Jill Bepler, Duane J. Corpis, Alexander J. Fisher, Ulrike Gleixner, Claudia Jarzebowski, Hans Medick, Barbara Lawatsch Melton, Christopher Ocker, Helmut Puff, Thomas Max Safley, Jeffrey Chipps Smith, Lynne Tatlock, Mara Wade, Lee Palmer Wandel, and Bethany Wiggin.