Concerns over privacy grow in our society. Understanding the historical roots of the phenomenon becomes more and more necessary to navigate our contemporary struggles with availability and control of personal information. When we ponder what people of the past valued and aimed to protect and what they considered threatening and needing uncovering, we achieve a broader perspective of the importance of privacy in everyday life. The early modern period, in particular, was a period in which many views and experiences of privacy were negotiated and consolidated into more recognisable feelings and norms in different layers of society. This volume will focus on Saxony, as it is a great example to explore how privacy was created and negotiated in the early modern period. Throughout the sixteenth century, Saxony rose to prominence in the broader European context through the influence of its Electors. Saxony is an emblematic context to explore notions of privacy in the early modern period, as the region underwent a range of transformations - religious, political, legal, and cultural - that reconfigured the thresholds between the private and the public. The main goals of this volume are: to put Saxony on the map of early modern studies of privacy by bringing forth the region's contribution to political, cultural, scientific, religious, and legal developments; to challenge preconceived notions of privacy in the early modern German context by providing new analytical tools to analyse both well-known and novel sources; to inaugurate and instigate further the research of early modern privacy in regional studies.

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.

Attempts to present a coherent account of early modern German history are often hampered by the German equivalent of the Whig theory of history, by which all useful roads lead up to the creation of the nineteenth-century power state (Machstaat) or institutional state (Anstalstaat). In this kind of historiography, there are large "blank" areas between the "important" events like the Reformation, the Thiry Years War, the Seven Years War, and the French Revolution. During the intervals of apparent stagnation between these events, "Germany" seems to disappear, to be replaced by states such as Prussian and Austria, Saxony, Bavaria, and the Palatinate. Substantial areas are ignored, and groups such as the parliamentary Estates, which stood in the way of state-building, are virtually written out of most accounts. Rather than focusing on the separate histories of the individual German states, Michael Hughes looks to the structure of the Holy Roman Empire in its final centuries and writes an account of Germany as a functioning, federative state, with institutions capable of reform and modernization. For nineteenth-and twentieth-century historians, the Empire was seen as the embodiment of division and weakness. But by examining the first Reich, Hughes reveals the persistence of the idea of Germanness and German national feeling during a period when, according to most accounts, Germany had virtually ceased to exist. At the same time, he examines "the element of continuity in Germany's development . . . in an attempt to discover how far back in Germany's past it is necessary to go to find the roots of the 'German problem,' the Germans' search for a political expression of their strongly developed awareness of cultural unity."

Emphasizing the significance of early modern prose fiction as a hybrid genre that absorbed cultural, ideological and historical strands of the age, this fascinating study brings together an outstanding cast of critics including: Sheila T. Cavanaugh, Stephen Guy-Bray, Mary Ellen Lamb, Joan Pong Linton, Steve Mentz, Constance C. Relihan, Goran V. Stanivukovic with an afterword from Arthur Kinney. Each of the essays in this collection considers the reciprocal relation of early modern prose fiction to class distinctions, examining factors such as: the impact of prose fiction on the social, political and economic fabric of early modern England the way in which a growing emphasis on literacy allowed for increased class mobility and newly flexible notions of class how the popularity of reading and the subsequent demand for books led to the production and marketing of books as an industry complications for critics of prose fiction, as it began to be considered an inferior and trivial art form. Early modern prose fiction had a huge impact on the social and economic fabric of the time, creating a new culture of reading and writing for pleasure which became accessible to those previously excluded from such activities, resulting in a significant challenge to existing class structures.

For German townsmen, life during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was characterized by a culture of arms, with urban citizenry representing the armed power of the state. This book investigates how men were socialized to the martial ethic from all sides, and how masculine identity was confirmed with blades and guns.

This study fills a large gap as most texts on Nazism in German society around 1933 concentrate on the country's western parts. This book deals with the problems caused by the constitutional monarchy, democracy, and dictatorship.

Cross-disciplinary perspectives on responses to material and spiritual loss in early modern Germany trace how individuals and communities registered, coped with, and made sense of deprivation through a spectrum of activities, often turning loss into gain and acquiring agency.

This book explores the concept of religious Enlightenment in the Nordic countries during the long eighteenth century. It argues that Lutheran confessional culture became intertwined with Enlightenment ideas and practices in this European region. In the book’s three parts, specialist historians explore themes central to students of the early modern era – historical writing, material culture, ecclesiastical and legal reform, censorship, cameralism and innovative medical practices. It offers a timely reconsideration of a complex period in European history from a northern perspective.