Banishment was crucial to law enforcement in early modern Europe, as magistrates used expulsion to punish and control thousands of offenders convicted of crimes ranging from adultery to theft. While early modern social control has attracted considerable scholarly attention in recent decades, banishment has been largely neglected. This book examines the role of banishment in sixteenth-century Ulm, an important south German city-state, using the town's experience to uncover how early modern magistrates used expulsion to regulate and reorder society. This investigation sheds new light on the...

This interdisciplinary collection of essays about early modern Germany addresses the tensions, both fruitful and destructive, between normative systems of order on the one hand, and a growing diversity of practices on the other. Individual essays address crucial struggles over religious orthodoxy after the Reformation, the transformation of political loyalties through propaganda and literature, and efforts to redefine both canonical forms and new challenges to them in literature, music, and the arts. Bringing together the most exciting papers from the 2005 conference of Fruhe Neuzeit...

Traditionally, the term boundary applies to the demarcation between a physical place and another physical place, most commonly associated with lines on a map As the essays in this volume demonstrate, however, a boundary can also function in a more broadly conceptual manner. A boundary becomes not an "imaginary line" but a tool for thinking about how to separate any two elements, whether ideas, events, etc., into categories by which they become comprehensible and distinct. The scholar contributors seek not simply to discern the boundaries, but, and perhaps more importantly, to understand the...

The book deals with the relationship between Friedrich Meinecke, who is often considered to be the leading German historian of the first half of the twentieth century, and several of his students who, after the Nazi seizure of power, were forced to emigrate because of their Jewish descent or their political views. The letters published here to Meinecke from Hans Rothfels, Dietrich Gerhard, Hajo Holborn, Felix Gilbert, Hans Rosenberg, and others show these scholars' deep respect for their old teacher, but also their growing distance from his historical interests and methods. In a period of...

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...

The radical process of religious change in eastern Germany poses a real challenge to social researchers. Common explanations view either the socialist past or larger scale processes of modernization to be the cause of eastern German secularization, but fail to address historical contingencies and individual agency. This book focuses on the interplay between local bureaucracies and individual lives. Contextualizing individual choices is essential in order to gain insight into how religious meaning is produced, reproduced, contested, discontinued, and disrupted. Bringing together the...

The study of German mining and metallurgy has focused overwhelmingly on labor, capitalism, and progressive engineering and earth science. This book addresses prospecting practices and mining culture. Using the divining, or dowsing rod as a means of exposing miner beliefs, it argues that a robust vernacular science preceded institutionalized geology in Saxony, and that the Freiberg Mining Academy (f.1765) became a site for the synthesis of tradition and new science. The tacit knowledge of dowsing was the mark of the experienced prospector, and rather than decline in importance through the...

To kill someone purely in order to be sentenced to death and then to die at the hands of the executioner Such murders were alarmingly frequent in eighteenth-century Lutheran Europe. The book traces the complex motives behind these crimes - an investigation that leads not only to the Pietist interest in saving the souls of those sentenced to death but also into some of the central elements of Lutheran soteriology and the idea of capital punishment as being divinely ordained. The murders prompted special legislation and challenged the religious basis of the death penalty, and the killings and...

This study of the Catholic Prince-Bishopric of Bamberg and its largely Protestant aristocracy tells the complicated story of Lutheran nobles and their relatives in the Catholic Church and their struggle to cooperate in the Reformation era.

Looking at a series of Swiss political debates, this book offers a case study of a revolutionary transformation to a rights-based society and political culture. Based on a tradition of political innovation and experimentation, Swiss citizens recalibrated their understanding of liberty and republicanism from 1750 to 1848. The resulting hybrid political culture centered around republican ideas, changing understandings of liberty and self-rule. Drawing from the public political debates in three characteristic cantons, A Laboratory of Liberty places the Swiss transformation into a European...