Gender in Early Modern German History

A range of startling case-studies from German society between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.

Ulinka Rublack (Edited by)

9780521813983, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 17 October 2002

328 pages
23.6 x 16.1 x 2.8 cm, 0.65 kg

"Remarkable for uniqueness and depth..." History

Why did parents prosecute their children as witches? Why did a sixteenth-century midwife entice a burgher woman to pretend that she was giving birth to puppies? How did the life of a transsexual woman in early eighteenth-century Hamburg come to its end? This volume presents a range of startling case-studies from German society between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment which make us consider the meanings of gender and identity in the past and which relates, above all, to the lived experiences of men and women, whose lives and choices mattered. The book argues for approaches to early modern history which point to the complexity of peoples' attitudes, in terms of contemporary experiences of the physical, both emotional and imaginary; of shifting symbolisations of evil, sexual symbolisms, of perceived boundaries between the 'real' and the 'fantastical', family structures and spiritual worlds.

Preface
1. Introduction Ulinka Rublack
Part I. Masculinities: 2. What made a man a man? Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century findings Heide Wunder
3. Men in witchcraft trials: towards a social anthropology of 'male' understandings of magic and witchcraft Eva Labouvie
Part II. Transgressions: 4. Monstrous deception: midwifery, fraud and gender in early modern Rothenburg ob der Tauber Alison Rowlands
5. 'Evil imaginings and fantasies': child witches and the end of the witch craze Lyndal Roper
6. Gender tales: the multiple identities of Maiden Heinrich, Hamburg 1700 Mary Lindemann
7. Disembodied theory? Discourses of sex in early modern Germany Merry Wiesner
Part III. Politics: 8. Peasant protest and the language of womens' petitions: Christina Vend's supplications of 1629 Renate Blickle
9. State formation, gender and the experience of governance in early modern Württemberg Ulinka Rublack
Part IV. Religion: 10. Cloistering womens' past: conflicting accounts of enclosure in a seventeenth-century Munich nunnery Ulrike Strasser
11. Memory, religion and family in the writing of Pietist women Ulrike Gleixner
12. One body, two confessions: mixed marriages in Germany Dagmar Freist.

Subject Areas: Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography [JHMC], Gender studies, gender groups [JFSJ], Social & cultural history [HBTB], Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700 [HBLH], European history [HBJD]