This groundbreaking book explains the widely accepted practice of feuding amongst noblemen and princes in its social context.

A new and revisionary account of how the nobility grew and developed in late medieval and early modern Germany.

We tend to think of a feud as being a long established state of hostilities, especially between families or clans, which normally manifests itself in revengeful violence. One of the articles in this volume thus states: "What began as a dispute over the property rights of a woman to whom both parties were related quickly mutated into a violent clash between men, in which honour and reputation were at stake -- and from here to a full-blown feud the distance was rather short". However, the studies of feuds presented in this publication leave no doubt that they were very different in different societies. The phenomenon of feud turns out to be intimately connected with developments in society and state. Consequently, in recent years a growing interest has been aroused in further researching the topic and the aim of this book is therefore to present some of the principal positions of this new research. Contributions by leading scholars in the field cover a large span of years, from the classic Icelandic feuds of the Sagas to more recent Early-Modern incidents. One contribution even takes us back to the roots of mankind, but the focus of the book is mainly on the Medieval and Early-Modern period. The volume is opened with a comprehensive introduction to the field, followed by a chapter that seeks general definitions. Hereafter, we are presented with specific cases of Icelandic women from the Sagas who promote feuds, studies of feuds in 14th century Marseilles, Italian Medieval vendettas, and feuding in Medieval Germany and Denmark.

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."

This book presents a social and cultural history of 'dishonourable people' (unehrliche Leute), an outcast group in early modern Germany. Executioners, skinners, grave-diggers, shepherds, barber-surgeons, millers, linen-weavers, sow-gelders, latrine-cleaners, and bailiffs were among the 'dishonourable' by virtue of their trades. This dishonour was either hereditary, often through several generations, or it arose from ritual pollution whereby honourable citizens could become dishonourable by coming into casual contact with members of the outcast group. The dishonourable milieu of the city of Augsburg from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries is reconstructed to show the extent to which dishonour determined the life-chances and self-identity of dishonourable people. The book then investigates how honourable estates interacted with dishonourable people, and how the pollution anxieties of early modern Germans structured social and political relations within honourable society.

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.

The story of conflict in an island community offers a valuable case study for the analysis of early modern German political culture. Investigations range from interpersonal relations to dynamics of civic church and imperial government. Chronicled throughout are the interactions of two opposing principles in modern society 'secular' vs 'spiritual' and 'public' vs 'private'. These are found to operate both discursively and institutionally, and are deployed to help establish 'sovereign authority' ( Obrigkeit ), as well as to articulate resistance in the form of 'bourgeois republican ideology'.