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Molly Taylor-Poleskey

What food production, presentation, and consumption reveals about the exercise of power in early modern Germany

 In politics, as with food, presentation is everything. At the court of Elector Friedrich Wilhelm in Brandenburg-Prussia, the two combined in a way that illuminates the social and cultural dynamics of seventeenth-century German life. In this remarkable book, the first of its kind, Molly Taylor-Poleskey offers an innovative critical approach to understanding how a particular dynasty and an unexceptional German state rose to their eminent position on the Central European stage following the devastation of the Thirty Years’ War. Food, she shows, functioned both as a tool of self-aggrandizement for rulers and as a means of coercion and leverage in power negotiations. From bakers to botanists, court servants up and down the social ladder each had a role to play in the political life of this court. Moving beyond dusty bureaucratic narratives, this colorful and inviting book offers readers a new way of appreciating how culture, politics, the natural environment, and science intertwined in early modern German statecraft.

University of Virginia Press

Studies in Early Modern German History

The Great Elector's Table: The Politics of Food in Seventeenth-Century Brandenburg-Prussia

Noria K. Litaker

The defense of the cult of saints and relics was an essential element of the Catholic Counter-Reformation in Europe. Facing attacks from Protestant denominations of all kinds, the Roman church redoubled its efforts to promote the veneration of its holy figures and to house their earthly remains in dramatic style. Bedazzled Saints chronicles the transfer, distribution, and display of nearly four hundred "holy bodies" of ancient Christian martyrs, some of the church’s most prestigious relics, sent from the Roman catacombs to the Electorate of Bavaria between 1590 and 1803. Local communities, both religious and secular, broke with medieval tradition and spent immense amounts of time and money to fuse incomplete skeletons into lavishly decorated whole-body saints.

By examining these ornamented skeletons—painstakingly enhanced with jewels and fine clothing and still on display atop church altars to this day—Noria Litaker elucidates the interplay between local religious practice and universal church doctrine, shedding new light on the negotiated nature of sanctity in early modern Catholicism. In so doing, she challenges the dominant narrative of the Bavarian Catholic Reformation as a top-down process and provides new insights into the role relics and their innovative presentation played in the development of Catholic identity in early modern German lands.

Bedazzled Saints: Catacomb Relics in Early Modern Bavaria

Tanya Kevorkian

Music and Urban Life in Baroque Germany offers a new narrative of Baroque music, accessible to non-music specialists, in which Tanya Kevorkian defines the era in terms of social dynamics rather than style and genre development. Towns were crucial sites of music-making. Kevorkian explores how performance was integrated into and indispensable to everyday routines, celebrations such as weddings, and political culture. Training and funding likewise emerged from and were integrated into urban life. Ordinary artisans, students, and musical tower guards as well as powerful city councilors contributed to the production and reception of music. This book illuminates the processes at play in fascinating ways.

Challenging ideas of "elite" and "popular" culture, Kevorkian examines five central and southern German towns—Augsburg, Munich, Erfurt, Gotha, and Leipzig—to reconstruct a vibrant urban musical culture held in common by townspeople of all ranks. Outdoor acoustic communication, often hovering between musical and nonmusical sound, was essential to the functioning of these towns. As Kevorkian shows, that sonic communication was linked to the music and musicians heard in homes, taverns, and churches. Early modern urban environments and dynamics produced both the giants of the Baroque era, such as Johann Sebastian Bach and Georg Philipp Telemann, and the music that townspeople heard daily. This book offers a significant rediscovery of a rich, unique, and understudied musical culture.

Received a subvention award from the Margarita M. Hanson Fund and the Donna Cardamone Jackson Fund of the American Musicological Society.

Music and Urban Life in Baroque Germany

Maximilian Miguel Scholz

In the sixteenth century, German cities and territories welcomed thousands of refugees fleeing the religious persecution sparked by the Reformation. As Strange Brethren reveals, these Reformation refugees had a profound impact on the societies they entered. Exploring one major destination for refugees—the city of Frankfurt am Main—Maximilian Miguel Scholz finds that these forced migrants inspired new religious bonds, new religious animosities, and new religious institutions, playing a critical role in the course of the Reformation in Frankfurt and beyond.

Strange Brethren traces the first half century of refugee life in Frankfurt, beginning in 1554 when the city granted twenty-four families of foreign Protestants housing, workspace, and their own church. Soon thousands more refugees arrived. While the city’s ruling oligarchs were happy to support these foreigners, the city’s clergy resented and feared the refugees. A religious fissure emerged, and Frankfurt’s Protestants divided into two competing camps—Lutheran natives and Reformed (Calvinist) foreigners. Both groups began to rethink and reinforce their religious institutions. The religious and civic impact was substantial and enduring. As Strange Brethren shows, many of the hallmarks of modern Protestantism—its confessional divides and its disciplinary structures—resulted from the encounter between refugees and their hosts.

Studies in Early Modern German History

Strange Brethren: Refugees, Religious Bonds, and Reformation in Frankfurt, 1554–1608

Johann Peter Oettinger

As he traveled across Germany and the Netherlands and sailed on Dutch and Brandenburg slave ships to the Caribbean and Africa from 1682 to 1696, the young German barber-surgeon Johann Peter Oettinger (1666–1746) recorded his experiences in a detailed journal, discovered by Roberto Zaugg and Craig Koslofsky in a Berlin archive. Oettinger’s journal describes shipboard life, trade in Africa, the horrors of the Middle Passage, and the sale of enslaved captives in the Caribbean.

Translated here for the first time, A German Barber-Surgeon in the Atlantic Slave Trade documents Oettinger’s journeys across the Atlantic, his work as a surgeon, his role in the purchase and branding of enslaved Africans, and his experiences in France and the Netherlands. His descriptions of Amsterdam, Curaçao, St. Thomas, and Suriname, as well as his account of societies along the coast of West Africa, from Mauritania to Gabon, contain rare insights into all aspects of Europeans’ burgeoning trade in African captives in the late seventeenth century. This journeyman’s eyewitness account of all three routes of the triangle trade will be invaluable to scholars of the early modern world on both sides of the Atlantic.

A German Barber-Surgeon in the Atlantic Slave Trade: The Seventeenth-Century Journal of Johann Peter Oettinger

Roberto Zaugg

Craig Koslofsky

Jason P. Coy

In early modern Germany, soothsayers known as wise women and men roamed the countryside. Fixtures of village life, they identified thieves and witches, read palms, and cast horoscopes. German villagers regularly consulted these fortune-tellers and practiced divination in their everyday lives. Jason Phillip Coy brings their enchanted world to life by examining theological discourse alongside archival records of prosecution for popular divination in Thuringia, a diverse region in central Germany divided into a patchwork of princely territories, imperial cities, small towns, and rural villages. Popular divination faced centuries of elite condemnation, as the Lutheran clergy attempted to suppress these practices in the wake of the Reformation and learned elites sought to eradicate them during the Enlightenment. As Coy finds, both of these reform efforts failed, and divination remained a prominent feature of rural life in Thuringia until well into the nineteenth century. 

The century after 1550 saw intense confessional conflict accompanied by widespread censure and disciplinary measures, with prominent Lutheran theologians and demonologists preaching that divination was a demonic threat to the Christian community and that soothsayers deserved the death penalty. Rulers, however, refused to treat divination as a capital crime, and the populace continued to embrace it alongside official Christianity in troubled times. The Devil’s Art highlights the limits of Reformation-era disciplinary efforts and demonstrates the extent to which reformers’ efforts to inculcate new cultural norms relied upon the support of secular authorities and the acquiescence of parishioners. Negotiation, accommodation, and local resistance blunted official reform efforts and ensured that occult activities persisted and even flourished in Germany into the modern era, surviving Reformation-era preaching and Enlightenment-era ridicule alike.

Studies in Early Modern German History

The Devil's Art: Divination and Discipline in Early Modern Germany

Dorinda Outram

Unveiling the nearly lost world of the court fools of eighteenth-century Germany, Dorinda Outram shows that laughter was an essential instrument of power. Whether jovial or cruel, mirth altered social and political relations.

Outram takes us first to the court of Frederick William I of Prussia, who emerges not only as an administrative reformer and notorious militarist but also as a "master of fools," a ruler who used fools to prop up his uncertain power. The autobiography of the itinerant fool Peter Prosch affords a rare insider’s view of the small courts in Catholic south Germany, Austria, and Bavaria. Full of sharp observations of prelates and princes, the autobiography also records episodes of the extraordinary cruelty for which the German princely courts were notorious. Joseph Fröhlich, court fool in Dresden, presents more appealing facets of foolery. A sharp salesman and hero of the Meissen factories, he was deeply attached to the folk life of fooling. The book ends by tying the growth of Enlightenment skepticism to the demise of court foolery around 1800.

Outram’s book is invaluable for giving us such a vivid depiction of the court fool and especially for revealing how this figure can shed new light on the wielding of power in Enlightenment Europe.

Four Fools in the Age of Reason: Laughter, Cruelty, and Power in Early Modern Germany

Frantz Schmidt

During a career lasting nearly half a century, Meister Frantz Schmidt (1554-1634) personally put to death 392 individuals and tortured, flogged, or disfigured hundreds more. The remarkable number of victims, as well as the officially sanctioned context in which they suffered at Schmidt’s hands, was the story of Joel Harrington’s much-discussed book The Faithful Executioner. The foundation of that celebrated work was Schmidt's own journal--notable not only for the shocking story it told but, in an age when people rarely kept diaries, for its mere existence.

Available now in Harrington’s new translation, this fascinating document provides the modern reader with a rare firsthand perspective on the thoughts and experiences of an executioner who routinely carried out acts of state brutality yet remained a revered member of the local community, widely respected for his piety, steadfastness, and popular healing. Based on a long-lost manuscript thought to be the most faithful to the original journal, this modern English translation is fully annotated and includes an introduction providing historical context as well as a biographical portrait of Schmidt himself. The executioner appears to us not as the frightening brute we might expect but as a surprisingly thoughtful, complex person with a unique voice, and in these pages his world emerges as vivid and unforgettable.

Studies in Early Modern German History

The Executioner's Journal: Meister Frantz Schmidt of the Imperial City of Nuremberg

Joel F. Harrington

David M. Luebke

The pluralization of Christian religion was the defining fact of cultural life in sixteenth-century Europe. Everywhere they took root, ideas of evangelical reform disturbed the unity of religious observance on which political community was founded. By the third quarter of the sixteenth century, one or another form of Christianity had emerged as dominant in most territories of the Holy Roman Empire.In Hometown Religion: Regimes of Coexistence in Early Modern Westphalia, David Luebke examines a territory that managed to escape that fate—the prince-bishopric of Münster, a sprawling ecclesiastical principality and the heart of an entire region in which no single form of Christianity dominated. In this confessional "no-man’s-land," a largely peaceable order took shape and survived well into the mid-seventeenth century, a unique situation, which raises several intriguing questions: How did Catholics and Protestants manage to share parishes for so long without religious violence? How did they hold together their communities in the face of religious pluralization? Luebke responds by examining the birth, maturation, old age, and death of a biconfessional "regime"—a system of laws, territorial agreements, customs, and tacit understandings that enabled Roman Catholics and Protestants, Lutherans as well as Calvinists, to cohabit the territory’s parishes for the better part of a century.

In revealing how these towns were able to preserve peace and unity—in the Age of Religious Wars— Hometown Religion attests to the power of toleration in the conduct of everyday life.

Hometown Religion: Regimes of Coexistence in Early Modern Westphalia

Martin Mulsow

Online supplement,"Mulsow: Additions to Notes drawn from the 2002 edition of Moderne aus dem Untergrund": full versions of nearly 300 notes that were truncated in the print edition. Hosted on H. C. Erik Midelfort's website. 

Martin Mulsow’s seismic reinterpretation of the origins of the Enlightenment in Germany won awards and renown in its original German edition, and now H. C. Erik Midelfort's translation makes this sensational book available to English-speaking readers. In Enlightenment Underground, Mulsow shows that even in the late seventeenth century some thinkers in Germany ventured to express extremely dangerous ideas, but did so as part of a secret underground. Scouring manuscript collections across northern Europe, Mulsow studied the writings of countless hitherto unknown radical jurists, theologians, historians, and dissident students who pushed for the secularization of legal, political, social, and religious knowledge. Often their works circulated in manuscript, anonymously, or as clandestinely published books. 

Working as a philosophical microhistorian, Mulsow has discovered the identities of several covert radicals and linked them to circles of young German scholars, many of whom were connected with the vibrant radical cultures of the Netherlands, England, and Denmark. The author reveals how radical ideas and contributions to intellectual doubt came from Socinians and Jews, church historians and biblical scholars, political theorists, and unemployed university students. He shows that misreadings of humorous or ironic works sometimes gave rise to unintended skeptical thoughts or corrosively political interpretations of Christianity. This landmark book overturns stereotypical views of the early Enlightenment in Germany as cautious, conservative, and moderate, and replaces them with a new portrait that reveals a movement far more radical, unintended, and puzzling than previously suspected.

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