Steven Ozment
The Burgermeister's Daughter
Scandal in a Sixteenth-Century Germany Town
New York 1996
Stron XII+227, format: 16x24 cm
Książka bez śladów używania, ma niewielki ubytek w prawym górnym rogu obwoluty.
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The tragic yet uplifting story or Anna Buschler, whose rebellion against the constricting mores of her times is reconstructed in this vivid social portrait or Germany at the end or the Middle Ages.
Historian Steven Ozment's haunting story examines the brutal legal battle between Anna Buscnler and her powerful father, the btirgermeister of the imperial German city or Schwabisch Hall and a local hero, in the first half of me sixteenth century. A frequent subject of gossip because of her garish dress and flirtatious behavior, Anna was banished from her father's house after she was caught in secret, simultaneous love affairs with two men—one a member of royalty, the other a cavalryman.
After being forced from her home, she brought suit against her father, charging him with abandonment in the very chambers over which he had presided. He responded by taking her captive and chaining her to a table for six months, before she escaped and took up her case again, now adding abuse to the charge of abandonment. Thus began nearly thirty years of on-and-off litigation between Anna and her lather, her siblings, and the city council of Hall, as she fought disinheritance and impoverish¬ment. In her legal battles, as in her personal life, she defied the accepted standards of behavior for the women in her age.
Drawing on rare surviving love letters and extensive court records, The Burgermeister's Daughter recaptures Anna's compelling story from the perspectives of the combatants and the testimony of more man forty citizens, shedding light on the politics of sexuality, gender, and family, and demonstrating what a determined woman might do at law even in the Middle Ages. However, the morals of Anna's story reach far beyond the sixteenth century, teaching the modern reader universal lessons about surviving unrightable wrongs and maintaining human dignity through even the most degrad¬ing circumstances.
Profound and evocative, Ozment's meticulous study of this legal battle and its human costs brings to life one of the great dramas of the sixteenth century, examining me inequalities of a distant age and the courage and tenacity of one woman who challenged them.
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