Steven Ozment
Flesh and Spirit
Private Life in Early Modern Germany
New York 1999
Stron XIX+348, format: 16x24 cm
Książka bez śladów używania
Family life in premdustnal Europe has been considered by historians to have been far different from family life today. It has been portrayed as impersonal, businesslike, communal. Now, in perhaps the most penetrating look at the family cycle of late-fifteenth-century to early seventeenth-century Germany, Steven Ozment illuminates with dazzling immediacy what family life of the time was actually like. As he did in his much praised The Burgerrneister's Daughter, Ozment, who is the McLean Professor of Ancient and Modern History at Harvard University, analyzes and weaves together primary sources to create a compelling account of family: courtship, marriage, pregnancy, child rearing, and the establishment of new families. Using private papers and archives—letters, journals, account books, legal records—Ozment depicts fascinating portraits of five families:
A young man writes eager love letters to his comely fiancee while their politically prominent families conduct a complicated courtship dance A father chronicles the joys of parenthood, when, in his fifties, and having lost ten infants, a child at last survives
A widowed mother and her son exchange tense letters during his years of study in Italy. She pleads with him to curb his spending and, after two years, to come home, even though the family's fortunes depend on the success that his foreign studies can ensure
A curious and adventurous Protestant teenager attempts to make his way in Catholic Louvain and discovers orthodoxy is a luxury A Lutheran pastor struggles to raise his family after the death of his beloved wife and also to negotiate the bitter factionalism of the church in Reformation Germany
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS v
INTRODUCTION ix
Courtship, Marriage, and Early Parenthood I
GETTING MARRIED: The Courtship of Lucas Friedrich Behaim and Anna Maria Pfinzing 3
BIRTH AND EARLY CHILDHOOD: The Three Sons of Christoph Scheurl and Katharina Futterer 53
Teenagers and Adults 133
MOTHERING: Magdalena Romer Behaim and Her Eldest Son Paul 135
THE PRIVATE LIFE OF A TEENAGER: Sebald Welser's Semester in Louvain 192
FATHERS AND SONS: The Family Chronicle of Pastor Lorenz Durnhofer 217
CONCLUSION 260
NOTES 269
INDEX 333
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