Money is more than just a medium of financial exchange: across time and place, it has performed all sorts of cultural, political, and social functions. This volume traces money in German-speaking Europe from the late Renaissance until the close of the twentieth century, exploring how people have used it and endowed it with multiple meanings. The fascinating studies gathered here collectively demonstrate money's vast symbolic and practical significance, from its place in debates about religion and the natural world to its central role in statecraft and the formation of national identity.

The significant changes in early modern German marriage practices included many unions that violated some taboo. That taboo could be theological and involve the marriage of monks and nuns, or refer to social misalliances as when commoners and princes (or princesses) wed. Equally transgressive were unions that crossed religious boundaries, such as marriages between Catholics and Protestants, those that violated ethnic or racial barriers, and those that broke kin-related rules. Taking as a point of departure Martin Luther's redefinition of marriage, the contributors to this volume spin out the multiple ways that the Reformers' attempts to simplify and clarify marriage affected education, philosophy, literature, high politics, diplomacy, and law. Ranging from the Reformation, through the ages of confessionalization, to the Enlightenment, Mixed Matches addresses the historical complexity of the socio-cultural institution of marriage.

Money is more than just a medium of financial exchange: across time and place, it has performed all sorts of cultural, political, and social functions. This volume traces money in German-speaking Europe from the late Renaissance until the close of the twentieth century, exploring how people have used it and endowed it with multiple meanings. The fascinating studies gathered here collectively demonstrate money's vast symbolic and practical significance, from its place in debates about religion and the natural world to its central role in statecraft and the formation of national identity.

Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe offers students a concise introduction to health and healing in Europe from 1500 to 1800. Bringing together the best recent research in the field, Mary Lindemann examines medicine from a social and cultural perspective, rather than a narrowly scientific one. Drawing on medical anthropology, sociology, and ethics as well as cultural and social history, she focuses on the experience of illness and on patients and folk healers as much as on the rise of medical science, doctors, and hospitals. This second edition has been updated and revised throughout in content, style, and interpretations, and new material has been added, in particular, on colonialism, exploration, and women. Accessibly written and full of fascinating insights, this will be essential reading for all students of the history of medicine and will provide invaluable context for students of early modern Europe more generally.

The significant changes in early modern German marriage practices included many unions that violated some taboo. That taboo could be theological and involve the marriage of monks and nuns, or refer to social misalliances as when commoners and princes (or princesses) wed. Equally transgressive were unions that crossed religious boundaries, such as marriages between Catholics and Protestants, those that violated ethnic or racial barriers, and those that broke kin-related rules. Taking as a point of departure Martin Luther's redefinition of marriage, the contributors to this volume spin out the multiple ways that the Reformers' attempts to simplify and clarify marriage affected education, philosophy, literature, high politics, diplomacy, and law. Ranging from the Reformation, through the ages of confessionalization, to the Enlightenment, Mixed Matches addresses the historical complexity of the socio-cultural institution of marriage.

Patriots and Paupers carefully analyzes a crucial juncture in the history of a great city: Hamburg's passage from the pre-modern into the modern world. Despite the relative wealth of historical literature on Reformation Germany and on Germany after unification, few English-language histories have addressed the events of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Mary Lindemann here details issues associated with poor relief--indigency, mendicancy, public health, labor regulation, social control, and disciplining--then uses these as springboards to broader historical debates. She draws out the subtle yet decisive political shift from the paternalistic dirigisme of a government of fathers and uncles to the socio-economic laissez-faire of early liberalism, and locates this political metamorphosis firmly within the framework of Hamburg's dynamic economic development and dramatic demographic growth. She links these political and social changes to the intellectual, cultural, and prosopographical contexts of the German Enlightenment. Far more than a history of poverty and social welfare policies, Patriots and Paupers explores the critical interconnections between economics, demographics, social change, and government in the closing years of the European Old Regime.

The Merchant Republics analyzes the ways in which three major economic powerhouses - Amsterdam, Antwerp and Hamburg - developed dual identities as 'communities of commerce' and as republics over the course of the long eighteenth century (c.1648-1790). In addition to discussing the qualities that made these three cities alike, this volume also considers the very real differences that derived from their dissimilar histories, political structures, economic fates and cultural expectations. While all valued both their republicanism and their merchant identities, each presented a different face to the world and each made the transition from an early modern republic to a modern city in a different manner.

Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe offers students a concise introduction to health and healing in Europe from 1500 to 1800. Bringing together the best recent research in the field, Mary Lindemann examines medicine from a social and cultural perspective, rather than a narrowly scientific one. Drawing on medical anthropology, sociology, and ethics as well as cultural and social history, she focuses on the experience of illness and on patients and folk healers as much as on the rise of medical science, doctors, and hospitals. This second edition has been updated and revised throughout in content, style, and interpretations, and new material has been added, in particular, on colonialism, exploration, and women. Accessibly written and full of fascinating insights, this will be essential reading for all students of the history of medicine and will provide invaluable context for students of early modern Europe more generally.

The Merchant Republics analyzes the ways in which three major economic powerhouses - Amsterdam, Antwerp and Hamburg - developed dual identities as 'communities of commerce' and as republics over the course of the long eighteenth century (c.1648-1790). In addition to discussing the qualities that made these three cities alike, this volume also considers the very real differences that derived from their dissimilar histories, political structures, economic fates and cultural expectations. While all valued both their republicanism and their merchant identities, each presented a different face to the world and each made the transition from an early modern republic to a modern city in a different manner.

Although the physicians and surgeons of eighteenth-century Germany have attracted previous scholarly inquiry, little is known about their day-to-day activities -- and even less about the ways in which those activities fit into the economic, political, and social structures of the time. In this groundbreaking work, Mary Lindemann brings together the scholarly traditions of the history of structures, mentalities, and everyday life to shed light on this complex relationship.

Opening with a discussion of the interplay of state and society in the independent German state of Braunschweig-WolfenbA1/4ttel, Lindemann explains how medical policy was "made" at all levels. She describes the striking array of healers active in the eighteenth century: from physicians to all those consulted in medical situations -- friends and neighbors, executioners and barber-surgeons, bathmasters, midwives, and apothecaries. She surveys the available vital statistics and more personal narrative accounts, such as reports on the "Increase and Decrease of the Inhabitants," and medical topographies. Lindemann also examines the process of becoming a patient and explores the effects of the social, economic, political, and cultural milieus on how medicine was practiced in the everyday world of the village, the neighborhood, and the town.

"Mary Lindemann has built up, over the last decade, an enviable reputation as a social historian of Germany and as a historian of German medicine. Many scholars have been looking forward to a book-length account from her of medicine and health, doctors and patients, in eighteenth-century Germany, and the present [volume]... exceeds all reasonable expectations." -- Roy Porter, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine

Liaisons dangereuses examines the local and international repercussions of a notorious episode in eighteenth-century Hamburg. Historian Mary Lindemann recounts the mysterious circumstances surrounding the violent death of a counterfeit Milanese count, Joseph Visconti, at the hands of an erstwhile Prussian lieutenant, the Baron von Kesslitz.

Reconstructing the drama from the perspectives of four principal players -- the count, the baron, an Italian/French courtesan, Anna Maria Romellini, and Antoine Ventura de Sanpelayo, the Spanish consul in Hamburg -- Lindemann explores the historical currents that swept these individuals together and the effects of their encounter on Hamburg's public, its government, and its diplomatic and economic relationships with European courts and states. Lindemann profiles each person involved in the crime, exploring their lives as unique sets of circumstances while analyzing them as eighteenth-century types.

What actually took place on that fateful night in October 1775? All Hamburg buzzed with rumors, but it is impossible to determine without doubt the motives of those involved, or even to know what really happened. Nevertheless, the case that developed around the killing of Visconti provides fascinating insights into the diplomatic, cultural, legal, social, and political history of the last third of the eighteenth century.