Current Research

Currently I am continuing to explore the construct of masculinity in German towns of the early modern period, especially as it was established and confirmed through identification with weapons and the defense of person, household, and community. Support for this project has been provided by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD); the Instutut für Europäische Kulturgeschichte (Universität Augsburg); the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH); the American Philosophical Society (APS); Bucknell University; the Herzog August Bibliothek Fellowship Program (Wolfenbüttel); the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS); and the Fulbright Scholar Program.

Cooperative Research Projects

With Helmut Graser (University of Augsburg)

The libraries and archives of Europe offer large amounts of as yet under-exploited printed and manuscript sources from the early modern period. A truly comprehensive reconstruction of these sources, however, is in many cases hindered by traditional disciplinary boundaries. Historians of various breeds, historical sociologists and anthropologists, scholars of literature and linguistics, and other early modern scholars work in these sources more or less independently of one another and are often unable to fully exploit the synergetic effect of interdisciplinary cooperation. With that in mind, my partner and colleague Helmut Graser (University of Augsburg) and I are engaged in a series of related projects that aim to combine linguistic analysis with social-historical research. We hope thus to gain a new kind of insight into the function of early modern communications strategies.

1. The Honorable Weaver and the Shrewish Maid: An Interdisciplinary Analysis of Slanderous Songs as Corpus Delicti in Criminal Trials of the Sixteenth Century (research in progress)

This project examines defamatory songs that were sung on the streets by non-professional singers (generally craftsmen) during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The practice was forbidden by local authorities and, in some cases, led to an arrest and interrogation of the singers and other participants in the incident. In a few of these cases, the songs themselves were confiscated by the authorities as evidence and have been maintained as part of the legal records. These songs and the conditions that surrounded their creation are interesting from the standpoint of social and cultural history, linguistics, the history of literature, and the history of music, thus lending themselves particularly well to an interdisciplinary approach. Talks based on this research have been presented at the University of Pittsburgh, Duke University, and the University of Augsburg, along with several public venues.

2. toll vnd voll. Zur Bezeichnung des Betrunkenseins in städtischen Gerichtsakten und Verordnungen des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts aus Ostschwaben (toll and voll: Labeling Drunkenness in civic court records and ordinances of 16th and 17th century East Swabia)

This brief essay, which draws on sources related to my research on early modern German drinking practice, examines the colorful variety of terms used to describe "drunkenness" in sixteeenth- and seventeenth-century ordinances and court records. The analysis is based on a corpus of approximately 420 entries from the imperial cities of Augsburg, Nördlingen, and Memmingen, and the territorial town of Mindelheim. The shifts and variations over time are examined both linguistically and in light of the changing political, social, and moral-religious landscape. Published in Sprachgeschichten: Ein Lesebuch für Werner König zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Edith Funk et al. ( Heidelberg, 2003), 81-98. We are now working on applying similar methods to a larger body of sources.

3. Voices in the Archives: History and Language "From Below" in Early Modern Augsburg (research in progress)

This project examines samples of non-professional writing (that is, texts produced by ordinary townsfolk) in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Germany in order to open new windows on literacy, language, and day-to-day use of the written word.  These rare and fascinating fragments of history reveal the ways in which members of the wider populace were able to find a voice in the discourse of civic life through varying levels of mastery of written language.  The result will both reveal the interplay between oral and written culture during the early modern period, and provide crucial new evidence of evolution of the New High German language in both its written and spoken forms. 

Our sample of non-professional writing includes derogatory songs and slander sheets; brief supplications produced by petitioners to the city courts in their own hand; falsified correspondence created in cases of attempted fraud; letters; and records produced in the day-to-day administration of the city, for example written requests for permission from the mayor to drink tax-free in the villages outside the city walls and escort passes written by Jews requesting permission to enter the city.  The texts provide evidence of a wide range of levels of literacy as well as features of local dialects.  By applying the methods of textual linguistics and discourse analysis to early modern texts, we are able to identify varying rhetorical strategies and emotional layers, which can then be placed in their historical context through an examination of the various kinds of archival documents in which they are embedded. 

Talks on this project have been presented in various venues including the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference (St. Louis), the AHA Annual Meeting (Seattle), the International Medieval Congress (Leeds), the HiSoN conference on Language and History, Linguistics and Historiography (Bristol), the Jewish Kulturmuseum Augsburg Schwaben, and at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania State University, Bucknell University, Cornell University, and the University of Augsburg.

 

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