Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book originated from a conference held at Duke University on 16–18 April, 1998. The meeting was the second triennial gathering organized by Fruhe Neuzeit Interdisziplinar, an international scholarly organization devoted to promoting interdisciplinary work in the field of early modern German studies. The book shows funeral books as a medium of dynastic propaganda in the smaller Protestant courts of the early modern period. It argues, a broad consensus nonetheless existed throughout Augsburg society regarding the levels and occasions of violence deemed acceptable. The book emphasizes the connections between popular and elite culture, and finds an incipient tendency in sixteenth-century Protestant treatises to separate them. It views the disjunction of the human and animal spheres as part of a regulatory, elite discourse intent on drawing invidious distinctions between town and country, cultivated city-dweller and uncouth peasant, self-controlled male and disorderly female.