ABSTRACT
Harvard historian Steven Ozment must have been elated when he discovered the court records of Anna Buschler (1496/8-1552), daughter of the burgermeister of the German town of Schwabisch Hall during the Protestant Reformation. Schwabisch Hall was an imperial city run
by a council of twenty-six men drawn from the nobility and middle class of the surrounding region. As a young woman during the early 1520s, living in her father’s house, Anna somehow managed to carry on two love affairs simultaneously with Erasmus Schenk, a young nobleman, and Daniel Treutwein, a cavalryman from the lower nobility. These affairs were recorded in some detail in Anna’s letters to and from both men, letters found by her father in his own house and used in subsequent court proceedings. Anna worked for several years at the Schenk castle outside of town, while living in her parents’ home (her mother had died in 1520). She refused to marry either of her lovers and soon became a local scandal and an embarrassment to her beleaguered father, Hermann Buschler, perhaps Hall’s leading citizen.
