ABSTRACT
The history of Gypsies, especially for the early modern German period, is still rather fragmented. One might want to blame the lack of scholarly interest for this void—it was only recently that scholars started to publish monographs on their lives—but this line of argument does not fully explain the gap in historical research. One of the major stumbling blocks is the difficulty in locating relevant source material, or, indeed, the lack thereof. While for the more recent period written data, supplemented by oral transmissions, is becoming more accessible this is, unfortunately, not the case for the early modern era. Here, the historian has to be rather lucky, if such a term might be used in the context of historical scholarship, to find some traces of Gypsy lives.
