ABSTRACT

On 3 March 1565, the Augsburg city council banished Hans Gallmeyer from their territories for bigamy and forgery. Gallmeyer, a cloth-shearer journeyman from Ulm, had worked in Hans Nadler’s workshop since his arrival in Augsburg the previous July. After Gallmeyer seduced his daughter, Nadler forced the pair into a formal engagement. Nadler, and probably his guild, demanded that Gallmeyer complete his masterpiece in Ulm before the wedding. In order to do so, as Gallmeyer later testified, he needed to explain the absence of his first wife to the authorities in Ulm. Gallmeyer presented a letter from the Glotz city council that he hoped would persuade officials in Ulm to release his paternal inheritance so he could pay the guild fees for his masterpiece. The bi-confessional Augsburg city council, like many early modern state authorities, sought to impose a single definition of marriage, using widely distributed Lutheran church ordinances regulating marriage as models for their own published marriage ordinances.