ABSTRACT
Important advances in European historical demography, especially since the 1950s and 1960s, have given historians a much more precise apprehension of the patterns of life and death so vividly suggested by the memorial tablets of a Lienhard Romig or a Marie Firnhaber. For centuries, in fact, periodic outbreaks of the bubonic plague had been a fact of life in almost every European city, and the impact of the disease could be devastating. For as of 1750, long-established demographic patterns, and the expectations they created about life and death, still continued to predominate in most European cities. Early modern Europeans, like all people, were fascinated by diseases and death. To get a fuller sense of the character of inter-urban migration in early modern Europe, the author considers the life of Catharina Ickermann, who died in Schwabisch Hall without ever having married or given birth.
