ABSTRACT
Urban citizenship has been studied m ore extensively in German scholarship than in that focusing on western Europe, where cities lost their independence to centralizing states earlier. (This may also be the reason that W eber’s ideas about urban development are not as well known in English-language scholarship as the ‘Weber thesis’ or ‘ideal types’, both of which can be applied m ore easily to English and French developments.) In German scholarship, this interest has no t been limited to the medieval period, for notions of urban community based on citizenship have also been a key part of research on the urban Reformation since Bernd Moeller’s Imperial Cities and the Reformation-, and a recent study of German towns between the Thirty Years War and Bismarck asserts: ‘Any town’s citizenship policy and citizenship grants are usually the best place to read its history.’8
