ABSTRACT
Though they are featured prominently in studies of medieval urban life, craft guilds have received less attention from early m odern historians, who often view them as institutions in decline which were trying unsuccessfully to prevent economic change. This view of the guilds’ decay has been successfully challenged in the case of Germany by Mack Walker, who demonstrates that in most medium sized German cities the time after the Thirty Years War was ‘the period probably of their greatest power to impress their values and goals upon the society of which they were com ponents’.1 These values and goals primarily involved maintaining the local economy and upholding the honour of the guilds. Walker and others have analysed the guild notion of honour quite extensively without not ing what is, in my opinion, the most im portant com ponent of it: this was an honour among men, an honour which linked men together with other m en and excluded women. Craft guilds became an excellent example of what sociologists and psychologists term ‘male bonding’.
