Flesh and Spirit: Private Life in Early Modern Germany

by Steven E. Ozment

Book Overview

In this exceptional piece of social history Steven Ozment sifts through private papers and public archives to analyse and weave together fascinating primary documents relating to five German families... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0670883921
• ISBN13: 9780670883929
• Release Date: August 1999
• Publisher: Viking Books
• Length: 348 Pages
• Weight: 1.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.3" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

Magnificent

This is a truly magnificent book, a real pleasure to read--Ozment has maticulously pieced together the lives of various upper class citizens of the southern German city of Nuremburg during the sixteenth-century from letters and family chronicles in an effort to give us a better understanding of family-life during that period. Although the sources are not considerable, leaving Ozment to fill in the gaps with astute, yet conjectural interpretation, the reader still gets an excellent sense of what it must have been like to live during this era, and realizes that, yes, in some respects things haven't changed all that much. It's my understanding that Ozment's interpretation of family life during this period--that it is not as overtly authoritarian and patriarchal as we have been led to believe--is somewhat "controversial". In my opinion, our understanding of Germans and German history is unjustifiably tainted by the brief Hitler era, pre-Hitler anti-Germanic attitudes and current social ideologies, and that Ozment's work appears to be rectifying this problem to a certain degree. One hopes that much more of this sort of work is in the offing.

Understanding people from another world

If you're trying to understand the thoughts & feelings & humanity of people from another time, or from this particular time and place, this does a great job of opening that door.

Historical research you can rely upon

On the basis of careful archival research, Ozment has achieved the type of insight that makes for reliable history. His work depicts the old imperial city of Nuremberg during the 16th century. He is using the correspondence between members of prominent patrician families, mostly between offspring and their parents, to show the tenor of family life and also sketch the conditions during a century that brought such momentous events as the Reformation, religious discord, and the plague. The reader gains a direct feeling how these upheavals affected family life. Unfortunately, scrutiny was limited to rich, upper-class families, and an alternative title of the book could be "Brats and Money," since one of the almost constant themes in the letters were demands by the young to get their parents to give them more money. There are interesting parallels with modern life. Ozment's limitations were set by the fact that letters by the simple and common people were rare and are virtually nonexitent in today's archives. As in his other works, mostly focusing on life in German cities during the early modern period, Ozment again has achieved excellence of research. Besides, the book is entertaining and can be enjoyed by readers who are not necessarily hisorians.