The Burgermeister's Daughter: Scandal in a Sixteenth-Century German Town

“Hermann Büschler’s defiance and daring had helped put new leadership permanently in city hall, one less bound to the social order of the Middle Ages and, as we will see, to the Church of Rome as well. That change spared the city some lethal political conflict during the second decade of the sixteenth century, and it made the city more receptive to the Protestant Reformation in the third. The successful resolution of the constitutional crisis also established Hermann Büschler’s heroic reputation in Hall’s history.”

Hermann Büschler was a historically significant figure and a local legend in his own time. Everybody in Hall knew him and his children. Because of this, everything Anna did was subject to scrutiny and rumor. If her father belonged to a humbler profession, Anna’s story might have turned out very differently. In part, Anna’s is a story about the difficulty of having a famous and difficult father.

“The combination of a deadly new venereal disease and the success of a religious reform that exalted marriage over celibacy revised thinking about previous sexual practice. Historians have perceived a new ‘moral politics’ emerging in German cities during the sixteenth century, closely tied to the desires of both Protestant and Catholic reformers to restrict all sexuality to marriage, which Martin Luther proclaimed to be the only ‘true chastity.’ To this end, the leaders of the Reformation and Counter Reformation sanctioned new measures against premarital, extramarital, and deviant sexual behavior.”

Ozment contextualizes Anna’s life story in this emerging moral politics to highlight the riskiness of Anna’s situation. Anna, a charismatic, stubborn, and sexually active young woman with a famous father, must have stood out like a sore thumb in Hall during these times of spiritual revival and prudishness. When her father kicked her out of his home after discovering her two affairs, Anna was about as vulnerable as a 16th-century woman could possibly be.

“Thanks to the survival of their correspondence, we can meet them both in their own words, unembellished by either contemporary or modern historians.”

The author is discussing the historical value of primary documents, like letters that the subjects themselves wrote, rather than historical commentary about those documents (though that also has its place). The reader can read Anna’s letters as she wrote them and even disagree with Ozment’s own assessment of what they reveal about Anna’s character and motivations.