This important volume will bring the history of a fascinating German city to a wider audience. Augsburg, in modern-day Bavaria, can trace its foundation to the time of Emperor Augustus and remains an important regional centre today, but it is the complex and intricate history of the city in the medieval and early modern period that attracts the most attention. This volume approaches the city's history from a multitude of scholarly and methodological approaches, providing an accessible introduction that will be read with interest by undergraduates and scholars interested in urban history and civic government, trade and commerce, and social and cultural developments.
Divided into four sections, the first serves as an introduction with the opening chapter discussing the sources available for the study of Augsburg and the historiography surrounding the city. The three other chapters comprising this section include Barbara Rajkay's exploration of Augsburg's topography and demographics, Claudia Stein's contribution on public health and medical provision and Gregor Rohmann's exploration of the chronicle material produced in the city.
The second section focuses on economy, politics and law, with surveys of Augsburg's political structures and leadership, its administration of justice and its regional and international trading links. Alyson F. Creasman's contribution stands out in particular, drawing attention to the rich sources available for the study of crime and punishment in the city and assessing Augsburg's administration of justice through insightful comparisons with contemporary practice in cities such as Frankfurt am Main and Nuremberg.
The third section looks at religion and society, a particularly important facet of Augsburg's history given its status as a ‘bi-confessional’ city in the early modern period – one of only four such cities in the empire – where Catholic and Protestant communities lived side by side and co-operated in matters of governance and administration. The chapters on religious change and confessional co-existence are therefore of particular interest. The contribution of Michele Zelinsky Hanson highlights the array of religious groups active in the city in the 1520s and 1530s – Catholics, Lutherans, Zwinglians, Anabaptists and Schwenckfelders, among others – before Marjorie E. Plummer and B. Ann Tlusty examine contractions in the religious landscape and the social and political structures underpinning Catholic–Protestant co-existence from 1548. Other pieces in the section include Tlusty's exploration of the leisure and entertainments enjoyed by Augsburg's citizens and Sabine Ullmann's survey of Jewish communities resident within the walls between 1400 and 1800.
The final section focuses on communication, cultural and intellectual life, with contributions on the dissemination of news and books, dress and material culture, and art, architecture and music. Among other chapters, in his exploration of the book trade Hans-Jörg Kunast emphasizes Augsburg's unique position as the only city in Europe to print more works in the vernacular than in Latin, while Andrew Morrall, with the help of high-quality images, examines some of the extraordinary instruments and technical devices fashioned by clockmakers and other artisans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
There is a natural tension in this volume between focusing on Augsburg while also providing the regional and European background necessary to place the developments under examination in their historical context. Christopher W. Close's chapter, for example, fruitfully explores developments in Augsburg's governance and guild structures by framing them against broader political and social impulses in Swabia and the Holy Roman Empire in general, but the focus of other chapters can sometimes feel too narrow. Some readers, for example, might take issue with Rohmann's characterization of chronicle writing in the city. His argument that Augsburg's professionalization of historical writing in the later medieval period distinguished it from other cities would be difficult to sustain if comparisons were actually made with other cities in the region, such as Basel, whose council commissioned individuals (usually town clerks) to write histories of the city as early as 1420. There is similarly a tension between individual authors focusing on their particular areas of expertise and providing coverage of the later medieval and early modern periods promised by the book's title. Andreas Flurschütz da Cruz's piece on Augsburg's experience of war, for example, begins in the 1530s with no mention of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, despite Augsburg's engagement in conflict under the aegis of the Swabian Town League throughout the later medieval period and its important role in the Hussite Wars (1419–34). Apart from one brief aside to merchants’ wives in the late fifteenth century, Michele Lewis’ contribution on gender and family life similarly restricts itself to the period beginning with the onset of the Reformation. In some sections, therefore, the volume feels more like a companion to early modern rather than late medieval Augsburg. While the volume contains a range of high-quality plates, it is difficult to follow Rajkay's description of Augsburg's physical and political geography, which includes descriptions of river courses, stone spurs, jurisdictional boundaries and civic gates and quarters (pp. 21–6), as the volume contains no basic technical maps of the city and its region. Given the volume's aim to introduce an Anglophone readership to the city, a cartographic aid to help make sense of Augsburg's position in a region dense with trade routes, imperial free cities and secular and ecclesiastical lordships would have been helpful.
These criticisms aside, this volume makes accessible the history of a remarkable city to a broader readership. As Hanson notes, ‘Augsburg is often cited as a microcosm of the Empire in the sixteenth century’ (p. 243), and the city's history sheds light on diverse and varied historical developments in the Holy Roman Empire and western and central Europe throughout the periods covered by the volume. Readers will no doubt find much of interest within.
