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

“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. In the second chapter of this book, Ozment provides both the letters between Anna/Erasmus and Anna/Daniel and a running commentary on their content, making Chapter 2 an example of both primary and secondary sources of information.

“The Limpurg Schenks’ hard times were, however, those of royalty. The family experienced some deprivation and self-denial, but nothing remotely approaching impoverishment as ordinary people knew it. Erasmus remained the scion of a centuries-old dynasty of imperial Schenks, whose future still seemed bright. For this reason, he probably never entertained the thought of marrying Anna, either out of love or for money. In an age acutely conscious of class and rank, Anna was not a realistic match for a royal Schenk. She was a good catch for a man from the lower nobility, but not for royalty. If the thought of a permanent relationship with her had ever crossed Erasmus’s mind, such a union would have been completely unthinkable to his parents and peers.”

The fact that Anna and Erasmus were an impossible match highlights their relationship’s primarily sexual character. Given their history, however, Anna mistakenly expected that Erasmus would help her when her relationship with her father soured. As this passage indicates, the threat of the relationship’s discovery did not pose the same threat to Erasmus as it did to Anna; she was forced out of her father’s home, while Erasmus was able to marry somebody else and lead a life typical of royalty.

“Anna lost her father’s devotion not because her behavior ended a dream he had to catapult them both into a higher social world, but because she had lessened his stature within his own world.”

The gossip surrounding Anna Büschler, including her sexual liaisons, had a profound impact on public opinion surrounding not only Anna but also Hermann Büschler. Discussion in Hall and the surrounding region about their strained father/daughter relationship and about Hermann’s parenting ability damaged his reputation. Although his fellow citizens would almost universally agree that he was dealt a bad hand in having such a stubborn daughter, he was not immune to criticism about the harshness of his actions, which included kicking Anna out of his home. Hermann further lashed out at Anna because of his own damaged reputation.

“1524 was not a good year for women in special situations in Hall. That year, as we know, saw the demolition of the Franciscan cloister, the closing of the public house, and an order to clergy living in concubinage to separate from their female companions. How appropriate, then, that Anna’s secret as a woman with two lovers should also begin to be disclosed, as both Erasmus and her father took steps to distance themselves from her because of her affair with Daniel Treutwein.”

Ozment highlights the unique precariousness of Anna’s struggle. Her personal life was unravelling at a time when her hometown would have been least willing to forgive her for her sins, in part due to the Protestant Reformation’s condemnation of perceived moral laxity. The choice her father and Erasmus—the two most powerful people in her life—made to abandon Anna initiated her spiral into a life of being on the run and embroiled in legal battles.

“The history of Hall’s Jews is the European story in microcosm. There, too, the terror of the Black Death combined with centuries of religious prejudice and hatred of Jewish moneylenders to make the Jews scapegoats for the city’s misfortune.”

The city of Hall expelled their Jewish population in the late 14th century and confiscated their goods—an illegal action for which the emperor fined the city. These sorts of action were commonplace throughout Europe. The history of antisemitism enters Ozment’s story primarily through Anna’s lover Daniel, who had Jewish roots but whose family converted generations before. Hiding one’s Jewishness (if one even knew about one’s Jewish heritage after generations of concealing it) was often necessary to participate as an equal in society.

“In addition to the absence of letters by Anna to Daniel, this correspondence differs from that between Anna and Erasmus in its narrower preoccupation with arranging secret meetings, surviving Anna’s father, and making ends meet. There is small comment on the larger world around them and little information about what each is doing. Daniel takes quick aim at Anna’s heart, not at her head. The letters convey caring, devotion, and passion, and seek assurance of her loyalty and love in return. Save for planning rendezvous, he does not instruct her, and his only criticism is leveled at her continuing contacts with Erasmus.”

Anna’s correspondence with Erasmus is rife with accusations of infidelity, requests for secrecy, and broken promises. It is difficult to detect any actual love or tenderness in this correspondence; rather, it sounds like Erasmus was holding on to this connection for sex and Anna was suffering from the disproportionate effort she was putting into the relationship. While the correspondence with Daniel Treutwein is not exactly a model of a healthy relationship (Daniel fairly regular asks Anna for money), his insistence that he will stand by her in her conflict with her father and the general tone of the correspondence are miles away from the Erasmus letters.

“The sixteenth century was a time when everyone had his or her place in society, and certain kinds of behavior were expected and enforced in accordance with a person’s rank in life. Townspeople lived on pre-assigned streets, according to their trade or profession, and they dressed in clothing appropriate to their social class. To reach above one’s station in life or to act contrary to it unsettled one’s neighbors and was viewed as a threat to public order […] Basic virtues and physical order understandably become sacrosanct among people who find themselves threatened easily and often by sinister forces (famine, feuds, plague, revolts) that are beyond their control and understanding, as was the case in Anna’s lifetime. A family’s security in time of need and success in everyday life might then depend on nothing so much as what their neighbors think about them.”

This social context of Anna’s story emphasizes the extreme risk of her behavior. Her fellow citizens would not have viewed her flirting and carousing as a simple nuisance; from their point of view, Anna was a threat to social order and possibly even the welfare of the city.

“For Anna, however, her father’s actions against her were not expressions of justifiable anger, but the deeds of an ‘unfatherly heart’ incapable of parental love and duty. Until the end of her life, she would insist that he had cast her out of his house without just cause. The fatal flaw, she believed, was in his character, not hers, and the fatal act was his as well, namely, the spurning of his paternal responsibility to provide her a proper marriage.”

Much of Anna’s apparently “deviant” or socially disruptive behavior—including her affairs, provocative dress, and flirtation—arguably stemmed from Hermann Büschler’s failure to arrange a marriage for her during her prime. It is not an exaggeration to say that had Anna been granted a marriage in her twenties, a feat that a man as respected and important as Herman Büschler could have surely accomplished, Anna’s subsequent problems with her family and the city of Hall might not have ever arisen.

“As a dependent single woman claiming wrongful abandonment and impoverishment, Anna had a right to request financial support from her father, who technically still had legal custody of her, and she was also legally due at this time a share of the maternal inheritance. In the summer of 1525, the Esslingen court sent the city council of Hall a copy of Anna’s petition for a hearing there on the question of her support, expecting in return either compliance or an explanation. The council shared the petition with her father, who declared that he had ‘no desire whatsoever’ to discuss money with his daughter. That being the case, the council informed the Esslingen court on August 14 that its hands were tied and it considered the matter closed.”

The Hall city council was a flawed organization, to put it lightly. The council combined legislative, judicial, and executive powers in its operations and despised outside interference. Though Anna could pursue justice through petitioning the imperial court at Esslingen and the lower court at Rottweil, the Hall city council would have been unaccountable without these intrusions. This passage highlights the arrogance of the council, which believed it could dismiss Anna’s serious accusations against her father after her father told the council that he was simply not interested in dealing with the problem.

“Roman and early German law based male guardianship of women on women’s comparative physical weakness and their limited experience in worldly affairs, the latter a self-fulfilling deficit, as women were excluded from politics and formal higher education. The original intention of the practice had been to compensate vulnerable and disadvantaged women by providing them with male guidance and protection in the public forum. In this sense, the practice, so prejudicial from a modern point of view, actually served social order and provided women a greater degree of justice than they might otherwise have received at law given then prevailing attitudes and circumstances.”

Ozment complicates our understanding of 16th-century sexism by providing context for what appears at first glance to be inexcusable inequality. While he acknowledges that male guardianship of women helped create a “self-fulfilling deficit” by ensuring the exclusion of women from important public institutions, he explains that male guardianship was originally intended to address preexisting inequality, giving women who were not able to navigate the legal system a chance to have their concerns addressed in court.

“In suing the city as well as her father, Anna demonstrated not only her determination to pursue justice for herself, but her enterprise as well. One of the conclusions of her petition to the Rottweil court reopening the case reads: ‘Anna would much prefer to lose or never to have had five thousand gulden, if such could be hers, than to endure again the disgrace, insult, and loss she suffered at the hands of her father by such imprisonment.’”

Ozment argues that the indignity and distress Anna suffered during her six-month imprisonment in her father’s home was the major insult Anna experienced throughout her many years of litigation. Given how many of those legal battles concerned money, the fact that Anna claimed she would have preferred financial loss to the imprisonment underscores how traumatic the incident was.

“In the end, both father and daughter believed they had been betrayed by the other in the most unkind and unprincipled fashion—Anna by the denial of marriage and by physical abuse, her father by disloyalty and loss of reputation. From that sense of mutual betrayal sprang lifelong enmity.”

For Hermann Büschler’s contemporaries, his feeling of betrayal at Anna’s behavior might have seemed at least as justified as Anna’s resentment, however inexcusable her imprisonment and abuse may seem to many modern readers. In fact, many contemporaries of the Büschler drama took Hermann’s side.

“That Anna and her husband signed the agreement without first having raised and satisfied such suspicions is an indication, first, of their pressing need to satisfy their creditors, and second, of an unfortunate tendency on Anna’s part, which will be seen again, to grab what the moment offers and not to ponder what the future holds.”

Ozment describes an impulse that is common among those who have fallen on hard times: taking whatever one can get in the moment because something is better than nothing and because tomorrow might otherwise never come. However, the author also suggests Anna’s actions stemmed from a character defect—specifically, a lack of foresight. The question of how to interpret Anna’s actions is central to Ozment’s work and was just as complicated for her contemporaries as it is to the modern-day historian.

“He virtually disinherited her, leaving her only the absolute minimum he believed the law required. By doing so, he tempted her to litigate as furiously with her siblings for a share of the family estate as she had twice been forced to do with him […] She had, however, one powerful factor on her side: absolute disinheritance of a child was repugnant to German law, regardless of the circumstances.”

Hermann Büschler’s treatment of Anna in his last will and testament was an extension of how horribly he treated her while he was alive. While his contemporaries could sympathize with him for having a disobedient or promiscuous daughter, even they had to admit that Hermann could be cruel to Anna (and would later do so at the imperial court during Anna’s litigation with her siblings). Anna had a legal foothold in this instance because Hermann’s cruelty extended beyond what was tolerable to German law by resembling outright disinheritance.

“The preamble to the October 1543 agreement describes the portion allotted Anna by her father as ‘rather too harsh and unkind,’ particularly now that she was a widow. That frank acknowledgment on the part of all concerned, including members of the city council who signed off on the agreement, was an unusual civic admission. Hermann Büschler’s neighbors and colleagues did not believe him to be as heroic a parent as he was a bürgermeister.”

Anna’s insistence on getting a fair deal out of her father’s estate forced a reckoning both within the Büschler family and in the city of Hall regarding Hermann’s legacy. Despite Anna’s limited success in addressing her grievances in court, Anna’s siblings and the Hall city council agreed that Hermann Büschler treated Anna badly, at least in terms of his last will and testament.

“She informed the delegation that could she relive the day in the council room when she signed the agreement with her siblings, knowing then all that she knew now, she would dispense with every semblance of womanly courtesy, and ‘in the presence of your honors, squat down in the middle of the council room and politely perform the coarsest bodily act.’”

Like many episodes in Anna’s life, her remarks here are open to interpretation: They seem in keeping with her often feisty personality, but their recklessness could indicate the toll her struggles had taken on her. Anna would have known that such a comment would essentially end negotiations with the delegation regarding pursuing legal action, but perhaps she had such little respect for the process and the people trying to dissuade her from her path that it made no difference if she sabotaged this one meeting. At this stage in her life, it seems Anna had very little to lose by petitioning the courts and burning some bridges once again.

“Clearly, Philip had the most to gain from an agreement that masked his father’s bias toward him in apportioning the family inheritance. At the same time, the agreement promised to silence the only person (Anna) who had a reason to challenge Hermann Büschler’s disposition of his estate. In Anna’s opinion, Philip and his allies had played with a deck that could not have been more prejudicially stacked.”

Anna might have overplayed the idea of a mass conspiracy against her, but her suspicions that her siblings and the powerful men of Hall were working together to thwart her success were not entirely baseless. Anna’s father’s consistent favoritism of Philip and their joint consultation regarding Hermann’s last will and testament before the old bürgermeister’s death do indicate some plotting against Anna’s interests, especially in light of how miserly the final product turned out in terms of Anna’s portion.

“Anna might well have said of her father in the mid-1520s what she now said of her brother in the early 1540s, for her father had then been a heroic and unblemished man whom everyone respected and feared. And he too had successfully worked his will on her through the courts, thanks to strategically placed allies. The parallel between the two episodes may have crossed Anna’s mind in a disturbing moment of hindsight.”

It appears that Anna’s brother came to the same conclusion regarding Anna as their father did years before: that Anna was a problematic nuisance who deserved the bare minimum it would take to shut her up and keep her happy. There is very little evidence that Anna’s family members valued her as a daughter or sister after the first wave of serious problems hit. It is likely that by the 1540s, Anna would have thought Philip and Hermann were both exactly the same kind of villain.

“In a complex story such as Anna’s, where the protagonist is both a fearless sinner and boldly sinned against, a seeming friend might prove an enemy, a presumed enemy a friend, and not a few could play it both ways. For Anna tempted her contemporaries to take a second, critical look at their public lives and heroes, and to compare their own private desires with what society required of them—a prospect both frightening and exhilarating.”

This passage sums up what the author believes to be Anna’s legacy. Her notoriety in Hall and her litigation against her family made everybody reevaluate Hermann Büschler’s status as a local legend and reconsider the ethics of Hall’s esteemed city council. It would have also forced other parents to consider how they would deal with a daughter like Anna and whether or not her willfulness justified Hermann’s actions.

“It was uncharacteristic of Anna to play a waiting game; her instinct was always to act up, to take immediate and decisive action. While it can hardly be said that she was ever in the dark during the negotiations with her siblings (she rather understood all too well what was occurring), she did find herself at the time in what was for her the most stressful of situations, namely, one she could not control. Hence, the contradictory assessments of her behavior.”

The witnesses called during the court-mandated grand review of Anna’s case did not agree as to whether or not Anna was a fully willing and knowledgeable participant during the drafting of the inheritance agreement with her siblings. Although Ozment argues that Anna obviously understood what was happening around her, he suggests that Anna’s extreme stress and discomfort during the negotiations would have made some witnesses unsure as to her mental state and willingness to cooperate. There is a suggestion in this passage that Anna hated not being in control and therefore desired to control every situation she was involved in. While this might have been true generally of her personality, the stakes of this particular situation would have given her additional reason to desire control.

“Anna Büschler may not have received justice and fairness in her home court sufficient to assuage the modern conscience, but she was heard there. And because the city council was not a legal island but subject to a network of imperial courts willing to prod and override it, she did not end up empty-handed. But that also happened in part because the city council itself, for all its many failings, remained a principled body, some of whose members sympathized with her plight.”

In the final chapter, Ozment makes an effort to demonstrate that 16th-century Germany was not as unequal a society (at least for women) as readers might assume. This might seem an unlikely conclusion given the extent of the abuse Anna suffered at her father’s hands, but (as Ozment notes) that abuse also exceeded what society considered acceptable.

“Despite the limited nature of women’s educational and vocational opportunities in comparison with men’s, and the fact that women could participate in the most important civic and political activities only vicariously, they still had inalienable rights and significant access to the courts, by which they could climb onto the stage of history and leave their mark, as Anna did […] Anna’s story suggests that the "sexism" that seems so pervasive in the literature and laws of late medieval and Renaissance Europe was not as prominent or severe in actual family life and social practice […] Society’s general attitude toward women at this time is more accurately described as condescending and protective than as hateful and dismissive. To his fellow citizens, Hermann Büschler’s treatment of his daughter was both unusual and unacceptable and was neither condoned nor left unpunished.”

Ozment continues to provide a positive spin on the 16th-century German experience for women. He suggests that the written archive gives a more sexist impression of the age than the real-life experience of women. Whether Ozment overstates his case is debatable, but the goal here is to give readers a window into a past that does not conform to our often ungracious interpretations of people who came before.