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

Anna’s life and legal battles take place in a 16th-century context in which order and social hierarchies dominated everyday life. Townspeople lived on streets assigned to them based on their careers and dressed in accordance with their class. Embarrassing one’s family in this context was a cardinal sin; the average Haller would have sided with Hermann Büschler against Anna for her disobedient ways. Nevertheless, Anna felt that her father was the one who behaved inappropriately by “the spurning of his paternal responsibility to provide her a proper marriage” (106).

Hermann threatened family members who might dare to assist or provide shelter to Anna after he kicked his daughter out of his home, forcing Anna to leave the entire region. She petitioned the imperial supreme court in Esslingen to secure “a safe hearing before the city council in Hall, the city’s supreme executive, legislative, and judicial authority” (108). Hall’s council was an arrogant group that did not take kindly to citizens turning to foreign courts to intervene in internal matters, so Anna’s was a particularly uphill battle. The Esslingen court sent Anna’s request for financial support from Hermann Büschler to Hall; she believed this support was rightfully hers as a legal dependent of her father and as part of her maternal inheritance.