37 pages • 1 hour read
The Burgermeister's Daughter: Scandal in a Sixteenth-Century German Town
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Chapter 6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 6 Summary
Anna married Johann von Sporland in 1546, and together they successfully petitioned the imperial court in Esslingen to conduct a grand review of their matter “in what promised to be a decisive resolution between the spring of 1550 and January 1552” (168); it would involve four commissions, witnesses, and the collection of testimonies. Anna made two major accusations in this legal matter: first, that she was coerced into signing an unfair agreement with her siblings, who subsequently “refused to honor its key provision, the payment of her debts” (169); and second, that the Hall city council illegally arrested her with the intention of permanently incarcerating her.
The court collected testimony from 39 witnesses who represented a cross-section of German society. Some witnesses, like Hermann Büschler’s servants, were predictably unfavorable to Anna, while others (even in the Hall city council) supported her claims of mistreatment. The consensus among the witnesses was that it was impossible for Anna not to have understood what she was signing up for, although some witnesses, like Johann Hornberger, had heard rumors that Anna was never happy with the agreement and always intended to fight it. Her council-appointed curator, Conrad Büschler Jr., agreed that Anna entered into the agreement with her siblings willingly, but he could not unequivocally state that there was no duress. Anna herself believed that Büschler Jr. conspired against her as well.
Anna’s brother and sister had their own role in the demise of the agreement by making “the negotiations difficult from the start, and then, after the agreement was signed, by fulfilling their obligations in as slow and tedious a fashion as possible” (178). When it came to the repayment of Anna’s debts, the most important provision of the agreement, Philip’s “exceedingly meticulous negotiations with his sister’s creditors […] bruised many egos” (179), and when Philip refused to pay debts for which Anna’s creditors could not provide a full accounting, Anna once again found debt-collectors on her doorstep.
Chapter 6 Analysis
The Esslingen court’s grand review of Anna’s matter played out like a referendum on Anna’s character. The diversity of the witnesses who were called to present their view of Anna, her motivations, and the decisions she made represented a cross-section of 16th-century German society. This wasn’t the pile-on it could have been; some people who might have been expected to hate Anna, including “salt-maker Gilg Menger [who] had lent Anna money, which she only slowly repaid” and “a few councilmen” from Hall who had every reason to despise Anna (171), spoke out in her favor.
Ozment claims that these surprising twists are to do with the ways in which 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” (171-72). More specifically, Ozment argues that Anna’s revelations about her relationship with her father sat uneasily alongside Hermann’s public image. In highlighting this gap, Ozment gestures towards the double problem historians face in trying to reconstruct personality—not simply the temporal distance, but also the perennial question of how well public and private personas align.
That said, the sixth chapter does explore Anna’s personality and psychology in greater depth. In assessing her state of mind surrounding the agreement with her siblings, Ozment writes that “it was uncharacteristic of Anna to play a waiting game; her instinct was always to act up, to take immediate and decisive action” (173); this aligns with her behavior leading up to the grand review, including her two daring escapes from captivity. The author also provides helpful context for Anna’s state of mind around the time of the agreement when he writes that she “was then more vulnerable than ever before or after in her life” (176). Both her husband and her father had just died, and she now had to deal with her late father’s attempt to disinherit her on top of everything else.
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