37 pages • 1 hour read
The Burgermeister's Daughter: Scandal in a Sixteenth-Century German Town
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Chapter 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary
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. Hall closed the matter after Herman Büschler declared that he was not interested in discussing such things with Anna.
While Anna’s legal matter in Hall was pending, her father petitioned the imperial supreme court in Esslingen separately, which the court permitted either as an oversight or because Büschler had friends in both Hall and Esslingen. Following his request, the court issued a “mandate for surreptitious capture” (115), which allowed Hermann to legally kidnap his daughter—a feat he accomplished. Anna became a prisoner in her father’s home for over six months.
Anna eventually escaped, found lodging with maternal relatives in Heilbronn, and married Hans von Leuzenbrunn, a compulsive gambler. The couple successfully filed a suit against the city of Hall in the lower court in Rottweil. They were seeking compensation from the city for the violation of the promise of safe passage for Anna through the city during her legal process there; it was the council reneging on this agreement that led to her capture and captivity by her father and to the unfair termination of her legal process. Hall asked the court in Esslingen to intervene in this complaint from Rottweil, and Esslingen finally overruled the lower court. This was a crushing blow for Anna in her quest for justice and compensation from her father.
Chapter 3 Analysis
It is difficult to overemphasize the unfavorable social and historical context that exacerbated Anna’s difficulties throughout the course of her legal battles and made her strong personality a target of public revulsion. This was the age in which the law regulated matters as banal as dress through sumptuary laws, rigorously maintaining class structure at every level of public life. Ozment references a popular opinion expressed by the Englishman William Smith, who wrote that the well-being of a citizenry depended on a city’s “cleanliness and orderliness and the wisdom and vigilance of its law enforcement” (104). Despite the inherent unfairness of these laws and customs, especially for personality-rich women like Anna Büschler, there was a logic to them beyond merely preserving the social hierarchy. As Ozment explains, orderliness and adherence to a simple code of ethics is crucial for populations “who find themselves threatened easily and often by sinister forces […] a family’s security in time of need and success in everyday life might depend on […] what their neighbors think about them” (105-06). In short, strict public order was associated with survival in Anna’s day.
A good deal of Hermann’s grievance with Anna had to do with the shame she apparently brought on him through her behavior. In his eyes, this justified what is to modern eyes perhaps the most shameful act that takes places within the pages of Ozment’s book: Hermann’s legal kidnapping and imprisonment of his daughter Anna, who was chained to furniture in her father’s home for six months before her lucky escape. The author specifies that this inhumane method of dealing with people “was at the time a medically approved and legal procedure for dealing with the mentally ill” (115-16). Anna, however, was healthy and certainly traumatized by this experience forever.
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