Flesh And Spirit - Private Life In Early Modern Germany

Before privacy meant passwords and curtains, it meant family honour, household discipline, marriage contracts, church oversight, and trying to have an inner life while everyone else had an opinion.

Flesh and Spirit by Steven Ozment explores private life in early modern Germany: husbands, wives, children, faith, work, sex, grief, education, domestic order, and all the intimate machinery by which ordinary people attempted to live properly under highly watchful conditions.

This is history with the grand battles mostly left outside. Instead, Ozment turns to the home, where the real negotiations happened: affection versus duty, desire versus doctrine, individuality versus the household, and the eternal question of who exactly was in charge of whom.

There is a lovely irony in the phrase “private life.” In early modern Europe, privacy seems to have involved a surprising number of relatives, neighbours, pastors, magistrates, and moral expectations. The soul may have belonged to God, but the household was apparently a committee.

This good copy, as sold by Crappy Old Books, is ideal for readers of social history, Reformation-era Europe, German history, and anyone who enjoys discovering that people in the past were just as complicated as us, only with more theology and fewer escape routes.

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