New publication on political culture, crime and religious deviance

To mark his retirement, Ulrike Ludwig, Falk Bretschneider, Alexander Kästner, Franziska Neumann and Susanne Rau have collected some of Senior Professor Gerd Schwerhoff's essays and published them as a commemorative publication: Political Culture, Crime and Religious Deviance.

Using selected case studies, Gerd Schwerhoff examines the tension between participation and exclusion in late medieval and early modern cities. How did city dwellers assert their right to co-determination and what scope did they use for controversial debates? How was public unity and harmony staged or even enforced by the authorities? Which forms of deviation from the norm were tolerated, and which provoked harsh sanctions? And how much religious difference did the urban environment tolerate? Due to their comparatively dense source tradition, for example in the form of criminal sources, ancient European cities can be used as laboratories for the exemplary investigation of scope for action and social conflict management.

Further information can be found on the publisher's homepage.