About this Book

Why did parents prosecute their children as witches? Why did a sixteenth-century midwife entice a burgher woman to pretend she was giving birth to puppies? How did the life of a transsexual woman in early eighteenth-century Hamburg end? This volume presents a range of startling case-studies from German society between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment which make us think in new ways about the meanings of gender and identity in the past and which relates, above all, to the lived experiences of men and women, whose lives and choices mattered.