City Rights and “Gute Policey”-Guidelines in Nuremberg, Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Schweinfurt, and Überlingen. A Comparison of Four Imperial Cities in Southern Germany (Stadtrechte und Policeygesetze in Nürnberg, Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Schweinfurt und Überlingen. Vier süddeutsche Reichsstädte im Vergleich)
Author : Wolfgang Wüst
Abstract :
City and police(y) rights had countless points of intersection in terms of content, which were rarely classified and examined comparatively in research for the simple reason of temporal incongruity. While the analysis of city law focused on the middle Ages, the early modern period played a central role in police(y) research. At closer look, however, the temporal parallels extended when investing for typical police(y) matters in the medieval “Dekretenschatz”, even though the term only became common in the imperial cities of southern Germany at the end of the 15th century, and often only in the century of the Reformation. While the word “Polletzey” is first documented for Nuremberg in 1464, it took until 1505 in Nördlingen, 1551 in Überlingen, and 1572 in Schweinfurt. In Rothenburg police regulations did not become popular until the 17th century, with proclamations and renewals taking place there since 1614. However, the imperial city legislature then financed a whole series of elaborately printed ordinances in quick succession, as shown by the graphically appealing “explanations” of the ordinances of 1654, 1685 and 1698. As a result of a cross-epochal analysis that relativizes the turning point around 1500 with regard to legal values, it can be concluded that the city police(y), in the full breadth of social necessities, dynamized the foundations of city law until the end of the imperial cities and carried it with eloquent breadth into the estates of a socially stratified urban population.
Keywords :
Southern Germany, city rights, police(y) regulations, Middle Ages, Early Modern Times, imperial cities, Nuremberg, Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Schweinfurt, Ueberlingen, Franconia, Baden.
