4 - Polizeiordnungen: Taming the Shrew with Common Sense and the Law

Summary

HAVING DISCUSSED POPULAR TEXTS intended to be read for pleasure and with no other normative claims than a desire to portray good and bad examples of male and female behavior, I will now turn to decrees passed by the city council of Strasbourg to study a completely different type of text in search of the role(s) women play in these texts. The records discussed here are products of an almost exclusively middle or upper class male population, the “Bürger,” and hence not representative for all residents of the city. These texts are, however, aimed at the same readership and audience that Frey, Montanus, Wickram, and Fischart address in their prefaces, and they are all written by men who express their view of women without ever letting the women make their own voices heard. The decrees passed by the city council depict problems as they were perceived by those in power, and they show what issues were important to the council and its members. By prescribing how these problems should be solved, they indirectly describe sources of conflict within the city and among its inhabitants. Some of these problems were clearly gender-related while others were not.

The Strasbourg Council was given the mandate of leading the city and ensuring that peace and order were maintained. It was elected to act on behalf of all citizens and did not stand to benefit from passing any laws or decrees that would cause uprisings or riots. Rather, such regulations would have been regarded as counterproductive, since the loss of order would have resulted in a loss of control. The men in power thus needed to ensure that any dissatisfaction among the inhabitants of the growing city was kept to a minimum. The size of the early modern city — that is, the space enclosed within walls — was in no way proportionate to the size of its population. Indeed, most cities were overcrowded and only the wealthy could afford spacious living quarters. Looking at the architecture of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century towns and cities — the road network and the architecture of the buildings — it is not difficult to imagine that the lack of space was a risk factor for those responsible for upholding law and order.