Gastfreundschaft in der frühneuzeitlichen Gesellschaft

Hospitality is studied in its various aspects in this book - sociability, households, resources, ritualized ways of life, transcultural perspectives. As a social group, scholars are focused on and studied in their practices and their perspectives. Scholars valued hospitality on account of the opportunities for sociability it offered. At the same time, as a complex web of social, religious, and juridical rules, hospitality was highly important for their professional attempts at making decisions on normative aspects of life. Seen as a core of socialization, hospitality attracted the attention of scholars in their personal practices as well as in their professional activities as theologians, jurists, teachers, and advisers. The focus of this study is on early modern society and thus related to a specific historical time period. At the same time, methodological tools from historical anthropology are developed so as to be useful for analyzing other societies and social groups as well. This is the first book-length study on early modern hospitality in the German speaking areas, and at the same time the first on hospitality in a scholar's culture.