Family, Property, and Feeling in Early Modern German Noble Culture: The Zimmerns of Swabia

Abstract

The Zimmern family of Swabia, like so many other noble families in early modern Germany, struggled to reconcile its inheritance practices and expectations with the realities of external political pressures and internal family disagreements. While its strategies were in many ways unique to the Zimmerns'own domestic dynamics, the family shared in the situation of all nonprincely nobles who were caught between a constituting empire and competing princely houses. The Zimmern Chronicle, written in the latter half of the sixteenth century, is a rich source that provides historians with a better understanding of how emotions helped to shape the early modern German nobility's inheritance decisions. Recording marriage alliances, property divisions, feuds, and sibling disputes, the Chronicle is a Gedachtnis, a carefully crafted memory of a noble family in decline.