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Sumptuary Law in Nürnberg; A Study in Paternal Government
Sumptuary Law in Nrnberg A Study in Paternal Government Author:Kent Roberts Greenfield General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1918 Original Publisher: Johns Hopkins Press Subjects: Sumptuary laws Nuremberg (Germany) History / Europe / Germany History / Military / World War II Law / International Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there ... more »may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER II Marriage Festivities One of the major passages of life in which the citizen encountered the paternal action of the council was his marriage. Weddings are much the same in all ages; and the exchange of gifts, the feasting, wine, and music, the festive attire, and the lavish hand, expected as befitting the joyousness and the freedom of the occasion, offered a temptation almost impossible to resist; hence the city fathers were engaged from an early time in seeking to curb what they felt to be extravagance in these matters. In Niirn- berg, legislation on the subject of weddings was the most complete of the varieties of sumptuary law previous to the Reformation. A review of it will serve to exhibit the nature of the sumptuary ordinances in general, at the same time that it tells its own story of the course of regulation in one important field. The earliest regulations of weddings that have come down to us are little more than miscellaneous fragments. There is nothing by which to determine their dates except within very wide limits; and it is almost impossible to know anything of the order in which they appeared. Indeed the form in which they survive makes it difficult to reach any conclusions whatever as to the conditions of their making, unless it is this: that, although they appear on the records in sequence as if articles of one ordinance, they are plainly the products of a diversity of circumstances, and were made at diffe...« less