"Ordering Medieval Society"

I am current reading selections from Ordering Medieval Society, edited by Bernhard Jussen and translated by Pamela Selwyn. The "Introduction" by Prof. Dr. Jussen is well worth the time for anyone interested in either the German medieval period or the application of approaches to past societies that are derived from sociology and anthropology. One section in particular, which summarizes the questions posed in the article by Prof. Dr. Otto Gerhard Oexle reads "In short, research on groups serves as a corrective to our image of a hierarchical, "feudal" Middle Ages, confronting it with the powerful presence of organization forms such as the ritual friendship, the conspiracy, and the guild. These social forms were precisely not hierarchical, and individuals were not "born into" them. Instead, they rested on the idea of a free contract and were-at least formally-structured along egalitarian lines." Jussen, "Introduction," 6. One of the subject-areas that attracted me to German studies in the first place was the way in which urban development and urban cultures in Germany contrasted to a model or urban life based on, say, northern Italian cities or cities in the Low Countries. Germans cities were never as large in terms of population and they were not able to extricate themselves from a cultural landscape dominated by a landed aristocracy, as least in the way that the northern Italian cities had. Yet, for all that, they were aggressive in maintaining their collective independence and emphasizing their collective rights against other vertical institutions. At the same time, their goals were different, and different among themselves as they might be from cities in other contexts. For instance, while wealth was often a tool leveraged by burghers against the power of the aristocracy, some cities, like Ulm were very conservative and avoided fostering trading companies, in large part because such wealth in the hands of merchants (a guild) was viewed as a resource that could be leveraged against the patricians, who jealously guarded their rank in society. So, although Ulm was an important source of textile manufacturing, it never developing financial institutions like the Fuggers of Augsburg or the Ravensberger Trading Company. The goal of the patricians was to keep order, and part of achieving that goal was outlawing conspiracies and placating the guilds to a certain extent. In "Urkundenbuck" for the city, there are certain laws that prohibit any type of "public" gathering, but that came to include things like limiting the number of people who might visit a woman who has just given birth and is recovering, or in the "Kindbett." Even such a small gathered represented the potential to disrupt the legitimate power of the guild council and emphasizes the notion that social power might be represented hierarchically but it was based on vertical associations who granted legitimacy to those hierarchical institutions.