"Who is to Blame When Disaster Strikes? Women as Scapegoats for Catastrophe in Early Modern Germany"

The Division for Late Medieval and Reformation Studies is presenting the 2022 Summer Lecture Series, titled "Immigrants, Outsiders and Scapegoats: 'The Other' in Early Modern Germany."

As recent developments both in politics and in connection with the global Covid-19 pandemic have made clear, societies are built on – and destroyed by – assumptions about who belongs and who does not, ideas about what are acceptable and unacceptable forms of behavior, and a host of other perceptions about politics, social relations, religion, and the natural world. It is well known that early modern European societies burned women as witches and persecuted Jews and members of other minority religions, but what about everyday exclusions of and (micro)aggressions against people perceived as “the other”?

The 2022 Summer Lecture Series explores three case studies from early modern Germany by focusing on military chaplains as outsiders, women as scapegoats for natural disasters, and an English immigrant in the port city of Hamburg.

The final lecture, available on YouTube beginning on Sept. 4, is titled “Who is to Blame When Disaster Strikes? Women as Scapegoats for Catastrophe in Early Modern Germany,” presented by graduate student Rachel Davis Small.