37 pages • 1 hour read
The Burgermeister's Daughter: Scandal in a Sixteenth-Century German Town
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Chapter 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 2 Summary
Erasmus Schenk von Limpurg, one of Anna’s lovers, was a royal and a womanizer. According to some local history books, he was a hero of the Protestant Reformation in Hall, though he carefully balanced Catholic and Protestant obligations throughout his life. His family’s influence in the region was declining by the time of his affair with Anna, while Hermann Büschler’s local influence was at its peak. Still, Anna and Erasmus’s differing ranks precluded any possibility of a formal romantic relationship. A substantial record of their secret correspondence has survived, permitting a remarkably intimate snapshot of their troubled relationship.
Most of Anna and Erasmus’s letters to each other reveal a preoccupation with keeping their relationship secret and with planning their meetings, with many disagreements about who should visit whom. Both declared their love for one another regularly; however, “[W]hatever Erasmus’s professed love for Anna may have meant to him, it did not necessarily include attentiveness and fidelity” (47). Anna often brought up Erasmus’s womanizing (for example in Letter 3) (48). Similarly, Erasmus’s jealousy regarding Anna’s affair with Daniel Treutwein became a dealbreaking sore spot for Erasmus toward the end of their correspondence, as Letter 23 demonstrates (74).
Daniel Treutwein, Anna’s second lover, was an assimilated Jewish mercenary—a “crack cavalryman during service with the Swabian league in the 1520s” who put down peasant revolts in 1525 (77). His life was grittier and more violent than Erasmus’s, and the two men disliked each other based on one another’s association with Anna. Daniel’s affair with Anna occurred during the peak of his military career, from 1522 to 1524, and while her letters to Daniel Treutwein have not survived, some of his letters to Anna remain. The tenor of their relationship is apparent in this one-sided correspondence. Daniel discussed and reiterated his support for Anna, including his willingness to take her side in Anna’s escalating dispute with her father. He also regularly asked for money, as in Letter 2 and Letter 19 (85, 93).
Eventually, both of these affairs fizzled out. Erasmus married another woman, Countess Anna of Lodron, despite promising Anna Büschler not to abandon her; in his final letter Erasmus suggested patching things up with Hermann, and “in advising her to crawl back to her father, Erasmus simply abandoned her to her own devices” (100). Meanwhile, Daniel “quietly disappeared from her life” by the end of 1525 (101), as his career and probably his annoyance at Anna’s ongoing affair with Erasmus kept him away from Anna.
Chapter 2 Analysis
A cynical view of Anna’s relationships with her two lovers is that Erasmus just wanted sex and Daniel just wanted money. Erasmus found many excuses not to visit Anna but frequently requested that she come to him instead, while Daniel often requested money; both sets of letters feature selfish motivations. Particularly in the case of Anna’s correspondence with Daniel, however, there are hints of affection and even love, especially as Daniel reminds Anna of his constancy in the face of her major struggles with her father. Erasmus, meanwhile, references his “old love” still being there for Anna, suggesting that a once passionate affair had dissolved into a complicated and unsatisfying relationship for both parties.
The two men’s attitudes toward Anna’s difficult relationship with her father reflected their relationship with Anna. Toward the end of their correspondence, Erasmus “[advised] her to crawl back to her father” (100); since this was an impossible option for Anna, it was effectively abandonment on Erasmus’s part. By contrast, Daniel stated and reiterated his constant support for Anna should her relationship with her father take a turn for the worse. Part of the difference in quality between these two relationships involved the men’s differing ranks and the consequences for Anna. Daniel was able to speak affectionately and openly with Anna as a social equal who had the option of converting the affair into a marriage, while Anna and Erasmus (except in moments of anger) spoke formally to each other due to Erasmus’s nobility and could not have created a formal intimate bond in 16th-century German society. Extreme secrecy was Erasmus’s constant concern in his relationship with Anna.
It was Anna, however, who had the most to lose if her relationships with these two men became testy. This reflects a broader aspect of Renaissance society: Women generally bore harsher consequences than men for similar “crimes,” especially when sex was involved. The risk of pregnancy was perhaps the greatest fear; in fact, “so frightening had the prospect of unwed motherhood become by the seventeenth century that some pregnant women resorted to infanticide when a marriage could not be arranged” (60). Hermann Büschler’s failure to arrange a marriage for Anna was her major complaint against her father throughout all of their personal and legal troubles. Given Anna’s willingness to pursue love outside of marriage, her frustration on this point testifies to the extreme precariousness of life for an unmarried woman at the time.
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