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As he did in his much praised and highly successful The Burgermeister's Daughter, Steven Ozment analyzes and weaves together primary sources to create a compelling account of German life in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. From private papers and archives -- account books, letters, legal records, journals -- emerge fascinating stories rescued from history: the complicated courtship dance of two politically prominent families; the joy of parenthood for a middle-aged couple when, after losing their first nine infants, a child survives; the difficulty a widowed mother has restraining her eldest son's expenses as he studies in Italy; the challenges faced by a Lutheran pastor negotiating the Church's bitter factionalism; and a Protestant teenager coping in Catholic Louvain.