Augsburg was one of the largest and most influential cities in Germany in the early modern period: a major political, economic, and cultural center, and home to the Fuggers, the wealthiest family in Europe. This volume offers a detailed look at the imperial city from the founding of its guild-based government in 1368 through Augsburg's golden age in the sixteenth century, and its long decline over the next two centuries to its loss of independence in 1806. Its twenty-three informative and readable chapters, written by scholars from Europe and North America, introduce anglophone readers to a great deal of recent work on Augsburg written in German.

The book is divided into four parts. Part 1, “The City,” has four chapters and provides a brief historiographic overview of research on Augsburg and describes the city's physical space and its depiction in maps and chronicles. A chapter on “invisible boundaries” concerns health care but also introduces a theme that runs through the remaining chapters: the line that divided Protestants and Catholics in the wake of the 1555 Peace of Augsburg. Part 2, “Economy, Politics, and the Law,” opens with a description of the city's twin economic engines, local fustian production and long-distance trade and banking. The city's political development is covered in two chapters, the first devoted to the guild regime established in 1368, and the second dealing with the patrician government that replaced the guild regime in 1548 and ruled the city until it was incorporated into Bavaria in 1806. The last two chapters of this section deal with crime and criminal procedure and with the city's civil law code.

Part 3, “Religion and Society,” begins with two chapters describing the impact of the Protestant Reformation on Augsburg up to 1555 and the long-term challenge of religious coexistence. Less directly influenced by religion was the city's economic boom in the sixteenth century, which increased the already significant divide between rich and poor, and the long economic decline that began with the Thirty Years’ War. Two chapters focus on marriage and sexuality and on leisure activities. These areas were influenced by the religious divisions of the sixteenth century, but also by changing economic conditions and, in the case of leisure activities, growing secularization. A chapter on the experience of war looks more closely at the impact on the city's inhabitants from the Schmalkaldic War in the mid-sixteenth century, through the Thirty Years’ War in the seventeenth century, to the War of the Spanish Succession in the early eighteenth century. A final chapter considers the marginal place of Jews, who were expelled from the city in 1438 and not allowed to reside in the city until the beginning of the nineteenth century, but who still played a significant role in trade and commerce.

The first chapter of Part 4, “Communication, Cultural and Intellectual Life,” describes Augsburg's importance for the dissemination of news, in part to meet the needs of the city's merchant and banking firms. A chapter on printing highlights the production of vernacular publications by Protestant printers through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the growth of Catholic Latin publications in the eighteenth century. A chapter on dress and material culture describes the economic and cultural value of clothing and of the suits of armor produced in the city. The two movements of humanism and the Reformation shaped the city's learned culture through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but by the early Enlightenment Augsburg lagged behind other German cities as a cultural center. The final three chapters deal with the arts, architecture, and music. Here, too, religious change played a role, as a secular art market emerged after the Reformation and musical culture separated into Catholic and Protestant forms. Ecclesiastical patronage was replaced by civic and patrician patronage, with considerable investment in public fountains and the new city hall.

The volume's greatest strength is its long chronological perspective. The Protestant Reformation brought a major change to Augsburg, but there were important continuities and gradual changes from the late fourteenth through the early nineteenth century that are obscured by the traditional division between medieval and early modern. The chapters are synthetic, and each has a lengthy bibliography of primary and secondary sources at the end, making the volume ideal for both graduate students starting their research and scholars looking for detailed treatment of a specific topic. Although the book concerns Augsburg, much of what is written about that city sheds light on urban history in Germany more generally, and its broad coverage of economic, social, and cultural topics makes it valuable for readers in a variety of historical specializations.