The chapter explores marriage litigation in Northern France and the German-speaking regions. It utilizes a distinction from late medieval Xanten between “simple” and “double” suits. The former pitted claimant against defendant, the latter showed several parties competing for the same partner. The preponderance of simple petitions especially in Germany is indicative of judges passively waiting for litigants to approach them. In fifteenth-century Cambrai and Brussels, the bishop installed a promoter for expert management of the accusations. He served to support persons whose case he found worthwhile or acted as instigator like a modern state attorney. Double proceedings at Cambrai nearly matched the simple ones and considerably outnumbered them at Brussels. Most of the multiparty suits arose when couples had their wedding banns announced in the parish church. At that moment, a person identified as the “opponent” in the sources came forward and objected to the validity of the proposed union. Regardless of the promoter, the courts of the North adjudicated in uniform fashion. They confronted many dozens if not hundreds of marriage cases. A mere handful of them met juristic criteria. The rest would stay within the limits of pastoral concern and lead to certain defeat.

This article explores Brecht’s origins and life in Augsburg from the time he was born in 1898 until he left Augsburg for Berlin in 1924. Brecht came from a well-educated and prosperous middle-class family, and he was raised as a Lutheran by his mother, although he soon rejected any form of Christian religious belief. From an early age he demonstrated great promise and ambition as a writer and soaked up influences from all around him, including the fairs that occurred in Augsburg on a regular basis. He read widely and was influenced by what he read. Among his most important influences were Frank Wedekind, Georg Büchner, Rudyard Kipling, Friedrich Nietzsche, François Villon, Arthur Rimbaud, and Paul Verlaine.In his adolescence Brecht became the center of a group of friends in Augsburg devoted to literature, music, and a nonconformist approach to life. In Augsburg Brecht experienced the Bavarian Revolution after the end of World War I.Brecht’s first plays Baal and Drums in the Night reflect some of his experiences and thoughts while living in Augsburg, and his revolutionary first book of poetry, Domestic Breviary, also emerged above all out of his life in Augsburg.

Bertolt Brecht, the most influential playwright of the twentieth century, is unthinkable without music.Many of his poems, as well as his forty-eight completed dramas and roughly fifty dramatic fragments, are connected to music.There is hardly another writer or dramatist of the twentieth century who based his work as clearly and decisively on the complex relationship between music, text, and drama.Brecht worked with some of the most important composers of the twentieth century, in particular Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler, and Paul Dessau.Although Brecht rejected some of the aesthetic ideas and ideology of Richard Wagner, in his ambition to combine the arts together and to leave a major legacy, he nevertheless in some respects ultimately came to resemble Wagner.The music connected to Brecht‘s texts is performed and passed on in the media throughout the world, from the early recordings made by the young Brecht himself all the way to innumerable versions of his “Ballad of Mack the Knife” created and spread by the globalized music market.