From dealer's description: "Von den neun Hauten der bösen Weiber, wie jede Haut mit Nam[m]en genennet wird, und was sie für Tugenden haben. Nurnberg: Paulus Fürst, 1640. Large oblong folio broadside [38 x 29 cm]. With a long engraving [33.5 x 6.5 cm] illustrating the different types of ‘bad wives’. Third recorded copy of this broadside printing, following the impossibly rare first edition of 1530. The ever-popular Mesitersinger Hans Sach’s satire making light of domestic abuse is thought to have been extremely influential, and continued to be republished through the 18th century. The title literally translates as “The Nine Skins of Bad Wives”; “the text is a first person narrative… in the struggle, the husband beat his wife at length. Each round of beating uncovered a new ‘skin’ on his wife’s body, and for each newly revealed skin, the husband encountered a different kind of behavior in his wife. When he uncovered her bear skin, for example, the wife began to growl; the horse’s skin is associated with kicking, the cat’s skin with scratching, and so on. In the end, the husband laid bare his wife’s human skin. Reduced to her human nature, the wife began to cry, asked for mercy, and swore never to act in an inappropriate manner again…” (Katja Altpeter-Jones, “Inscribing Gender on the Early Modern Body: Marital Violence in German Texts of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Century” Early Modern Women Vol 3 (2008), pp. 27-60). Cf also Joy Wilternburg, Women in Early Modern Germany: An Anthology of Popular Texts (2002), p. 40 OCLC: no American copy, and just the Herzog August Bibliothek worldwide." Ordered from David Rueger D9774, 2025-10-31, Cat. "WOMEN CAN BE SAVED!" item G-2
