“Als fromme und getrewe Bürger…”: Designing Desired Social Behaviour in 16th- and 17th-century Fire Ordinances from Gdańsk

Abstract

Fire ordinances, called Feuerordnung or Willkür in German, were quite early documents regulating fire prevention and showing how to act in the case of a conflagration. They were especially popular in German-speaking areas, although they have rarely been investigated from a linguistic perspective. In this article, the vocabulary concerning desirable and undesirable human actions in the time of a conflagration, as well as the consequences of such actions, was analysed in order to investigate the focal vocabulary of the authors of three fire ordinances from Gdańsk. The aim of this article is also to state clearly, through analysis, whether the authors of the ordinances believed punishment or reward to be a better motivation in fire prevention.