Cities were and are places to meet strangers. Who or what is viewed as 'foreign' always depends on the definition of what is one's own. The construction of foreignness thus also serves to create meaning with a view to one's own identity. Urban self-testimonies and chronicles of the late Middle Ages and the early modern period reflect these relationships in different ways. Occasionally the authors appear to be curious and open to appropriating the foreign, but in many cases they also show themselves to be prejudiced and negative in order to use the demarcation to create and sharpen their own, family or a communal-collective identity. From this perspective, the volume is devoted to texts from Northern Germany, Franconia, Upper Germany, Italy and England as well as the work of Cologne councillor and chronicler Hermann Weinsberg (1518-1597), which is considered the most extensive urban self-testimony of the 16th century.