Frankfurt am Main, in common with other imperial German cities, enjoyed a large degree of legal autonomy during the early modern period, and produced a unique and rich body of criminal archives. In particular, Frankfurt’s Strafenbuch, which records all criminal sentences between 1562 and 1696, provides a fascinating insight into contemporary penal trends. Drawing on this and other rich resources, Dr. Boes reveals shifting and fluid attitudes towards crime and punishment and how these were conditioned by issues of gender, class, and social standing within the city’s establishment. She attributes a significant role in this process to the steady proliferation of municipal advocates, jurists trained in Roman Law, who wielded growing legal and penal prerogatives. Over the course of the book, it is demonstrated how the courts took an increasingly hard line with select groups of people accused of criminal behavior, and the open manner with which advocates exercised cultural, religious, racial, gender, and sexual-orientation repressions. Parallel with this, however, is identified a trend of marked leniency towards soldiers who enjoyed an increasingly privileged place within the judicial system. In light of this discrepancy between the treatment of civilians and soldiers, the advocates’ actions highlight the emergence and spread of a distinct military judicial culture and Frankfurt’s city council’s contribution to the quasi-militarization of a civilian court. By highlighting the polarized and changing ways the courts dealt with civilian and military criminals, a fuller picture is presented not just of Frankfurt’s sentencing and penal practices, but of broader attitudes within early modern Germany to issues of social position and cultural identity.

With the growth of printing in early modern Germany, crime quickly became a subject of wide public discourse. Sensational crime reports, often featuring multiple murders within families, proliferated as authors probed horrific events for religious meaning. Coinciding with heightened witch panics and economic crisis, the spike in crime fears revealed a continuum between fears of the occult and more mundane dangers. In Crime and Culture in Early Modern Germany, Joy Wiltenburg explores the beginnings of crime sensationalism from the early sixteenth century into the seventeenth century and beyond. Comparing the depictions of crime in popular publications with those in archival records, legal discourse, and imaginative literature, Wiltenburg highlights key social anxieties and analyzes how crime texts worked to shape public perceptions and mentalities. Reports regularly featured familial destruction, flawed economic relations, and the apocalyptic thinking of Protestant clergy. Wiltenburg examines how such literature expressed and shaped cultural attitudes while at the same time reinforcing governmental authority. She also shows how the emotional inflections of crime stories influenced the growth of early modern public discourse, so often conceived in terms of rational exchange of ideas.

Frankfurt am Main, in common with other imperial German cities, enjoyed a large degree of legal autonomy during the early modern period, and produced a unique and rich body of criminal archives. In particular, Frankfurt’s Strafenbuch, which records all criminal sentences between 1562 and 1696, provides a fascinating insight into contemporary penal trends. Drawing on this and other rich resources, Dr. Boes reveals shifting and fluid attitudes towards crime and punishment and how these were conditioned by issues of gender, class, and social standing within the city’s establishment. She attributes a significant role in this process to the steady proliferation of municipal advocates, jurists trained in Roman Law, who wielded growing legal and penal prerogatives. Over the course of the book, it is demonstrated how the courts took an increasingly hard line with select groups of people accused of criminal behavior, and the open manner with which advocates exercised cultural, religious, racial, gender, and sexual-orientation repressions. Parallel with this, however, is identified a trend of marked leniency towards soldiers who enjoyed an increasingly privileged place within the judicial system. In light of this discrepancy between the treatment of civilians and soldiers, the advocates’ actions highlight the emergence and spread of a distinct military judicial culture and Frankfurt’s city council’s contribution to the quasi-militarization of a civilian court. By highlighting the polarized and changing ways the courts dealt with civilian and military criminals, a fuller picture is presented not just of Frankfurt’s sentencing and penal practices, but of broader attitudes within early modern Germany to issues of social position and cultural identity.

The history of criminal justice in modern Germany has become a vibrant field of research, as demonstrated in this volume. Following an introductory survey, the twelve chapters examine major topics in the history of crime and criminal justice from Imperial Germany, through the Weimar and Nazi eras, to the early postwar years. These topics include case studies of criminal trials, the development of juvenile justice, and the efforts to reform the penal code, criminal procedure, and the prison system. The collection also reveals that the history of criminal justice has much to contribute to other areas of historical inquiry: it explores the changing relationship of criminal justice to psychiatry and social welfare, analyzes representations of crime and criminal justice in the media and literature, and uses the lens of criminal justice to illuminate German social history, gender history, and the history of sexuality.

'The Crimes of Women in Early Modern Germany' is a fascinating study of 'deviant' women. It is the first scholarly account of how women were prosecuted for theft, infanticide, and sexual crimes in early modern Germany, and challenges the assumption that women were treated more leniently than men. Ulinka Rublack uses criminal trials to illuminate the social status and conflicts of women living through the Reformation and Thirty Years War, telling, for the first time, the stories of cutpurses, maidservants' dangerous liaisons, and artisans' troubled marriages. She provides a thought-provoking analysis of labelling and sentencing processes, and of the punishments inflicted on those found guilty. Above all, she brilliantly engages with the way 'ordinary' women experienced authority and sexuality, household and community.

This first volume of a two-volume collection of essays provides a comprehensive examination of the idea of social control in the history of Europe. The uniqueness of these volumes lies in two main areas. First, the contributors compare methods of social control on many levels, from police to shaming, church to guilds. Second, they look at these formal and informal institutions as two-way processes. Unlike many studies of social control in the past, the scholars here examine how individuals and groups that are being controlled necessarily participate in and shape the manner in which they are regulated. Hardly passive victims of discipline and control, these folks instead claimed agency in that process, accepting and resisting -- and thus molding -- the controls under which they functioned. The essays in this volume focus on the interplay of ecclesiastical institutions and the emerging states, examining discipline from a bottom-up perspective. Book jacket.

Crime is men’s business, isn’t it? Women are responsible for 10 percent of crime in Europe. Yet, if we look at the Dutch Republic in the early modern period, we find that in the towns of Holland women played a much larger role in crime. In a number of early modern towns about half of the criminals convicted in court were women. These women were in vulnerable positions and thus more likely to become involved in crime. They also had a relatively independent status and led remarkably public lives. Manon van der Heijden convincingly shows that it is the very combination of women’s vulnerability and independence that accounts for the high female crime rates in Holland between 1600 and 1800.

This book charts the gender differences in crime in early modern Frankfurt. It shows that women's prosecuted crime patterns in Frankfurt were both similar and different to that of other European cities.

This book is a richly textured social and cultural study exploring the profound effects and lasting repercussions of superimposing Western-derived models of repentance and rehabilitation on traditional categories of crime and punishment.

A Companion to Late Medieval and Early Modern Augsburg introduces readers to major political, social and economic developments in Augsburg from c. 1400 to c. 1800 as well as to those themes of social and cultural history that have made research on this imperial city especially fruitful and stimulating. The volume comprises contributions by an international team of 23 scholars, providing a range of the most significant scholarly approaches to Augsburg’s past from a variety of perspectives, disciplines, and methodologies. Building on the impressive number of recent innovative studies on this large and prosperous early modern city, the contributions distill the extraordinary range and creativity of recent scholarship on Augsburg into a handbook format. Contributors are Victoria Bartels, Katy Bond, Christopher W. Close, Allyson Creasman, Regina Dauser, Dietrich Erben, Alexander J. Fisher, Andreas Flurschütz da Cruz, Helmut Graser, Mark Häberlein, Michele Zelinsky Hanson, Peter Kreutz, Hans-Jörg Künast, Margaret Lewis, Andrew Morrall, Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer, Barbara Rajkay, Reinhold Reith, Gregor Rohmann, Claudia Stein, B. Ann Tlusty, Sabine Ullmann, Wolfgang E.J. Weber.