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'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.
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.
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 lives of (suspected) thieves, illegitimate mothers and vagrants in early modern Frankfurt. The book highlights the gender differences in recorded criminality and the way that they were shaped by the local context. Women played a prominent role in recorded crime in this period, and could even make up half of all defendants in specific European cities. At the same time, there were also large regional differences. Women’s crime patterns in Frankfurt were both similar and different to those of other cities. Informal control within the household played a significant role and influenced the prosecution patterns of authorities. This impacted men and women differently, and created clear distinctions within the system between settled locals and unsettled migrants.
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 soldiers who occupied Germany after the Second World War were not only liberators: they also brought with them a new threat, as women throughout the country became victims of sexual violence. In this disturbing and carefully researched book, the historian Miriam Gebhardt reveals for the first time the scale of this human tragedy, which continued long after the hostilities had ended. Discussion in recent years of the rape of German women committed at the end of the war has focused almost exclusively on the crimes committed by Soviet soldiers, but Gebhardt shows that this picture is misleading. Crimes were committed as much by the Western Allies – American, French and British – as by the members of the Red Army. Nor was the suffering limited to the immediate aftermath of the war. Gebhardt powerfully recounts how raped women continued to be the victims of doctors, who arbitrarily granted or refused abortions, welfare workers, who put pregnant women in homes, and wider society, which even today prefers to ignore these crimes. Crimes Unspoken is the first historical account to expose the true extent of sexual violence in Germany at the end of the war, offering valuable new insight into a key period of 20th century history.
"The unique contribution of Venomous Tongues lies in its interdisciplinary approach and the way it situates scolding within a broader range of issues specific to the legal and social history of the period."—L. R. Poos, The Catholic University of America
This book is the first work to look at the full range of three centuries of the early modern period in regards to infanticide and abortion, a period in which both practices were regarded equally as criminal acts. Faced with dire consequences if they were found pregnant or if they bore illegitimate children, many unmarried women were left with little choice. Some of these unfortunate women turned to infanticide and abortion as the way out of their difficult situation. This book explores the legal, social, cultural, and religious causes of infanticide and abortion in the early modern period, as well as the societal reactions to them. It examines how perceptions of these actions taken by desperate women changed over three hundred years and as early modern society became obsessed with a supposed plague of murderous mothers, resulting in heated debates, elaborate public executions, and a media frenzy. Finally, this book explores how the prosecution of infanticide and abortion eventually helped lead to major social and legal reformations during the age of the Enlightenment.
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.
"Female protagonists are commonly overlooked in the history of crime; especially in early modern Italy, where women's scope of action is often portrayed as heavily restricted. This book redresses the notion of Italian women's passivity, arguing that women's crimes were far too common to be viewed as an anomaly. Based on over two thousand criminal complaints and investigation dossiers, Sanne Muurling charts the multifaceted impact of gender on patterns of recorded crime in early modern Bologna. While various socioeconomic and legal mechanisms withdrew women from the criminal justice process, the casebooks also reveal that women - as criminal offenders and savvy litigants - had an active hand in keeping the wheels of the court spinning"--