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This book presents a social and cultural history of 'dishonourable people' (unehrliche Leute), an outcast group in early modern Germany. Executioners, skinners, grave-diggers, shepherds, barber-surgeons, millers, linen-weavers, sow-gelders, latrine-cleaners, and bailiffs were among the 'dishonourable' by virtue of their trades. This dishonour was either hereditary, often through several generations, or it arose from ritual pollution whereby honourable citizens could become dishonourable by coming into casual contact with members of the outcast group. The dishonourable milieu of the city of Augsburg from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries is reconstructed to show the extent to which dishonour determined the life-chances and self-identity of dishonourable people. The book then investigates how honourable estates interacted with dishonourable people, and how the pollution anxieties of early modern Germans structured social and political relations within honourable society.

Occupations --- Social classes --- History. --- Statut social --- Honneur --- Professions --- Aspect social --- Allemagne --- Moeurs et coutumes --- Germany --- History --- Career patterns --- Careers --- Jobs --- Trades --- Vocational guidance --- Work --- Social classes History --- Social classes Germany --- Arts and Humanities

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"With this excellent study, research on suicide by proxy is taken a step further to constitute a field of research on its own. The cross-confessional approach between Lutheran Hamburg and Catholic Vienna, enables the author to show that this largely forgotten historical phenomenon was a fluid and malleable practice adopted by perpetrators according to their local cultural and confessional context." --Jonas Liliequist, Umeå University, Sweden Suicide by Proxy became a major societal problem after 1650. Suicidal people committed capital crimes with the explicit goal of “earning” their executions, as a short-cut to their salvation. Desiring to die repentantly at the hands of divinely-instituted government, perpetrators hoped to escape eternal damnation that befell direct suicides. Kathy Stuart shows how this crime emerged as an unintended consequence of aggressive social disciplining campaigns by confessional states. Paradoxically, suicide by proxy exposed the limits of early modern state power, as governments struggled unsuccessfully to suppress the tactic. Some perpetrators committed arson or blasphemy, or confessed to long-past crimes, usually infanticide, or bestiality. Most frequently, however, they murdered young children, believing that their innocent victims would also enter paradise. The crime had cross-confessional appeal, as illustrated in case studies of Lutheran Hamburg and Catholic Vienna. Kathy Stuart is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Davis, USA.

Criminology. Victimology --- History --- History of Germany and Austria --- History of Europe --- nieuwste tijd --- geschiedenis --- maatschappij --- criminaliteit --- Europese geschiedenis --- nieuwe tijd --- anno 1500-1799 --- anno 1800-1999 --- Eastern and Central Europe --- Europe --- Europe—History—1492-. --- Europe, Central—History. --- Crime—Sociological aspects. --- History of Early Modern Europe. --- History of Germany and Central Europe. --- Crime and Society.