Maria R. Boes,Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Germany: Courts and Adjudicatory Practices in Frankfurt am Main,1562–1696

Reviewed by: Susan C. Karant-Nunn, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, USA

This volume represents the culmination and summary of Maria R. Boes's career as an essayist on laws concerning and the judicial treatment of women and minorities in early modern Frankfurt am Main. Four of the 12 chapters have appeared previously as articles. Boes's findings resonate with, though they are not identical to, those for other cities within the Holy Roman Empire. This also applies to the Swiss Confederation too, as Laura Stokes showed in her Demons of Urban Reform: Early European Witch Trials and Criminal Justice, 1430-1530 (2011), which covered Basel and the Francophone Lucerne, in addition to Nuremberg. Boes has ransacked the pertinent archives, but her favored source is Frankfurt's Strafenbuch or Book of Punishments, which covers the period from 1562 to 1696. Her close analysis of the data from this chronological stretch enables her to ferret out legal shifts as well as evolving social attitudes of the elite administrators of justice.

The sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were a time, as Gerald Strauss showed in Law, Resistance, and the State: The Opposition to Roman Law in Reformation Germany (1986), when the imperial free cities were deeply attracted to the principles of Roman Law. They saw Roman Law holding out the ideal of uniformity within what had been till then a most disparate range of customary practices. Some ordinary citizens found it to be a foreign intrusion that interfered with their face-to-face and more moderate resolution of conflict. Authorities resorted to judicial torture. Simultaneously, the population rose towards 20,000 at the end of the century, and social and economic tensions increased. Among their symptoms were the exclusion of women from guilds, further disadvantages for illegitimate birth, and deepening prejudice against Jews. Adoption of the Reformation availed the city fathers of divine justification for the decisions they reached and reinforced their tendency towards ever more exacting supervision of behaviour. Boes calls the proliferation of advocates a ‘symbiotic development’ with the adoption of Roman Law.

This was the setting. Boes then provides chapters on categories of the authorities’ targets: gypsies, Jews, maternal infanticides, sodomists, murderous soldiers on leave and suicides. Every one of these somehow violated the official value system. Gypsies were as disliked for what they were reputed to do (spy for the Turks, pretend to be Christians) as what they did do (practice itineracy, disguise themselves as peasants, steal to survive). The more stringent treatment of Jews may indicate harsher verdicts for Gypsies as well, but evidence is insufficient. Jews wore emblems on their clothing. Crimes committed against Jews were frequent and were barely punished, in contrast with the rare reverse. Christian libels against Jews did not lessen after the Reformation. The city council consistently raised ‘the penal threshold for those who had robbed, attacked and murdered Jewish victims while lowering it for the Jewish perpetrator’ (111). This trend culminated in the Fettmilch Uprising of 1614. Jews had little legal recourse, and witnesses against them were permitted to omit relevant evidence.

Boes finds that no patrician women (like their husbands) were ‘ever sentenced for criminal wrongdoing in Frankfurt’ during the five generations of this study (135). Lesser women were as likely to be tortured and subjected to capital punishment as men of their station were. Teenage rape victims were punished along with the rapists. Infanticides were executed. Witch persecution is absent from this survey because ‘not a single witch … was ever sentenced to death locally’ (258), an astonishing fact. These years parallel the height of the ‘witch craze’ in Europe, nevertheless. While Boes finds that women came to each other's aid, I have not found such a pattern of such help in the settings I have studied. Certainly, women often accused one another and testified against one another in witch trials; and midwives bore witness on promiscuity and paternity to the authorities.

Chapter 10 presents two cases of alleged sodomy, that of Ludwig Boudin (1598) and Heinrich Krafft (1645). Hearsay testimony was admissible, and incidents could lie decades back. Boes finds popular attitudes to be far more tolerant of such sexual expression than judicial and ecclesiastical ones, and she notes that city fathers of the latter date kept the trial secret so that the common people would not be ‘contaminated’ by its subject matter. Boudin was tortured 12 times, Krafft twice; both were banished.

The infamous Landsknecht, or mercenary soldier, posed challenges to settled society throughout the early modern period. Of the 1,338 criminal cases contained in the Strafenbuch, 114 concerned soldiers. Frankfurt hired its own soldiers, the number reaching 1200 in the war year of 1631. Having taken on the role of killer, and often without compensation, such men could hardly maintain a non-violent demeanour between battles. They raped and pillaged. Yet the Frankfurt city fathers did not bring rape charges against any. Based on plentiful evidence, this chapter distinguishes among four phases of judgement, both during and between wars. Above all, Boes asserts a growing sense of military honour governing the relations among members of the military profession. This in turn produced ‘military honor killings’ (230), accompanied by ritual subtleties.

Fourteen successful and two attempted suicides find their places in the Frankfurter Strafenbuch. After as before the Reformation, the bodies of suicides were punished as though they were being publicly executed. Interment was dishonourable. In the seventeenth century, Frankfurt ‘began to reduce the application of torture and decrease the severity of criminal punishments’ (264). Boes concludes, ‘Roman Law … served to strengthen the power of male rulers at the expense of the less fortunate such as peasants, many women, gays, and even suicides’ (267). Deep prejudices remained in place, nonetheless. These essays vary in evidentiary base and analytical daring, but all provide additional local substance for our picture of early modern Germany as a whole.