Public Appearance and Criminal Judicial Practices in Early Modern Germany

Abstract

One of the most fascinating aspects of criminal adjudication is the method of identifying the criminal. Who committed the crime? While crime-detecting agents of the twentieth century use an array of sophisticated methods, such as fingerprinting, psychology, and, most recently, DNA sampling, no such methods were available to their sixteenth- and seventeenth-century counterparts. In fact, during the early modern period there were hardly any police forces to speak of. How, then, did contemporaries detect and report their culprits? Here I address these intriguing questions using an urban case study of Frankfurt am Main from 1562 to 1696.