Bodies tried by closed minds

In this persuasive and engrossing book, which will be of interest not just to German specialists but also to anyone concerned with larger questions of gender and criminality, justice and punishment, Ulinka Rublack examines ordinary female crime, excluding witchcraft. Her survey ranges from petty cases of immorality dealt with in village or church courts to theft, adultery, incest and murder. Some of this, such as rape and sexual abuse, would not seem at first sight to qualify as "female crime".

Rublack shows that it was often the women in such cases who were tried and punished, while the male rapists and abusers often managed to flee and escape punishment. Women were also more frequently accused of capital adultery than men. "Ultimately," Rublack concludes, "the fact that a man was able to enter a woman's body was itself taken as a sign of consent."

Rublack culls some fascinating stories from her sample of 252 manuscript trial records in Wurttemberg, backed up by what she describes as a "patchwork of sources" from elsewhere. They confirm that there was a growing crackdown on deviance from the second half of the 16th century, and that women suffered particularly in the process.

Ancient practices such as the allowance of petitions for mercy from the families of the condemned were discontinued as the process of clemency became bureaucratised. An incident such as occurred on the way to the gallows in Esslingen in 1517, when a woman who was about to be buried alive for infanticide was freed when a journeyman shoemaker arrived from another town and offered to marry her, had become unthinkable by the middle of the 17th century.

Rublack adds particularly to our knowledge by examining the crimes of poor women against their social background. As patriarchal values were strengthened in the 17th century, all areas of a specifically female work culture became suspect. This was not simply a matter of the growing power of the territorial state; on the contrary, the state was too weak to enforce its laws in a uniform manner, and depended heavily on popular consent.

Women were not mere passive victims of this wave of repression. On the contrary, they resisted it in a variety of ways, demonstrating their "alertness, unruliness and participation in early modern culture". The fate that awaited those who fell foul of the law by such conduct was a grim one. Trial by torture still faced the accused, and in a particularly illuminating section, Rublack details the "semiology of feeling" in which a woman's guilt or innocence was read by the examining judge from her non-verbal behaviour under questioning. Tears and glances could mean the difference between life and death.

This does not, as Rublack supposes, undermine Foucault's contention that early modern punishment was directed against the body rather than the mind, since it was an aspect of the trial that preceded punishment. Decapitation, sometimes preceded by the pinching-out of parts of the body with red-hot tongs, awaited those found guilty of crimes such as adultery or infanticide. After execution, the corpse was further shamed by public display, and Rublack records an incident in 1682 when the head of a woman fell off its stake after nine years, to be carried off by a local man for sale to a pharmacist.

Such incidents reveal the wonderful richness of Rublack's account, which demonstrates the power of a gender-based approach for rethinking many areas of early modern social history, from the nature of social relations in the village to the dynamics of economic growth and stagnation in the age of incipient proto-industrialisation.

Richard J. Evans is professor of modern history, University of Cambridge.