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Public Appearance and Criminal Judicial Practices in Early Modern Germany

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Extract

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.

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Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1996 

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