Defiled Trades and Social Outcasts: Honor and Ritual Pollution in Early Modern Germany (review)

This is a splendid book, carefully honed over several years, beautifully written, and a delight to read. It is accessible to undergraduate students, while making a major contribution to our understanding of the dynamics of early modern German society. Stuart entertains both comparative and ethnographic questions throughout her study—a fine example of history writing with an ethnographer’s eye. She takes up each alternative explanation of her material or objection to her interpretation in turn, disposing of them deftly and convincingly. There is no undigested or heavy-handed theory here, yet the book is informed by a wide reading in the literature, from Bourdieu to Bakhtin.

Defiled Trades is about surprisingly wide-ranging and deeply-rooted ideas and practices concerning dishonorability and about its social and political foundations and cultural meanings. Dishonor and pollution had everything to do with artisan and craft status and the careful policing of the boundaries of social groups in a corporate society of orders. The book is based on a careful reading of a large amount of material from the city archives in Augsburg dealing with the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Stuart convincingly argues that pollution from contact with dishonorable trades cannot be understood in terms of moral or ethical issues. Nor did dishonor have anything to do with cosmological ideas or religion, but persistently kept its profane character throughout the period. The dynamic of honor/pollution was strictly urban, and the larger the city, the stricter the code. Urban groups constantly in contact with their fellows in other cities mutually supported each other’s practices. Dishonor “shored up the underpinnings of corporate ideology” and thus was socially and politically stabilizing, yet, paradoxically, it demonstrated the weakness of patrician rule, undermining the political hierarchy in significant ways. Dishonor was almost totally derived from activities surrounding execution and the physical punishment of criminals. Theoretical ideas based on taboo or deep-seated psychological structures turn out to have little explanatory power to understand the phenomena.

The book carefully develops the history of the development of the practice of dishonor, the place of executioners in late medieval German society, and the role skinners played in assisting with executions. Stuart locates her study in early modern Augsburg, which stands out for its incredible archival sources and the fact that it was among the largest cities in the Empire. She also introduces some of the dynamics of the practices with wonderful examples, for which she gives characteristically close and brilliant readings. Ambivalence rather than hard and fast rules characterized the way guildsmen in Augsburg acted, and there was little uniformity in the way executioners and skinners were handled from city to city. Religious exercises could not affect the social stain of dishonor.

Stuart looks closely at skinners and executioners: caste formation, family dynamics, and wealth. She also explores the occupational limits of dishonor, looking at why shepherds and bailiffs and others were sometimes included and sometimes not. She shows that there was little consistency in practices, although there were ever more extensive systems of exclusions over the period. She demonstrates convincingly that pollution derived almost exclusively from activities surrounding executions. Coming into contact with the gallows or instuments of torture or the grip of the executioner could be polluting and lead to social exclusion. There was no moral dimension here: the executioner’s touch was contagious and occurred ex opera operato. Intention was irrelevent. By the seventeenth century, artisans subject to torture, even when proven innocent, were excluded from their guilds. Playing around on the gallows or taking tea with the executioner’s wife could make a person unerasably dishonorable. Paradoxically, the executioner had an important role in the curing of disease. While his “official” touch could be polluting, his medical touch had nothing dishonoring about it. Indeed, executioners frequently became rich from their medical practices. They also provided important raw materials, such as human fat, for regular pharmacies and doctors.

Stuart develops...