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

Historians of early modern German society have long recognized that the artisanal notion of "dishonorable trades" shaped social interaction. But that realization has rarely been manifested in the now-burgeoning literature on urban and rural culture and society of the era. Stuart's deeply researched and imaginatively argued study thus provides an important new perspective on this terrain. The book is all the more important because it is based on the rich archives of the city of Augsburg, which have also supported other intriguing studies of early modern urban society, both in English and German. Stuart's findings may be incorporated into a sophisticated literature on gender roles, notions of charity, confessional identity, and urban economic change at the microhistorical level.

Stuart easily dispels certain reflexive assumptions about ritual pollution and dishonor. First, she decouples the discussion of dishonor from socioeconomic status. Many artisans who were perceived as dishonorable were also at the margins of the society in other respects, but others were more well-to-do than honorable artisans in the city. Dishonorable status precluded particular forms of social interaction, but it also created a separate space for dishonorable people to develop their own strategies of interaction. The wealthiest of the dishonorable trades, such as executioner, depended on social endogamy to preserve their monopoly of a lucrative business.

Stuart also uncovers a paradox about the relationship between dishonor and secular authority. She claims that "the history of dishonor is closely related to the history of sovereignty and lordship" (3), but she demonstrates clearly that state authority did not attempt to enforce social norms by promoting the idea of dishonor in the populace. Ritual pollution appears to have been primarily the product of artisanal thinking, projected into the sovereign realm only when its claims created disorder. Indeed, it was generated mainly in response to the seamier side of the enforcement of social order. The two professions implicated most deeply in perceptions of dishonor were executioner and skinner. The source of their dishonor came from the punishments that they inflicted on criminals. One of Stuart's most telling anecdotes involves the dishonor of the latrine-cleaners of Augsburg. The source of their dishonor was not their contact with feces, but the fact that they used the same wagon to transport feces as executioners used to transport condemned criminals.

As the case mentioned above demonstrates, ritual pollution did not merely inhere in the trades; it could spread through contact, much like a disease. Stuart attends to the complexities of a notion that was attached both to people and things. The dishonor of executioners stemmed from their complicity in judicial torture. Honorable people could have dishonor attached to them by coming into contact with either the executioners or their instruments. Although sovereign authority could temporarily cleanse the instruments of the dishonor (as when a new gallows had to be built), it could never cleanse the wielders of the instruments. Only in specific circumstances, such as medical treatment, did the dishonor of executioners not extend to the person touched.

Stuart addresses all of these issues with careful consideration of the actual experiences of individuals, rather than the normative literature of the period. The case of the marriage of the "honorable" fisherman Andreas Anhauser to the "dishonorable" Barbara Leichnam, in particular, runs like a leitmotif through the book, illustrating the twists and ambiguities that the notion of dishonor created. Like many other investigations of the contested terrain of social identities, this book relies primarily on court cases that uncover ideas that otherwise remained implicit in social interaction. Those cases demonstrate the ideas of honor and dishonor that could polarize people as well as the gray area in which claims of honor and dishonor blended together.

The larger issues raised by this book, the relation of artisanal self-perception and regulation to secular authority and cultural subgroups, have wide application in European society and elsewhere. But the...