Who Are You? Identification, Deception, and Surveillance in Early Modern Europe (review)

The rapid proliferation of new technologies for tracking and controlling the movements of individual bodies, such as biometrics, "smart cards," and RFID chips, is a topic of intense scholarly interest these days. To the extent that this body of work refers to history, Groebner correctly notes, it is primarily a history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that locates the French Revolution as the "vanishing point" in the development of the modern bureaucratic identification of individuals (228).

Groebner pushes this history backward in a comprehensive examination of Europe's identification practices during the high and late Middle Ages and early modern period. Groebner's focus is not on "identity," in any of the myriad meanings of that word in scholarly discourse today, but rather on identification—the material practices of knowing who people are. The result is a fascinating, erudite, and wide-ranging work that draws on a wealth of primary-source material from Europe in general (but primarily from Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and France).

Rather than chronologically, the book is organized around technologies—portraits and wanted posters, insignias and seals, names, tattoos and other skin marks, identity documents, and so on. In a sense, the modern passport—the photograph, the seals and insignia of the state, the security paper and watermarks, the meager physical description—is assembled throughout the course of the book.

Groebner seeks to correct accounts of premodern identification practices that draw on stereotypes of premodern society as static. Instead, Groebner argues that identification was both necessary and actively practiced in early modern Europe. Groebner also emphasizes what might be called the "positive" origins of identification practices. Identification technologies emerged as much from the desires of individuals to authenticate their identities—whether as emissaries of a prince, as citizens of a state, or even, surprisingly as beggars (51)—as from the desires of states to exercise surveillance over individuals. Thus, identification has always furnished both "access and exclusion," both "registration" and "negation" (250). This point has contemporary relevance in a world in which individuals have something to fear both from state surveillance and from a lack of state-sanctioned identification artifacts.

Who Are You? is more descriptive than explanatory. It provides a good deal of information about the sequence of developments in identification technology but little about why particular material practices developed when they did. Groebner makes a persuasive case against the conventional attribution of all surveillance practices to individualism and the modern state. But why, given his point, do identification practices develop when they do? Why, for example, did scars become "the legal paradigm of identification" at the end of the Middle Ages (112)?

Groebner decries the supposed tendency of historians to read the appearance of administrative identification measures as "evidence of their own effectiveness" (167), rather than as evidence of the failure of identification. However, he appears to commit a similar fallacy when he correlates "the rise of the con man and the imposter" with the development of identification papers in the seventeenth century, when the correlation is probably with the detection of imposters, not their appearance (219).

The combined efforts of Groebner and the translators have yielded an extremely readable story about a fascinating assortment of identification artifacts. Who Are You? is a beautiful, lavishly illustrated (by current standards) artifact in its own right.