Crime and Culture in Early Modern Germany by Joy Wiltenburg (review)

In Crime and Culture in Early Modern Germany, Wiltenburg explores the representation of crime in early modern Germany, seeking to understand how the meaning of crime changed as it was depicted in print and imagined by readers. According to Wiltenburg, the early years of print history show a growing concern with criminal activity, fostered by fundamental changes in early modern society. Along the way, she demonstrates that crime stories, a prominent genre in early modern print culture, are a “reflection of the distinctive values, fears, and experience of its time and place” (2). For Wiltenburg, the “distinctive dynamics of crime discourse reveal interplays among fact, fiction, public power, familial tensions, emotional resonance, and personal identity,” dimensions of early modern culture that she examines in her perceptive analysis of printed texts (9).

Wiltenburg’s source base is a sample of more than 200 printed crime accounts, which she buttresses with a variety of complementary sources—legal texts, archival records, and fictional crime stories. Her source material presents several potential problems, including the limited literacy of the era, the notorious difficulty of gauging reception and impact, and the role of early modern authorities in shaping these crime accounts. In her analysis, Wiltenburg ably confronts these thorny issues, and her thoughtful approach to her sources serves to mitigate their limitations.

In her first chapter, Wiltenburg outlines the parameters of her sources, explaining what sorts of crimes, criminals, and victims that they highlighted. Murder featured most prominently in printed crime accounts, which, by the sixteenth century, had begun to focus on the threat posed by vagrant outsiders and desperate family members. It reflected growing concerns about the landless poor and the imperiled family in an age of want.

The second chapter concerns the relationship between official legal documents and popular crime accounts. Wiltenburg argues that both of these genres sought to create a “unified public response” to crime, the former through reason and the latter through sensation (64).

In Chapter 3, Wiltenburg evaluates how her printed crime accounts—constructed texts—compare with the reality of early modern crime, analyzing how authors used early forms of sensationalism to shape public attitudes. The next chapter covers the relationship between crime and Christianity in early modern crime accounts; authors encouraged readers to view these stories as “living sermons” (102). In a particularly riveting chapter entitled “Family Murders,” Wiltenburg shows how the pressures on families engendered by the depredations of the Little Ice Age and the moral rigors of the Reformation fueled concerns about violence within the household.

Chapter Six examines the role of sensationalism in the texts—how authors of crime pamphlets deployed “techniques of depiction that heightened the demand for audience imagination, identification, and feeling” in response to the bloody deeds that they related (147). In Chapter 7, Wiltenburg examines changes in crime literature during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, after the genre had peaked in popularity. In her conclusion, she argues for the larger significance of her topic: “By connecting the personal (violation of bodily boundaries and core values, probing of guilt, death and the soul) with the political (enforcement of order and legitimation of power) … [crime narratives] speak to central matters of social existence” (192).

Wiltenburg’s book is a valuable contribution to the scholarship on print culture and crime during the early modern period. With its focus on the interplay between reality and representation, text and reception, and authorship and audience, it should interest a wide variety of scholars from history, literature, and media studies.