Death and a Maiden: Infanticide and the Tragical History of Grethe Schmidt by William David Myers (review)

Who does not like a murder mystery, especially an intricate one with unusual plot twists? The history of Margarethe Schmidt possesses all the elements of a good story: a fourteen-year-old girl accused of murder, dedicated criminal investigators, an unyielding prosecution, a community seeking justice, a slew of quirky and possibly hostile witnesses, a worried family, and a good defense lawyer. What it is missing is the body of the victim: a newborn infant. But the real twist in the story is the uncertainty of some witnesses—and the author—that any crime had occurred in the first place. At least according to the midwives, the accused, Grethe, could never have been pregnant in the first place. This ambiguity provides William David Myers with an opportunity to dig deeply into the social life, class structures, medical knowledge, and legal systems of Braunschweig.

Grethe’s experiences were not uncommon, as Myers explains. Perhaps for this reason, rumors about her came to the attention of Braunschweig authorities, although how is never entirely clear; moreover, they were accepted as true. But it was less typical that no body could be produced and that her family not only declared her innocence but also demanded her right to a defense, especially before they applied torture. This request did not stop the city from questioning Grethe or attempting to find the body—even when evidence pointed to the possibility that she may never have been pregnant. Myers provides only brief commentary to the details he drew from the archives, allowing the reader to follow the twists and turns of the investigation as it progressed. The case specific chapters are interspersed with analytical chapters focusing on thematic analysis of some of the major issues that emerge in the case, from a discussion of the seventeenth-century medical understanding of pregnancy to a discussion of the use of torture.

The book considers two broad subjects, roughly embodied by the trials of the main actors: Grethe Schmidt and Justus Oldekop, her defense advocate. The first theme focuses on the subject of early modern infanticide, since this ultimately is the crime leveled against Grethe. As Myers points out in his introduction, infanticide was the most common capital crime for women during the early modern period. Myers begins by exploring the extensive case files collected while questioning witnesses; interrogating Grethe and her family; soliciting opinions from legal faculties at the universities of Helmstedt, Jena, and Rinteln; and filing appeals on her behalf. The author systematically pulls the investigation apart to highlight exactly what factors led Grethe, the teenaged daughter of an oxherd from the small farming village of Gross Schwülper, to be accused of murder in 1661 while serving as a maid in Braunschweig. He carefully reconstructs the circumstances in which the young girl first entered into domestic service, was seduced or raped by her widowed employer’s son, and was released from that position as well as a second one. In doing so, Myers is able to explore the ideas of recent scholars about the early modern understanding of pregnancy, domestic service, and a variety of related concerns.

The second topic is the early modern legal system itself. Myers concentrates on the conduct of the investigation, the way evidence is collected to confirm an accusation, and how, in the absence of a corpus delicti or certain evidence, legal authorities are consulted at nearby universities, leading to the questioning of the accused under threat, and with the use, of torture. His greater interest is in the conflict between the early modern legal system on the one hand, in which judicial torture, the queen of proofs, is used to extract a confession from an accused subject, and a newly emerging legal philosophy on the other, which introduces questions about this use of torture and argues for the rights of an accused to a defense lawyer...