Kathy Stuart Book order

The book explores the phenomenon of suicide by proxy that emerged after 1650, where individuals committed capital crimes to achieve a repentant death and avoid direct suicide's stigma. Kathy Stuart examines how this practice arose from aggressive social disciplining by confessional states, revealing the limits of early modern governmental power as they struggled to suppress it. The text includes case studies from Lutheran Hamburg and Catholic Vienna, highlighting the diverse motivations behind these acts, often involving the murder of innocent children.

This book presents a social and cultural history of 'dishonourable people' (unehrliche Leute), an outcast group in early modern Germany. Executioners, skinners, grave-diggers, shepherds, barber-surgeons, millers, linen-weavers, sow-gelders, latrine-cleaners, and bailiffs were among the 'dishonourable' by virtue of their trades. It shows the extent to which dishonour determined the life-chances and self-identity of dishonourable people. Taking Augsburg as a prime example, it investigates how honourable estates interacted with dishonourable people, and shows how the pollution anxieties of early modern Germans structured social and political relations within honourable society.