+Outcastes

Defiled Trades and Social Outcasts

This book presents a social and cultural history of ‘‘dishonorable 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 ‘‘dishonorable’’ by virtue of their trades.+++(4)+++ This dishonor was either inherited, often through several generations, or it arose from ritual pollution whereby honorable citizens could become dishonorable by coming into casual contact with members of the outcast group. +++(5)+++

The dishonorable milieu of the city of Augsburg from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century is reconstructed, to show the extent to which dishonor determined the life-chances and self-identity of dishonorable people. The book then approaches the study of honor from the outside in, by investigating how honorable estates interacted with dishonorable people, and how the pollution anxieties of early modern Germans structured social and political relations within honorable society.

Kathy Stuart is Assistant Professor of History, University of California, Davis.

विस्तारः (द्रष्टुं नोद्यम्)

The idea of an ‘‘early modern’’ period of European history from the fifteenth to the late eighteenth century is now widely accepted among historians. The purpose of Cambridge Studies in Early Modern History is to publish monographs and studies which illuminate the character of the period as a whole, and in particular focus attention on a dominant theme within it, the interplay of continuity and change as they are presented by the continuity of medieval ideas, political and social organization, and by the impact of new ideas, new methods, and new demands on the traditional structure.

For a list of titles published in the series, please see end of the book