Crime, Gender and Social Control in Early Modern Frankfurt am Main

Front matter

CRIME, GENDER AND SOCIAL CONTROL INEARLY MODERN

FRANKFURT AM MAIN

DAN

Contents

Acknowledgements IX

List of Illustrations XI

Introduction ı

Introduction

In 2015 the Spiegel Online—one of the most widely read German-language news websites—published a satirical article under the headline: ‘Stimulating women’s crime’! According to the article, discrimination against women was nowhere more visible than in the national criminal statistics, where women were consistently underrepresented as offenders. The article also proposed the solution to this problem: a new course developed to stimulate and support women to become less law-abiding. In each of the three levels of the course (from beginners to advanced), the female participants were taught to break down the barriers preventing them from committing offences in a similar fashion and at a similar rate as men. The issues that were addressed were passivity, cowardliness, low self-esteem, lack of aggression compassion for others and law-abidingness.

For a long time it was considered that the criminality of women is a marginal phenomenon and that this was invariable over time and place.” In 2015, the year of publication of the article in the Spiegel Online, women represented 24.8 percent of all suspects in Germany, and thus were clearly underrepresented considering their share of the total population.’ The sex differences among prosecuted offenders has fascinated criminologists and historians alike, who have sought various causes to explain the different nature of male and female offending. Underrepresentation was seen as the epitome of women’s criminality, and it was this underrepresentation that had to be explained. Many scholars (especially criminologists) looked for universal explanations. Some echoed the stereotypical portrayal of the female nature that was also displayed in the Spiegel Online article. Others considered biological factors or different attitudes

1 ‘Frauenkriminalitat fördern, Spiegel Online, 1 March 2015, (accessed 03-07-2017), https:// www.spiegel.de/spam/satire-bei-spiegel-online-frauenkriminalitaet-foerdern-a-1022763. html.

2 Michael R. Gottfredson and Travis Hirschi, A General Theory of Crime (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 145; Frances Heidensohn and Marisa Silvestri, ‘Gender and Crime’, 2012, 344.

© JEANNETTE KAMP, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004388444_002 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the cc By-NC 4.0 license.

towards women by law enforcement, judges, or the community as possible explanations for a consistent underrepresentation of female offenders.*

In 1991 historian Robert Jütte published the first German-language article providing an overview of available data about gender differences in recorded crime in late medieval and early modern Europe. Although Jütte pointed out local variations in the relative number of women prosecuted, he stressed that there was a historical continuity of female underrepresentation in the area of criminal justice. Since then, however, historians have moved away from a perspective of viewing female criminality in terms of continuity, and have rather adopted the perspective of change. In reaction to Jiitte’s article, renowned German crime historian Gerd Schwerhoff argued that considering the evidence presented in the study, with the share of women out of the total number of offenders varying between 10 percent and 40 percent, female ‘underrepresentation’ seems to be a very crude common denominator.®

The publication of an article by Malcom Feeley and Deborah Little in 1994, discussing historical trends in female crime, prompted a lively academic debate around the causes for variation in sex differences in recorded offences across time. Based on observations for London (later expanded with other European evidence, in particular for the Netherlands), they found that women played a much more prominent role in recorded crime in the early modern period than in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Feeley and Little dubbed this observation ‘The Vanishing Female’, which they believed resulted from changing gender roles, and the withdrawal of women from the public sphere in the course of the nineteenth century.’ The debate that followed focused primarily on the question of how, where, when, and why long-term changes in recorded female criminality occurred.®

4 Gerd Schwerhoff, Aktenkundig und Gerichtsnotorisch: Einführung in der Historische Kriminalitätsforschung (Tübingen: Diskord, 1999), 149-67.

5 Robert Jütte, ‘Geschlechtsspezifische Kriminalität im Späten Mittelalter und in der Frühen Neuzeit), Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte: Germanistische Abteilung 108, no. ı (1991): 93.

Schwerhoff, Aktenkundig und Gerichtsnotorisch, 152.

Malcolm M. Feeley and Deborah L. Little, ‘The Vanishing Female: The Decline of Women in the Criminal Process, 1687-1912), Law & Society Review 25, no. 4 (1991): 719-57; Malcolm M. Feeley, ‘The Decline of Women in the Criminal Process: A Comparative History’, Criminal Justice History 15 (1994): 235-74-

8 Peter King, Crime and Law in England, 1750-1840: Remaking Justice from the Margins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 196-223; Shani. D’Cruze and Louise A. Jackson, Women, Crime and Justice in England since 1660 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 16-19; Barry S. Godfrey and Paul Lawrence, Crime and Justice: 1750-1950 (Cullompton: Willan, 2005), 130-34; Greg T. Smith, ‘Long-Term Trends in Female and Male Involvement

The academic debate about ‘The Vanishing Female’ has yielded important insights into the nature of women’s offending and changes over time. However, the discussions have tended to oversimplify the early modern period as a time of high female involvement in crime, and paid little attention to regional differences within the period itself. While cities like Amsterdam and London indeed showed high levels of female offending (with percentages up to 50 percent), data for German cities displayed much lower figures. In sixteenth-century Cologne, women accounted for 16 percent of registered offenders, and in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Frankfurt this was around 22 percent.? In order to properly understand what factors contributed to gender differences among recorded offences in the period, it is therefore necessary to study not only regions with high figures, but also those with lower rates.

Most recently Manon van der Heijden and Marion Pluskota stated that we still know very little about ‘the structural impact of the local and regional contexts of female crime’! They argue that thorough analysis is needed in order to understand whether or not one can really speak of ‘a general pattern of women’s crime in the early modern period’! More input is needed in order to understand variations in early modern female offending, as well as to gain a better understanding of different factors that shaped the representation of women in recorded crime. This book aims to do exactly that. It investigates the development of female crime in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Frankfurt and places it in the context of other studies on early modern female crime in Europe. It examines why women were underrepresented in recorded crime in early modern Frankfurt, and how this pattern was shaped by the distinct interplay of local factors, most notably social and legal norms, patterns in Crime) in The Oxford Handbook of Gender, Sex, and Crime, ed. Rosemary Gartner and Bill McCarthy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 139-57; Manon Van der Heijden and Valentijn Koningsberger, ‘Continuity or Change? Female Crime in the ıgth-Century Netherlands’, Crime, History & Societies 17, no. 1 (2013): 101-28; Manon Van der Heijden, ‘Women and Crime, 1750-2000) in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Crime and Criminal Justice, ed. Paul Knepper and Anja Johansen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 250-67; G. Geltner, No-Womans Land? On Female Crime and Incarceration, Past, Present, and Future’, Justice Policy Journal 7, no. 2 (2010); Paul Knepper, Writing the History of Crime (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 173-201.

9 Gerd Schwerhoff, ‘Geschlechtsspezifische Kriminalität im frühneuzeitlichen Köln), in Von Huren und Rabenmüttern: weibliche Kriminalität in der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Otto Ulbricht (Köln: Böhlau, 1995), 91; Jeannette Kamp, Female Crime and Household Control in Early Modern Frankfurt Am Main’, The History of the Family 21, no. 4 (2016): 536-37.

10 Manon Van der Heijden and Marion Pluskota, ‘Introduction to Crime and Gender in History’, Journal of Social History 51, no. 4 (2018): 665.

11 Ibid.

of deviance and mechanisms of social control. It will argue that regional variations can be explained by different regimes of social control, which in their interplay with other factors shaped patterns of crime, gender and prosecution. The following section engages with the historiography on crime and gender in the early modern period. It will focus on the various factors that scholars have put forward to explain the level of women’s participation in crime and will explain why more local case studies are needed for a better understanding of these factors, and why the case study of Frankfurt is particularly important. I will then explain why social control mechanisms are a crucial factor in the study of gender differences in crime.

1 Forgotten Women: Putting Gender in Histories of Crime

Under the influence of the ‘new social history’ and the ‘history from below’ in the 1970s and 1980s, the study of crime developed as an important subdiscipline of social history.!? Most scholars paid little or no attention to crime patterns of women in the early days of the discipline. Notable exceptions were the study by Barbara Hanawalt on the female felon in fourteenth-century England, John Beattie’s analysis of female offending in eighteenth-century Surrey, and the work of French historians Nicole Castan and Arlette Farge.'* Part of the reason why women were paid little attention by historians of crime was the focus on quantitative methods, long-term trends, and serious offences. As women tended to form a minority of offenders prosecuted for crimes ı2 Barry S. Godfrey, Paul. Lawrence, and Chris A. Williams, History & Crime (Los Angeles, CA: Sage, 2008), 16-21; Paul Lawrence, ‘The Historiography of Crime and Criminal Justice’, in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Crime and Criminal Justice, ed. Paul Knepper and Anja Johansen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 17-37.

13 For a recent overview of the historiography on female crime, see: Ariadne Schmidt and Marion Pluskota, ‘Gevaarlijke vrouwen, gewelddadige mannen? Een review van het historisch onderzoek naar criminaliteit en gender in Europese steden, 1600-1900’, Stadsgeschiedenis 8, no. 1 (2013): 60-77; For German speaking territories see: Gerd Schwerhoff, Historische Kriminalitätsforschung (Frankfurt: Campus, 2011), Zusatztext 1. Zur Sozialgeschichte der Kriminalität. Geschlecht—Alter—sozialer Status’.

14 Barbara A. Hanawalt, ‘The Female Felon in Fourteenth-Century England’, Viator 5 (1974): 253-68; John M. Beattie, ‘The Criminality of Women in Eighteenth-Century England’, Journal of Social History 8, no. 4 (1975): 80-116; Nicole. Castan, Les criminels de Languedoc: les exigences dordre et les voies du ressentiment dans une société prerévolutionnaire (1750-1790) (Toulouse, 1980), 24-36; Arlette Farge, Délinquance et criminalité: le vol d'aliments a Paris au 1 8. siècle (Paris: Plon, 1974).

as murder and manslaughter, gender was not considered a factor of importance.!? Whenever women were considered, this was usually in their role as victims, both of male perpetrators and of a discriminatory patriarchal criminal justice system, or as perpetrators of typically ‘female’ offences such as witchcraft, prostitution and infanticide. The statistical absence of women was seen as an indicator for their weak and passive nature, and the limited extent of their public lives. Women were usually not considered as agents on their own account—their criminal activities considered to be limited to that of acting as accomplices for male offenders.!®

This attitude began to change by the early gos, as the dominant focus on the use of criminal statistics to study early modern criminality received considerable criticism, particularly from historians studying the aspect of gender. In their introduction to the first edited volume on female criminality in the early modern period, Garthine Walker and Jenny Kermode stated that as a result of the emphasis on quantification women had been ‘duly counted and then discounted’!” Rather than facilitating our understanding of the nature

15 Ted Robert Gurr, ‘Historical Trends in Violent Crime: A Critical Review of the Evidence’, Crime and Justice 3 (1981): 295-353; Pieter Spierenburg, ‘Long-Term Trends in Homicide: Theoretical Reflections and Dutch Evidence, Fifteenth to Twentieth Centuries’, in Civilization of Crime: Violence in Town and Country since the Middle Ages, ed. Eric A Johnson and Eric H Monkkonen (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 63- 105; Manuel Eisner, ‘Modernization, Self-Control and Lethal Violence: The Long-Term Dynamics of European Homicide Rates in Theoretical Perspective, British Journal of Criminology 41, no. 4 (2001): 618-38; For a discussion on the interpretation of long-term trends in violent offences: Pieter Spierenburg, ‘Violence and the Civilizing Process: Does It Work?, Crime, History & Societies 5, no. 2 (2001): 87-105; Gerd Schwerhoff, ‘Criminalized Violence and the Process of Civilisation—a Reappraisal’, Crime, History & Societies 6, no. 2 (2002): 103-26; Pieter Spierenburg, ‘Theorizing in Jurassic Park: A Reply to Gerd Schwerhoff’, Crime, History & Societies 6, no. 2 (2002): 127-28; More recently, historians have incorporated a gender aspect in the study of violence by focusing on the importance of honour and masculinity: Pieter Spierenburg, Men and Violence: Gender, Honor, and Rituals in Modern Europe and America (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1998); Joachim Eibach, ‘Violence and Masculinity’, in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Crime and Criminal Justice, ed. Paul Knepper and Anja Johansen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 229-49; Gerd Schwerhoff, ‘Early Modern Violence and the Honour Code: From Social Integration to Social Distinction?’, Crime, History & Societies 17, no. 2 (2013): 27-46.

16 Otto Ulbricht, ‘Einleitung: Für eine Geschichte der weiblichen Kriminalität in der Frühen Neuzeit oder: Geschlechtergeschichte, historische Kriminalitätsforschung und weibliche Kriminalität, in Von Huren und Rabenmüttern: weibliche Kriminalität in der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Otto Ulbricht (Köln: Böhlau, 1995), 1-35.

17 Garthine Walker and Jenny Kermode, ‘Introduction’, in Women, Crime and Courts in Early Modern England, ed. Jenny Kermode and Garthine Walker (London: UCL Press, 1994), 4.

of women’s offending, Walker and Kermode argued, the prevalent (statistical) methodologies were having a hampering effect. Critical voices were also raised among the early advocates for studying crime and gender among German-speaking scholars.!® After a self-proclaimed slow start in the history of crime in the early gos, German crime historians almost immediately incorporated the aspect of gender.! Susanne Burghartz argued that gender should always be an important factor in the study of crime, regardless of women’s statistical weight among prosecuted offenders. She stated that even if criminal statistics demonstrated a relatively constant underrepresentation of women over time, this does not necessarily imply a universal explanation, given that they resulted from different historical societal contexts and attitudes towards deviance.°

The shift towards a more inclusive approach towards female offending put into perspective what should be studied and considered as female crimes in the first place. For a long time, the label ‘female crime’ seemed to refer only to offences in which women constituted the majority of offenders, such as witchcraft, infanticide, scolding and prostitution.?! However, careful examinations of the actual crime patterns of women in several late medieval and early modern cities revealed that the majority were not prosecuted for so-called ‘female crimes’, but rather for more mundane offences such as theft. In many ways, women’s criminality was similar to that of men, or at least more similar than

18 Andrea Griesebner and Monika Mommertz, ‘Fragile Liebschaften? Methodologische Anmerkungen zum Verhältnis zwischen historischer Kriminalitätsforschung und Geschlechtergeschichte, in Kriminalitätsgeschichte: Beiträge zur Sozial- und Kulturgeschichte der Vormoderne, ed. Andreas Blauert and Gerd Schwerhoff (Konstanz: UVK Universitätsverlag Konstanz, 2000), 205-32.

19 Gerd Schwerhoff, ‘Kriminalitätsgeschichte im deutschen Sprachraum: Zum Profil eines “verspäteten” Forschungszweiges’, in Kriminalitätsgeschichte: Beiträge zur Sozialund Kulturgeschichte der Vormoderne, ed. Andreas Blauert and Gerd Schwerhoff (Konstanz: UVK Universitätsverlag Konstanz, 2000), 21-67; Claudia Ulbrich, “Kriminalität” und “Weiblichkeit” in der Frühen Neuzeit: Kritische bemerkungen zum Forschungsstand’, Kriminologisches Journal 27, no. 5 (1995): 208-20; Susanna Burghartz, ““Geschlecht” und “Kriminalitat’—ein “fruchtbares” Verhältnis?, in Weiblich—männlich : Geschlechterverhältnisse in der Schweiz: Rechtsprechung, Diskurs, Praktiken, ed. Rudolf. Jaun and Brigitte. Studer (Zürich: Chronos, 1995), 23-31; Otto Ulbricht, ed., Von Huren und Rabenmüttern: weibliche Kriminalität in der frühen Neuzeit (Köln: Böhlau, 1995); Ulinka Rublack, The Crimes of Women in Early Modern Germany (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999).

20 Burghartz, ‘Geschlecht und Kriminalität), 25-26.

21 Walker and Kermode, “Introduction, 5; Ulbricht, ‘Einleitung, 6; Lyndan Warner, ‘Women Before the Law’, in The Ashgate Research Companion to Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, ed. Allyson M. Poska, Jane Couchman, and Katherine A. McIver (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 247.

was previously acknowledged.?? Moreover, historians were able to show that the criminal sources of the highest courts that were traditionally used, and on which many ofthe quantifications were based, reflected only alimited part of the criminal justice system. Evidence from across Europe established that lower courts usually showed much higher levels of female involvement.??

These new insights put older explanatory models under pressure. It is no longer sufficient to explain early modern female crime patterns and gender differences in recorded offences simply as a result of patriarchal power relationships.?* First, it leaves little room to study the agency of female offenders, and continues to portray women’s delinquency as a deviation from the norm (i.e. male delinquency). More and more, historians turned their focus on women as active historical agents within the realm of criminal justice and focused on women as users of justice rather than passive players or victims of their subordinate position in early modern society. They demonstrated how women instrumentally employed expected gender norms in court as a defence strategy.?? Scholars working on early modern moral courts, for example, established that women actively made use of these institutions to discipline their husbands for misconduct. Patriarchy functioned as a ‘double-edged’ sword which bound men just as women to expected gender norms.” Ulinka Rublack’s study on female

22 Garthine Walker, Crime, Gender, and Social Order in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 412; Trevor Dean, ‘Theft and Gender in Late Medieval Bologna’, Gender & History 20, no. 2 (2008): 412.

23 Karen Jones, Gender and Petty Crime in Late Medieval England: The Local Courts in Kent: 1460-1560 (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2006); King, Crime and Law, 219; Manon Van der Heijden, ‘Women,Violence and Urban Justice in Holland c. 1600-1838), Crime, History & Societies 17, no. 2 (2013): 83-85.

24 Schwerhoff, Aktenkundig und Gerichtsnotorisch, 151.

25 Joachim Eibach, ‘Böse Weiber und grobe Kerle: Delinquenz, Geschlecht und soziokulturelle Räume in der frühneuzeitlichen Stadt, in Kriminalitätsgeschichte: Beitr äge zur Sozial- und Kulurgeschichte der Vormoderne, ed. Andreas Blauert and Gerd Schwerhoff (Konstanz: UvK Universitätsverlag Konstanz, 2000), 672; Schwerhoff, ‘Geschlechtsspezifische Kriminalität, 105-7; Laura Gowing, ‘Language, Power and the Law: Women’s Slander Litigation in Early Modern London’, in Women, Crime and Courts in Early Modern England, ed. Jenny Kermode and Garthine Walker (London: UCL Press, 1994), 26-47; Jennine Hurl-Eamon, Gender and Petty Violence in London, 1680- 1720 (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2005); Julie Hardwick, The Practice of Patriarchy: Gender and the Politics of Household Authority in Early Modern France (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998).

26 Heinrich Richard Schmidt, ‘Hausvater vor Gericht: Der Patriarchalismus als zweischneidiges Schwert, in Hausväter, Priester, Kastraten: zur Konstruktion von Männlichkeit in Spätmittelalter und Früher Neuzeit, ed. Martin Dinges (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998), 213-36; Joachim Eibach, ‘Der Kampf um die Hosen und die Justiz: Ehekonflikte in Frankfurt im 18. Jahrhundert), in Kriminalität in Mittelalter und crime in seventeenth-century Germany highlighted the experiences of ordinary women and showed how they actively and consciously shaped the way conflicts were handled, for example through the use of gossip.?7 Second, explaining women’s offending only a result of patriarchal power relations neglects the impact of both the local context and changes over time. Gender ideologies, legal norms, demographic and economic realities all shaped the everyday lives of men and women, and were highly determined by the local context.

2 Crime and Social Control

Thus, by now historians generally agree that criminal statistics are not only a reflection of actual behaviour, but the result of societal and institutional selection processes that determine what actually ends up in criminal courts. That is not to say that quantitative data holds no value for the study of gender and crime, but that they should offer a starting point of analysis, instead of the answer.28 According to Arnot and Usborne, this means that ‘the deconstruction and critical interrogation of the ‘terms of the judicial record’ is a crucial part of understanding the historical relationship between gender norms and institutional processes. Joachim Eibach called this an ‘enlightened’ approach to (constructed) criminal statistics—one where historians do not simply see statistics as facts, but analyse the social, cultural and institutional selection processes behind the statistics.3°

Früher Neuzeit: soziale, rechtliche, philosophische und literarische Aspekte, ed. Sylvia Kesper-Biermann and Diethelm Klippel (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2007), 167- 88; Ulrike. Gleixner, Das Mensch’ und ‘der Kerl’: die Konstruktion von Geschlecht in Unzuchtsverfahren der Frühen Neuzeit (1700-1760) (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1994); Susanna Burghartz, Zeiten der Reinheit, Orte der Unzucht: Ehe und Sexualität in Basel während der frühen Neuzeit (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1999).

28 _ Schwerhoff, Aktenkundig und Gerichtsnotorisch, 153-54.

29 Margaret L. Arnot and Cornelie Usborne, ‘Why Gender and Crime? Aspects of an International Debate’, in Gender and Crime in Modern Europe, ed. Margaret L. Arnot and Cornelie Usborne (London: Routledge, 1999), 3; Also: Heide Wunder, ‘““Weibliche Kriminalität” in der Frühen Neuzeit: Überlegungen aus der Sicht der Geschlechtergeschichte’, in Von Huren und Rabenmüttern: weibliche Kriminalität in der ‚frühen Neuzeit, ed. Otto Ulbricht (Köln: Böhlau, 1995), 39-61.

30 Joachim Eibach, Frankfurter Verhöre: städtische Lebenswelten und Kriminalität im 18. Jahrhundert (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2003), 27.

Older studies on crime and deviance in early modern Germany were strongly influenced by Gerhard Oestreich’s concept of social disciplining.?! He argued that the rise of the early modern absolutist state enabled authorities to impose coercive discipline on their subjects through the implementation of new norms in the form of ordinances and other formal mechanisms. Since the gos, the study of crime has witnessed a paradigm shift. This changed the perspective from criminal courts as a repressive force of early modern ‘weak’ states attempting to gain control, linking it to processes of state formation, to a perspective in which criminal prosecution is seen as (partially) driven by local demand. The population made active use of the courts in order to settle conflicts, which shaped the way these institutions (and the norms they aimed to impose) functioned. In this perspective, courts were not simply a place of top-down control but a locus for interaction and conflict settlement.”

The top-down disciplining perspective was increasingly supplemented and replaced with the concept of social control that enabled bottom-up approaches to be studied as well. Historians of crime have widely accepted Martin Dinges’ definition, according to whom social control referred to ‘all forms by which historical agents define deviant behaviour and react to it’3 It thus represents a much wider concept than social disciplining, as it includes both formal and informal regulation of transgressive behaviour. The former refers to state institutions and instruments of control, in particular the criminal justice system, while the latter refers to regulations within the community itself. In

31 Gerhard Oestreich, ‘Strukturprobleme des europäischen Absolutismus: Otto Brunner zum 70. Geburtstag’, Vierteljahrschrift fiir Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 55, no. 3 (1968): 329-47; Heinz Schilling, ‘Profil und Perspektiven einer interdisziplinären und komparatistischen Disziplinierungsforschung jenseits einer Dichtotomie von Gesellschafts- und Kulturgeschichte), in Institutionen, Instrumente und Akteure sozialer Kontrolle und Disziplinierung im frühneuzeitliche Europa, ed. Heinz Schilling and Lars Behrisch (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1999), 3-36; Pieter Spierenburg, ‘Social Control and History: An Introduction) in Social Control in Europe: Volume 1, 1500-1800, ed. Herman Roodenburg and Pieter Spierenburg (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2004), 16.

32 Pieter Spierenburg, The Spectacle of Suffering: Executions and the Evolution of Repression: From a Preindustrial Metropolis to the European Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Richard Van Dülmen, Theater des Schreckens: Gerichtspraxis und Strafrituale in der frühen Neuzeit, 5th ed. (München: C.H. Beck, 2010); Martin Dinges, ‘The Uses of Justice as a Form of Social Control in Early Modern Europe’, in Social Control in Europe: Volume 1, 1500-1800, ed. Herman Roodenburg and Pieter Spierenburg (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2004), 159.

33 Dinges, ‘Uses of Justice’, 161.

this book I follow the approach of Gerd Schwerhoff, according to whom the history of crime is focused on the triangular relationship between (social and legal) norms, deviance (i.e. the transgression of these norms) and the different institutions and mechanisms of social control.3*

In early modern cities, criminal courts were not the only places where deviance was regulated. Social control was exercised by a whole range of formal and informal institutions, including ecclesiastical courts, guilds, and notaries, and through mechanisms like gossip, insults and violence.?® Bernard Capp, for example, demonstrated that female networks in urban neighbourhoods played an important role in the policing of boundaries of acceptable behaviour through the use of gossip. The importance of honour in early modern societies meant that gossip could generate collective pressure and thereby force individuals to conform to the expected norms.36

The gender gap among recorded offences can be partially related, historians argued, to differences in social control. First, it is assumed that authorities were less inclined to prosecute female offenders, because they considered the transgressions of women as less disrupting to social order than those of men.3” Second, historians have argued that women’s crimes were more likely to be handled by lower courts or more informal means of control, such as informal sanctioning within the household or the neighbourhood community.?® Third, it is assumed that the restricted socio-economic roles assigned to women

34 Schwerhoff, Aktenkundig und Gerichtsnotorisch, 10-14.

35 Heinz Schilling and Lars Behrisch, eds., Institutionen, Instrumente und Akteure sozialer KontrolleundDisziplinierung im frühneuzeitliche Europa (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1999); Herman Roodenburg, ‘Social Control Viewed from below: New Perspectives), in Social Control in Europe: Volume 1, 1500-1800, ed. Herman Roodenburg and Pieter Spierenburg (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2004), 145-58; Francisca Loetz, ‘Linfrajudiciaire: Facetten und Bedeutung eines Konzepts), in Kriminalitätsgesch ichte: Beiträge zur Sozial- und Kulturgeschichte der Vormoderne, ed. Andreas Blauert and Gerd Schwerhoff (Konstanz: UVK Universitätsverlag Konstanz, 2000), 545-62.

36 B. S. Capp, When Gossips Meet: Women, Family, and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

37 Lucia Zedner, ‘Women, Crime, and Penal Responses: A Historical Account’, Crime and Justice 14 (1991): 320; Joachim Eibach, ‘Männer vor Gericht— Frauen vor Gericht, in Grenzen und Grenzüberschreitungen: Bilanz und Perspektiven der Frühneuzeitforschung, ed. Christine Roll, Frank Pohle, and Matthias Myrczek (Köln: Böhlau, 2010), 565-68.

38 Ulbricht, ‘Einleitung, 11; Carol Z. Wiener, ‘Sex Roles and Crime in Late Elizabethan Hertfordshire’, Journal of Social History 8 (1975): 39; Drew D. Grey, Crime, Prosecution and Social Relations: The Summary Courts of the City of London in the Late Eighteenth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 170.

influenced their opportunities to commit offences, because they were confined to the domestic sphere.*9

3 Crime and the City

Historians and criminologists alike commonly consider that the chances of women becoming involved with the law were (and still are) closely related to the extent to which they are able to assume public roles.*° Scholars found that female criminality in the early modern period was a typical urban phenomenon, and that this is an important factor in explaining the levels of male and female crime in relation to public roles. John Beattie was the first historian to mention the influence of the urban environment in relation to the criminality of women. He found that levels of female offending were higher in the city than in the countryside. According to Beattie, the relatively independent and public life in the city increased their risk of breaking the law. Moreover, the loss of social and economic support networks— often present in more traditional close-knit communities—made women more vulnerable in times of hardship.*!

Beattie’s findings were later confirmed for other regions as well. Peter King and Manon van der Heijden, amongst others, emphasised the importance of urban demographic characteristics in this context.*? Early modern cities attracted migrants, many of whom were women whose move to the city was connected to life-cycle patterns of work and mobility typical for North-West Europe. But urban economies were precarious and, as Andrew Lees and Lynn Hollen Lees stated, ‘created marginal people along with marginal jobs’.43 Most

39 Jütte, ‘Geschlechtsspezifische Kriminalität, 99; Malcolm M. Feeley and Hadar Aviram, ‘Social Historical Studies of Women, Crime, and Courts, Annual Review of Law and Social Science 6 (2010): 151-71.

40 Van der Heijden, ‘Women and Crime’, 2016, 250; Robert B. Shoemaker, Gender in English Society, 1650-1850: The Emergence of Separate Spheres? (Harlow: Pearson Education, 1998), 296-304; Wunder, ‘Weibliche Kriminalität‘, 45.

41 Beattie, ‘Criminality of Women’, 96-101; John M. Beattie, Policing and Punishment in London 1660-1750: Urban Crime and the Limits of Terror (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 65.

42 Peter King, ‘Female Offenders, Work and Life-Cycle Change in Late-Eighteenth-Century London) Continuity and Change 11, no. 1 (1996): 61-90; Ariadne Schmidt and Manon Van der Heijden, ‘Women Alone in Early Modern Dutch Towns: Opportunities and Strategies to Survive, Journal of Urban History 42, no. 1 (2016): 21-38; Manon Van der Heijden, Women and Crime in Early Modern Holland, 2016, 160.

43 Andrew Lees and Lynn Hollen Lees, Cities and the Making of Modern Europe, 1750-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 35.

female migrants were young and unattached. Some turned to petty theft and prostitution as part of a broader ‘economy of makeshift’, in particular if they had no access to formal or informal social support networks.**

Influenced by the theories of Emile Durkheim and Ferdinand Tönnies, historians argued that in contrast to rural societies people who lived in cities were less likely to form close-knit paternalistic networks. As a result, informal social control was less tight in cities where anonymity ruled and face-to-face communities only existed in smaller entities, such as the neighbourhood.* However, the city was not only a place of relative freedom, but also of discipline and control.*6 Authorities often perceived young and independent women as a particular threat to social order. The public anxiety towards the many independent migrant women in the city heightened the prosecution efforts of the authorities.4” Robert Shoemaker stated that ‘women’s crime was dealt with differently in urban areas: whereas suspected female criminals in rural areas were often dealt with informally, in towns they faced greater distrust’.*® The stronger formal control in cities was facilitated by the presence of, and easy access to, the criminal justice system and other disciplinary institutions. In rural regions, the nearest court could be far away, and even if there was one nearby, courts often convened only occasionally.*

Thus, the city offered a distinct environment which increased both the opportunities for women to commit offences, as well as the chance of their coming into contact with formal control through the criminal justice system. Hitherto this has been used as a very general explanation for crime patterns