Now that we have established a clear picture of the judicial framework, it is time to turn to the main objective of this study: gender differences in recorded criminality in early modern Frankfurt. Historians generally accept that women’s contribution to registered offences varied through time and place, however there is no consensus yet about how these figures should be interpreted and what the determining factors were that impacted the level of female offenders on prosecution rates. While there is a lively academic debate discussing changes in the transition from the early modern to the modern period, much less is known about fluctuations and developments in the early modern period itself.1
Indeed, data for early modern Europe show that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries women accounted for anything between 10 percent and 50 percent of all registered offenders. Historians have drawn contradictory conclusions based on these figures. Older studies on gender and crime read them as evidence of a general pattern of women’s underrepresentation among recorded offences.2 More recently the early modern period is characterised as a period in which women ‘were present in courts as criminal defendants in larger numbers […] than common criminological wisdom suggests’, and that this is a pattern predominantly found in cities.3
This chapter adopts a more differentiated approach. It analyses the female crime pattern in Frankfurt in comparison with the cities in North-West Europe that have until now dominated our understanding of women’s offending in the early modern period. Such a comparative perspective promotes a more complex explanation of female crime patterns than is usually adopted by scholars for this period. As it highlights local and regional differences, it becomes clear that generalisations, such as the effects of urban life on the chances of women to become involved with the law, only tell part of the story.
The first part of this chapter discusses the variations in female participation among recorded offences across early modern Europe, linking these variations to the different urban demographic contexts. The second part moves on to a closer examination of the gendered crime patterns in early modern Frankfurt, and focuses on the way that prosecution patterns, and consequently female crime levels, were shaped by socio-economic fluctuations, and how this developed over time.
1 Women in Recorded Crime
The analysis of selected data on the level of female offenders in early modern Germany, Holland, and England reveals that there was considerable variation throughout the period. Of course, one has to exercise some caution when comparing such figures for the early modern period, as they are each derived from a specific legal context and have been reconstructed based on very different sources. The data in table 1 represent the higher court levels, and allow us to draw comparisons of some general trends between the different cities. As one can see, the share of women was highest in London and Newcastle and in cities in the highly urbanised province of Holland. In London women constituted 30 to 50 percent of the cases brought before the Old Bailey during the seventeenth and eighteenth century.4 For the city of Newcastle, overall crime rates are lacking, but women constituted half of the property offenders during the eighteenth century. Similar figures were found in the Dutch Republic, with Amsterdam topping the list: 42 percent of all defendants between 1620 and 1810 were women.5 The figures for the entire epoch are somewhat lower in the other cities, but here too there were substantial periods in which women contributed a significant share to all prosecuted offences. Leiden had a share of 32 percent female delinquents, but witnessed a process of ‘feminisation’ of criminality in the second half of the eighteenth century with women contributing half over more to all the prosecuted offenses.6 Delft showed a similar pattern to Leiden, with women making up more than a third of all offenders in the entire period and close to half in the end of the eighteenth century. Figures for eighteenth-century Rotterdam show that there a well women formed a substantial part of all suspects before the criminal court.
Data for cities and territories in early modern Germany are more scattered and usually cover a shorter time frame. The available figures display a somewhat different pattern, and overall the gender gap appears to be more profound than in the cities mentioned above. In Frankfurt, women formed 22 percent of all suspects recorded in the Criminalia. Like elsewhere, these figures were not stable and fluctuated over time, but women never constituted more than 30 percent of all offenders per decade. In late sixteenth century Cologne, women accounted for only 16 percent of all offenders, as they did in the small town of Thorn in the eighteenth century. However, as Gerd Schwerhoff found, this had changed considerably by the beginning of the eighteenth century. By this time, women comprised close to 45 percent of all defendants. According to Schwerhoff this pattern was likely due to economic changes, as the period was characterised by poverty and decline, and women were primarily tried for ‘poverty crimes’ (‘Armut- und Notdelinquenz’) like theft, prostitution and infraction of their banishment. At the same time, he could not rule out that the pattern was the result of changing selection mechanisms by the authorities, and if it was a short-term deviation of a ‘normal’ pattern or more structural.7
Moreover, other data for larger territories in Germany caution us make generalisations about the early modern period as a time in which ‘female crime rates were rather high […] and subsequently declined in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’.8 For early modern Kurbayern, Wolfgang Behringer observed a decline from 29 percent female offenders at the beginning of the seventeenth century to 23 percent by the end of the century.9 And in Kurmainz, a large territory in the vicinity of Frankfurt, Karl Härter found that women constituted 34 percent of all offenders prosecuted by the central authorities.10 In both regions the relatively high rate of women was the result of intensified prosecution of sexual offences by the central authorities in their attempt to centralise the legal apparatus and firmly establish their authority over local judicial institutions.11
Share of women among defendants in Germany, Holland and England
| City/Region | % property offenders | % all offenders |
|---|---|---|
| Germany | ||
| Frankfurt (1600–1806)a | 27 | 22 |
| Cologne (1568–1612; 1698–1712) | 23–36 | 16–45 |
| Nuremberg (1578–1617) | 16 | 27 |
| Kurmainz (1560–1802) | 24 | 34 |
| Bavaria (1600–1650; 1685–1689) | 12–15 | 23–29 |
| Heiden (1680–1795) | 19 | 11 |
| Freiburg (1763–1772) | 34 | - |
| Thorn (1704–1792) | - | 16 |
| Netherlands | ||
| Amsterdam (1680–1810) | 31 | 42 |
| Delft (1591–1810) | - | 36 |
| Rotterdam (1700–1750; 1750–1810) | 28–33 | 33–35 |
| Leiden (1600–1810) | 37 | 32 |
| England | ||
| London (1670–1750) | 39 | 36 |
| Newcastle (1725–1800) | 50 | - |
| Surrey (1663–1802) | 24 | 21 |
| Cheshire (1590–1660) | 22 | - |
| Oxfordshire (1750–1800) | 22 | - |
For a justification of the recostruction of crime rates in this book, see appendix 1.
2 Urbanisation and Female Offending
The picture that emerges from this comparison is one of variation in which the gender gap in early modern Frankfurt appears to be more profound than in other urban centres in the Dutch Republic or United Kingdom. Historians have often stressed the relationship between urbanisation and female offending. Manon van der Heijden stated recently that ‘[T]he close relationship between the degree of urbanisation and the percentage of female offenders is particularly relevant to the highly urbanised region of Holland’.12 As mentioned earlier, the link between city life and high levels of female crime is generally explained as a combination of their independent and—at the same time—precarious position. The loss of social and economic support networks—often present in more traditional close-knit communities—was an especially important factor in making women more vulnerable in times of hardship. At the same time, means of formal prosecution were more available in towns than on the countryside, making it more likely for women to be subjected to the law.13 For non-urban settings, on the other hand, it is argued that informal sentencing, for example a master dismissing his maid, occurred more often than formal recourse to the law, thereby creating a possibly larger dark number than in cities.14
Given these general observations it is tempting to assume that there is a relationship between the size of the city, and consequently the level of urban precariousness, and the rate of female offending. At first glance the comparison between the various regions supports such an assumption. After all, urbanisation levels were much lower in early modern Germany than they were, for example, in the Netherlands.15 Peter King, however, previously warned against ‘making too simplistic a model of links between levels of urbanisation and levels of female involvement in recorded crime’.16 And indeed, a closer look at the cities in table 1 reveals that there was not a one-on-one relationship between the size of the city and the percentage of female offenders. With a population of 23,000 by the beginning of the eighteenth century and 39,000 by the end of the Ancien Régime, Frankfurt was certainly smaller than London (676,000) or Amsterdam (219,000).17 However, size in urban population alone cannot explain the differences. Population sizes of Rotterdam (39,000) and Newcastle (25,000) in the middle of the eighteenth century resembled that of Frankfurt, but they had considerably higher shares of female crime. Leiden’s population size had reached 67,000 inhabitants in around 1650, but by 1750 it had declined to 38,000.18 Rather than declining, the percentage of women among sanctioned offenders actually increased.19
Other factors, therefore, need to be taken into account. As underscored by scholars, it was in particular the relative independence and relaxation of patriarchal control, which was closely connected to urban migration patterns, that explain the high levels of female criminality in cities like London and Amsterdam. The cities with the highest share of women—Leiden, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Newcastle and London—were all characterised by specific demographic patterns due to labour markets which ensured high female migration to the city and a considerable level of male outward migration either through service as sailors or soldiers.20 In most early modern cities, there was a surplus of women, but the numbers of women were particularly high in some of the cities experiencing high levels of female crime listed in the table above. In eighteenth-century Leiden, for example, 26 percent of the households were headed by women, and their share among households classified as poor was even larger: 48 percent. And across Holland, the share of households headed by widows varied between 14 and 27 percent.21
In early modern Germany, on the other hand, the position of never-married females is believed to have been more restricted. In early modern Württemberg they were not allowed to head households and were instructed either to enter service or to take in a male authority figure who could keep their conduct under surveillance.22 There are no signs that such formal restrictions also existed in Frankfurt, but the majority of female household heads in the city were widows. According to tax records from the end of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, around 20 percent of the households were headed by women, 90 percent of whom were widows.23 Similar numbers are available for the eighteenth century as well: in 1761, 18 percent of Frankfurt’s real estate was owned by women, and again 90 percent were widows. Finally, in 1811, only 7 percent of the women heading households among the citizenry were single.24 Households headed by women were often among the city’s poorest. In the sixteenth century more than 40 percent of them were registered in the lowest tax categories.25 Although at first hand these figures are relatively comparable to those available for the Dutch cities, one must keep in mind that they only include citizens, leaving out half of the population. Considering that foreigners were not allowed to establish their own household, the level of independent female household heads in Frankfurt was quite limited. These figures make clear that the majority of women in Frankfurt were incorporated into male-governed households, and few women lived independently.
Self-employment by women, especially unmarried migrant women, as washers or seamstresses, was objected to by the authorities and prohibited as much as possible in early modern Germany, including Frankfurt.26 The conditions for women to live independently in early modern Frankfurt were more restricted than in cities like London or Amsterdam where women may have found more employment opportunities and possibilities for independence. The share of domestic servants among the population may be informative in this respect. According to Frankfurt’s first census of 1811, 17 percent of the city’s inhabitants belonged to the Gesinde—servants who lived as subordinates in their master’s household.27 The share of women among the servants listed in the 1811 census was 76 percent.28 These figures correspond with what is known for other cities during this period and reflect the typical gender structure and feminisation of domestic service as it developed throughout the eighteenth century.29 In eighteenth-century Amsterdam, on the other hand, domestic servants are estimated to be 9 percent of the total population and for London, Tim Meldrum considered a share of around 7.7 percent to be plausible.30 The figures suggest that the labour markets in these cities were more diverse, and that fewer women were incorporated in alien households as dependents than in Frankfurt.
3 Gendered Patterns of Crime
Although the quantitative comparison between Frankfurt and various other cities reveals that the level of female offending was relatively low, a qualitative comparison shows that there were also many similarities when looking at the pattern of offending. The crimes women were prosecuted for, match the typical early modern urban pattern found elsewhere in European cities.31 An overview of the share of women for each crime category (table 2) shows that while women made up more than half of defendants for moral offences (53 percent) and represented over a quarter of property offences (27 percent), their share among violent crimes and crimes against public order was below their overall average among recorded crime, at 13 percent and 17 percent respectively. Earlier studies that mentioned female criminality these differences often led to a stereotypical portrayal of women’s offending in the early modern period. It was often reduced to distinctively female offences such as infanticide, fornication, or prostitution.32 This reaffirmed older notions about gender and crime in which women’s transgressions were related to their sexuality and body, a sign of the weak character of the female nature which was driven by desire rather than reason.33 Women’s behaviour was characterised as more law-abiding, passive and peaceful, and contrasted to ‘male’ assertiveness and aggressiveness.34
Share of men and women among prosecuted offences, Frankfurt 1600–1806a
| Category | Men | Women | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total offenders | 8,427 | 78% | 2,382 | 22% |
| Moral | 401 | 47% | 445 | 53% |
| Property | 3,457 | 73% | 1,285 | 27% |
| Against authorities and public order | 1,755 | 83% | 355 | 17% |
| Violence | 2,945 | 87% | 433 | 13% |
| Misc. | 165 | 84% | 32 | 16% |
As some offenders were prosecuted for more than one offence at the same time, the total number of offenders is lower than the sum of offenders of the single crime categories.
Types of prosecuted crime by gender, Frankfurt 1600–1806a
| Category | Men | Women | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Property | 3,457 | 40% | 1,285 | 50% |
| Moral | 401 | 5% | 445 | 17% |
| Violence | 2,945 | 34% | 433 | 17% |
| Against authorities and public order | 1,755 | 20% | 355 | 14% |
| Misc. | 165 | 2% | 32 | 1% |
Looking only at the relative weight of women among each category of crime leads to a distorted image about what female criminality actually characterised in the early modern period. It was not the offences in which women featured disproportionately that made up the bulk of the crimes they were prosecuted for, but rather more ‘mundane’ offences like theft (table 3). In fact, both for men and women, property offences constituted the largest category of crimes, although this was more significant for women than for men (50 percent vs 40 percent respectively). The relative weight of violent and public order offences was considerably less for women than for men (17 percent vs 34 percent and 14 percent vs 20 percent respectively), whereas sexual offences were relatively more prevalent among female defendants than among males (17 percent vs 5 percent).
It was not uncommon for offenders to be prosecuted for several offences at the same time, and sometimes it is hard to distinguish the primary reason why they were investigated in the first place. Men and women who had to defend themselves for infraction of banishment, for example, were often simultaneously prosecuted for other crimes. And in cases where people were arrested as vagrants, or for acting ‘suspiciously’, there was often the assumption (or at least insinuation) that they had committed theft, or were members of a gang of thieves. They could be investigated for suspected theft, even if there were hardly any indications of such an offence having taken place. Ultimately, lacking evidence to convict them of a crime, the authorities often banished them as vagabonds or unwanted foreigners.35 Women were investigated slightly more often for more than one category of offence than men: this was the case for 6.5 percent of the women compared to 3.5 percent for men at that time.36 This is related to the fact that women were prosecuted relatively more often for offences related to survival strategies, for example the combination of theft and prostitution or infraction of banishment and theft. Prosecutions for violence, on the other hand, were hardly ever accompanied by other types of crimes. Considering that these crimes made up such a significant part of prosecuted male criminality, explains the difference in prosecutions for single or multiple offences. Overall, however, the majority of offenders were prosecuted for a single type of offence at the same time.
An important characteristic of female offending in Frankfurt, and that fits with the broader European urban pattern, was that the majority of prosecutions were aimed at a single offender. In 51.2 percent of the cases women were investigated alone without other suspects. For men, this figure was slightly lower, at 49.9 percent. When women were prosecuted together with others, they were more likely to have operated in mixed gender groups, than together with other women (31.2 percent vs 17.6 percent respectively). For men, this was the exact opposite: they were more often investigated with other men (40.4 percent) than with other women (10.1 percent).37 The majority of women, therefore, committed their crimes independently, and not (as has long been suggested) only as accomplices of men.38 That women were less likely than men to commit offences with partners of their own gender is primarily related to the different crimes they were prosecuted for. Fights often involved multiple offenders, and thus men were likely to be prosecuted with other men.
Moreover, institutional selection mechanisms and gendered biases played a significant role in the patterns that arise from the investigation records of the Verhöramt. Violence, for example, was only handled by the criminal investigation office if it involved serious physical injuries or was considered a danger to public order. In the Criminalia, women only accounted for approximately 13 percent of all suspects of violence, and a high proportion of these (47 percent) were related to ‘typical’ female crimes like infanticide, child abandonment and abortion. If such cases were excluded from the calculations, the share of women would drop considerably, to 7 percent. Women also made up a minority of violent offences, ranging between 6 percent and 16 percent, in other regions in early modern Europe.39
These and other examples have often led scholars to conclude that women were more subordinate, law-abiding and peaceful than men, thereby reinforcing both contemporary as well as historical notions of gendered behaviour. Female violence, it was often assumed, only manifested itself as verbal violence. When Pieter Spierenburg asked the question ‘How violent were women?’ in a 1997 article, he concluded that they were not fighters, and that the few women that did defy cultural stereotypes were imitating male aggression.40 More recent research has offered nuances to this picture and argued that our image of female violence was largely distorted by the sources we study. Studies on petty violence before lower courts in London and Rotterdam, for example, show that the share of women was much higher there.41 In a recent article on violence and masculinity, Joachim Eibach argued that male violence was more likely to be perceived as dangerous and a breach of public order than similar behaviour by women. He stated that it was ‘the interplay of social perceptions, crime reporting, and prosecution that produced male delinquency’.42 Thus, gendered notions on what is perceived as troublesome behaviour played a role in the prosecution of violence.
In Frankfurt, petty violence was usually transferred to the Oberster Richter, which did not leave any written records, or settled through civil adjudication. This means that much of the everyday fighting and scolding is not incorporated in the criminal statistics that have been reconstructed based on the Criminalia. Cases in which women were prosecuted for violence often resulted from conflicts in an economic setting (fights among market women, etc.) and within the neighbourhood and the family.43 Disciplining domestics is usually associated with the master of the household, but the sources show that mistresses also played a crucial part in the disciplining of household members.44 Moreover, Joachim Eibach showed that in Frankfurt social control in the neighbourhood was to a large extent dominated by women, and could in addition include the use of violence in various forms.45 In many of the neighbourhood conflicts husband and wife acted as a team against their opponents. There was no gender division in these fights, in the sense that a woman would only act as accomplice to their husband’s fights. On the contrary: not only did men and women act as equal parties in violent neighbourhood conflicts, women were often the instigators of such quarrels. Moreover, a quantitative assessment of the Criminalia reveals that in 58 percent of violent offences (excl. infanticide, abortion, child abandonment and suicide) women were either investigated alone or together with another woman.46
Similar gendered selection mechanisms in the prosecution practices of the authorities are also visible in the category of crimes against authority and public order. This category contains the most heterogeneous offences among all the different categories, ranging from anything between insulting the city council or other governmental and public officials, resisting arrest, coining offences and arson, to begging, vagabondage and infraction of banishment, to riots and public disturbance, violations of police ordinances, and military offences such as desertion and illegal recruitment. Overall, women made up 17 percent of offenders, but their share varied considerably between the different offences within this category. Women were rarely prosecuted for insulting authorities, hindering arrest or disrupting public order. That does not mean, however, that women were not part of such offences, rather, their behaviour was judged differently by the authorities and considered as less of a threat or insult. An example of this double standard is revealed in an altercation at the Eschenheimer Gate. Control at the city gates often gave rise to conflict between travellers or burghers and the gate guards.47 Johann Kling, one of the gatekeepers, came to the Verhöramt in order to report Herr Echzeller, member of the third bench of the city council, and his son-in-law, beer brewer Jäger. They insulted gate clerk (Einlassschreiber) Trapp and assaulted the gatekeeper’s daughter when they were told to wait at the gates until another carriage had exited the city.48 Echzeller and Jäger were accompanied by their daughter and wife, who was not indicted by the gate keeper. It was not until the gate-keeper’s daughter was heard as a witness that it became clear that Jäger’s wife also insulted the guards. Neither the gate keeper, nor the guards considered this worth reporting. Apparently for them, it was not as serious an infraction of their authority and honour as the insults by the two men.
Although women were rarely investigated for offences that were seen as an insult or threat to political stability and authority, they were prosecuted much more often for offences such as infraction of banishment (51 percent of defendants), begging and vagrancy (24 percent of defendants), or ‘acting suspiciously’ (34 percent of defendants). The majority of such ‘mobility offences’ were dealt with by the city beadles, Weltliche Richter and the poor house without the intervention of—and thus registration—by the Verhöramt. The language employed by the authorities in ordinances against begging etc. labelled male mobility specifically as a threat to public order. This framing influenced the policing patterns considerably, as we will see in chapter 6.
Double standards also played a role in the prosecution of sexual offences, where women formed the majority of suspects. The Verhöramt was not the primary institution to investigate crimes like fornication, prostitution and adultery as they belonged to the jurisdiction of the city’s moral courts (see chapter 5). The sexual offences prosecuted by the Verhöramt therefore only represent the tip of the iceberg. Even though women represented the majority of suspects, the weight of moral offences hardly impacted the total share of women among recorded offences. Excluding all sexual offences actually increased the percentage of female offenders by 1 percent.
More importantly, qualitative analysis of the sources shows that a large part of women’s interactions with the judicial apparatus are excluded from the sources of the Verhöramt. For many women, their first encounter with the law was through the moral court. A good example is the case of Maria Elisabetha Heßlerin from Mainz. Her first encounters with the law in Frankfurt date back to 1730, when she was arrested on several occasions for prostitution and sanctioned by the Konsistorium with dragging the scavenger’s cart (a typical sentence for loose women) and expulsion. It was not until she was arrested for breaking her banishment for the third time that she was investigated by the Verhöramt.49 Maria Elisabetha’s case is not unique: there are repeated references made in the sources to female offenders, especially young, independent and mobile women, who had previously been punished by the Konsistorium on multiple occasions before they were finally investigated by the Verhöramt.50 For men, on the other hand, the moral courts was much less of a ‘gateway’ to future encounters with the law and investigation by the Verhöramt.
Thus, these patterns reveal that although women had a relative low share among criminal offenders in early modern Frankfurt, the qualitative analysis demonstrates how problematic older characterisations of female offending are. To some degree, the crime patterns of men and women were more similar than that they were different. Women did not appear before the courts solely as dependants, but as individual and independent offenders, more likely to be prosecuted for theft, than ‘crimes of passion’. Moreover, institutional selection biases played a considerable role in the prosecution of crime.
4 Fluctuations over Time
An overview of the total number of cases prosecuted before the Verhöramt reveals that there was considerable variation in the intensity of prosecution during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (figure 2).51 In the first twenty years of the seventeenth century at least more than 200 criminal investigations were conducted each decade, only to decline considerably towards the middle of the century. In the 1640s and 1650s less than half of the number cases were investigated.52 A similar pattern emerges from the city’s the book of punishments: between 1601–1620 the city council imposed 298 penal punishments. From 1621–1640 this had dropped to a total of 116 and declined even further between 1641–1660, when it dropped to 58.53
The obvious explanation for this decline was the impact of the Thirty Year’s War and its aftermath on the demography of the city and the prosecution capacities of Frankfurt’s authorities—a general pattern which is witnessed throughout the Holy Roman Empire.54 This decline, however, differed according to the types of offences: investigations based on requests from other rulers almost came to a halt completely and property offences declined more intensely, while the number of prosecutions for violence remained relatively the same. Thus, the city’s authorities were selective when it came to which types of offences could be ignored due their declining prosecution capacities and which could not.
It was not until the 1680s that the number of investigations exceeded pre-war levels again. As a result of a combination of factors the number of cases prosecuted by the Verhöramt increased considerably towards the middle of the eighteenth century. After the war-related demographic decline in the seventeenth century, the city experienced a considerable population growth from circa 20,000 in the 1670s/80s to circa 25,000 by 1700 and increasing sharply towards to circa 40,000 by the end of the eighteenth century. Moreover, it was a period of socio-economic transformation during which many people became uprooted. This led to public anxieties of the authorities, which perceived the increasing number of mobile men and women as a threat to the existing social order. Ordinances against begging, vagrancy and all kinds of ‘masterless’ people characterised the period, not only in Frankfurt, but in the neighbouring territories as well.55 These anxieties about social disorder and crime went hand in hand with efforts to improve policing and exclude outsiders from the community.56 After the 1760s the socio-economic situation in Frankfurt improved and the city’s authorities were less tense as the implemented security measures and cooperation with other territories regarding the prosecution of vagrants appeared effective.57 The prosecution patterns of the Verhöramt are a reflection of these larger societal developments. In the first half of the 1740s (when the number of cases was at its highest), the Verhöramt investigated 114 cases on average per year, but by the beginning of the nineteenth century this had declined to only 59 cases. Moreover, specific events, such as the fire in the Judengasse in 1721 or the election and coronation of the Holy Roman Emperor could cause periodic spikes or lows.58
Total number of cases investigated by the Verhöramt per decade, Frankfurt 1600–1806
source: ifsg, criminalia 1600–1806
Number of male and female offenders investigated by the Verhöramt per decade, Frankfurt 1600–1806
source: ifsg, criminalia 1600–1806
The number of women prosecuted by the Verhöramt fluctuated between ca. 14 percent at the lowest and 30 percent at the highest per decade (figure 3). Women made up a considerable share of the offenders during the first half of the seventeenth century when the prosecution levels of the Verhöramt dropped, particularly at the ‘cost’ of male offenders. After the restoration of the war as the number of cases increased, the relative share of women declined again, but their absolute numbers grew. Towards the middle of the eighteenth century their absolute numbers increased more significantly than the number of male offenders, increasing women’s relative share among all offenders, only to decrease slightly again after the 1750s, with a short-term increase in the 1780s. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the share of women declined again.
It is impossible to determine to what extent this was a long-term trend or simply a short-term decline. Due to a reorganisation of the archives, all criminal cases after 1806 except for the political offences have been destroyed. The number of women declined more drastically than the number of men. With regard to female property offenders, Joachim Eibach found that this decline was primarily caused by the disappearance of local burgher women from the sample (1801–1805). Similar to arguments formulated by Feeley in his thesis of the ‘vanishing female’, Eibach considered that this pattern was connected to changing gender roles, and the emergence of an ideology of domesticity in which burgher women could participate but other women could not.59
Explanations for this pattern have to remain tentative, as the sources are lacking. Evidence for other regions, however, suggests that there was a period of long-term stability with regard to the share of female offenders in the nineteenth century rather than a sharp decline. Rebekka Habermas’ work on theft in the nineteenth century shows that in Marburg women still made up a considerable share of property offenders (26.7 percent), the majority of whom were actually married.60 Marriage, therefore, was not a guarantor for the withdrawal of women from the public sphere, nor from criminality. Gerd Schwerhoff pointed out that available figures for nineteenth-century Prussia showed that the share of women among offenders remained relatively stable at around 20 percent throughout the period, while female employment rates increased sharply towards the end of the period.61 Similar patterns were found elsewhere in Europe too, problematising an overall pattern of decline for the nineteenth century.62
It is not unlikely, therefore, that the changing gender patterns in Frankfurt during the two final decades of the period under research resulted from the political upheavals from the Revolutionary Wars, which ended with the occupation by the French and loss of the city’s independence in 1806, rather than representing a long-term pattern of change. The period between 1789 and 1803 was a characterised by social unrest, with riots, social protests and hunger revolts. Local—frequently poor—burgher women played active roles in these massive public gatherings and were not at all relegated to the domestic sphere. With their legitimacy at risk, the authorities were hesitant to quash disturbances with full force in this period, and rather opted for a strategy of conflict control, which explains why so few people received criminal sentences for riots in this period.63
Moreover, the trends in absolute numbers for male and female suspects show that for most of the period they followed the same pattern. Overall fluctuations in the number of investigated offences affected men and women to the same degree in the sense that there do not appear to be clear, intensified prosecution peaks aimed at one sex in particular: both genders were affected equally by the intensified prosecution efforts of the authorities towards the middle of the eighteenth century. However, there were considerable differences in what type of offences were prosecuted. For men the growth in the number of cases was evenly distributed across all different types of crime. The anxieties and prosecution efforts of the authorities were aimed at ‘thieving vagrants’ just as much as at ‘unruly fighting journeymen’ (figure 4).64 For women, on the other hand, the growth in the number of prosecutions was first and foremost related to property offences (figure 5).
Number of male defendants per category of crime per decade, Frankfurt 1600–1806
source: ifsg, criminalia 1600–1806
Number of female defendants per category of crime per decade, Frankfurt 1600–1806
source: ifsg, criminalia 1600–1806
5 Women Facing Crisis
Changes in the number of prosecutions of women thus seem to be primarily related to their property offending, at least in the eighteenth century. Historians generally assume that there is a link between periods of economic decline or impoverishment and a growing share of female delinquency, in particular in relation to property offences. Considering that women in general held a more precarious position—they were often dependent on poorly paid, low or unskilled (seasonal) labour, and their share among recipients of poor relief was disproportionately high—economic fluctuations are considered to have had a more severe impact on their survival strategies.65 The link between difficult socio-economic conditions and criminality should therefore be stronger for women than it was for men.66
Others suggested that the increased share of female offenders also resulted from weakening patriarchal control as a result of economic difficulties. According to Joachim Eibach, the relatively high share of women among property offenders as well as among vagrants in the second half of the eighteenth century was a sign of the fact that the traditional economy centred around the house (‘die traditionelle, auf das Haus zentrierte Ökonomie’) no longer provided sufficient support for women, neither financially nor socially.67 Moreover, as Ulinka Rublack pointed out, periods of socio-economic crises could lead to ‘more rigid defence of resources and hierarchies of rank as well as reinforced defences of marriage and family’, leading to intensified prosecution of poor independent women. Particularly if they were migrants.68
The eighteenth century is generally considered as period of increasing impoverishment of the lower classes and a decline in real wages.69 Unfortunately for early modern Frankfurt, there are hardly any sources that enable an assessment of the development of the economic position and possible pauperisation of the city’s inhabitants since the tax registers (Schatzungslisten) and other serial data that would allow for an analysis of income or wealth have been burnt. Based on an evaluation of the city’s trading fairs, wholesale trading companies, and developing banking industry, historians have established that Frankfurt’s economy was characterised by increasing growth after the period of the Thirty Years’ War. Particularly the last quarter of the eighteenth century was a period of economic prosperity.70
The economic benefits of Frankfurt’s role as a centre of trade and finance, however, were not felt equally among the population. The city’s wealthy mercantile elite made up only a minority of the burgher community and they were disproportionally represented in the highest and wealthiest tax categories.71 The majority of the city’s burghers, however, worked as craftsmen, who were disproportionately represented among the lower tax categories. During the eighteenth century, the artisan class experienced economic impoverishment, which mostly affected the dependent journeymen whose opportunities to make a career and gain an independent livelihood declined.72 Women especially were vulnerable economically. According to the eighteenth-century real estate taxation 18 percent of the houses were owned by women, 90 percent of whom were widows, mostly of artisans. More than two-thirds of them (67 percent) belonged to the lowest tax categories, inhabiting the humblest dwellings.73 Moreover, most foreigners also did not benefit from the city’s prosperity. Most resident aliens and migrants worked in lower occupational groups, such as the clothing and transport industries, or were simply employed as day labourers.74
Available data indicate that, despite the economic growth, poor relief expenditures from the communal poor chest per thousand inhabitants rose in early modern Frankfurt throughout the second half of the seventeenth century, and towards the early eighteenth century.75 Unfortunately, only scattered references about the number of recipients are available for the later period. In 1784 the communal poor chest distributed assistance in the form of bread or money to 697 burghers, and an additional 921 received assistance in the form of clothing.76 In 1787 the number of recipients of bread or alms was 739 and 830 were assisted with clothing.77 The city’s population during these years was approximately 36,000, of which half belonged to the burgher community. This means that between 8–9 percent of the burghers received some form of assistance, on which probably a much larger part depended (if we consider that their families are not included in these calculations). Daniela Heinisch estimated that between 1770 and 1809 about half of all requests for long-term relief to the city council were made by women.78 Unfortunately there are no figures available about the gender of recipients of the communal poor chest during the eighteenth century. Figures for other cities in the Holy Roman Empire have shown that women figured disproportionately among recipients of relief, which was also the case elsewhere in Western Europe.79
Next to the communal poor chest, which was only reserved for burghers, the city’s poorhouse (Armenhaus) offered relief for the city’s Beisassen or transient aliens. In practice, however, it also catered for burghers. The number of people that were provided with assistance in the form of bread or a small sum of money by the poorhouse increased during the eighteenth century. François Dreyfus estimated that in total about 21.5 percent of Frankfurt’s population depended on poor relief in the late eighteenth century.80 As we can see in the table 4 and figures 4 and 5, there was a certain correspondence with the years of a growing number of recipients of relief, and the high levels of prosecuted property offences.
Recipients of bread and alms from the poorhouse, 1700–1800
| Year | Recipients of bread and/or alms | Year | Recipients of bread and/or alms |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1700 | 447 | 1760 | 1,452 |
| 1705 | 756 | 1770 | 1,309 |
| 1710 | 865 | 1780 | 1,007 |
| 1715 | 612 | 1784 | 940 |
| 1720 | 795 | 1785 | 935 |
| 1730 | 1,545 | 1786 | 332 |
| 1735 | 1,425 | 1787 | 310 |
| 1740 | 1,877 | 1790 | 319 |
| 1750 | 1,355 | 1800 | 431 |
The question is then, if there is a clear link between economic distress and the level of women’s offending. A traditional methodology that is used by historians to study the relationship between offending and economic fluctuations, is to study if there is a correlation between the number of offences and rising grain and/or bread prices. These studies have shown contradictory results. John Beattie found a general relationship between indictments for property offences and price indexes, both over the long term and in year-to-year changes.81 Gerd Schwerhoff, on the other hand, found no relationship at all between the price for rye and property offences in sixteenth-century Cologne.82 Most recently, Anne-Marie Kilday, in a study on eighteenth-century Oxfordshire, concluded that ‘attempts at establishing a link between poverty and crime are extremely problematic’. Rather, she argued, ‘[i]ndictment levels can be more indicative of attitudes towards criminal behaviour […], than the ‘true incidence of illegality itself’.83
Joachim Eibach has demonstrated that in eighteenth-century Frankfurt the number of property offences was only marginally related to changing bread prices, albeit much stronger than violent offences. There were years in which fluctuations in the number of property offences corresponded with changing bread prices, whereas in other years there was only a delayed effect or no effect at all.84 One of the most severe subsistence crises was in the years 1770–1774 and, indeed, there appears to be a relationship between the crises and the prosecuted offences in this case: during this period, the share of impoverished journeymen and day labourers among offenders was relatively high.85 At the same time, as Joachim Eibach demonstrated, there was no significant increase in the number of prosecutions for domestic theft, suggesting that incorporation in a household provided at least some form of social support during times of need.86
The link between economic fluctuations and the proportion of women offenders proves to be difficult to establish as well. Between 1725 and 1755, more than 30 percent of the suspects in property offences were women. This largely coincides with the period in which the number of recipients of poor relief was high (table 4). At other times, however, the link is less straightforward. During the subsistence crisis in 1770–1774, for example, the share of women fluctuated considerably as they made up between 19 percent and 45 percent of the suspects. Other periods of short-term crises also reveal that economic distress did not necessarily correspond with a steady increase in female involvement. Between 1691 and 1693, another period of famine due to bad harvests, the share of women among property offences varied between 22 and 29 percent, while in the years before the famine (1687–1689) it had reached above 40 percent.87
Apart from looking at poverty in general, historians have also pointed out that changes in women’s economic situation as a result of war could impact their prosecution levels. Peter King and John Beattie both found that periods of war in early modern England coincided with a rising percentage of female offenders. Usually this rise was not absolute but resulted from a declining number of prosecuted men, many of whom were employed in the military during such periods. The absence of men during war had a double effect. On the one hand, there were fewer men present to be prosecuted. On the other hand, women faced more difficulties in providing for their families, which increased their vulnerability, but also their independence.88
The patterns for early modern Frankfurt show that the effect of war on criminality was not unilateral. In Frankfurt, the percentage of female offenders was at its highest during the tumultuous years of the Thirty Years’ War and the subsequent decade. Here as well, this was not caused by an increase in female offenders, but by a declining number of prosecuted men. The absolute number of women remained rather stable. The declining number of men was not distributed evenly across all crimes, but particularly affected property offences, while the number of violent offences remained relatively stable.89 It is very likely that such patterns resulted from the withdrawal of many young men from the urban population, taking up service in one of the many armies recruiting during this period. After all, (mercenary) armies were often comprised of men most vulnerable to prosecution for property offences.90
The link is less clear during other periods of conflict experienced by the city. At the time of the French occupation (1759–1763) as part of the Seven Years’ War the share of women was on average 29 percent, but it fluctuated substantially within these years varying between 13 percent and 39 percent. This variation was the result of fluctuations in the absolute number of both male and female suspects. Later, during the political upheavals following the French Revolution, including several short-term occupations by the French, the number of men and women prosecuted also varied considerably, not showing a clear trend of a decreasing absolute number of male offenders and an increasing share of women as a result of this.
More importantly, it has to be remembered that war and the vicinity of war also created anxieties that influenced prosecution policies, which may have been different on the continent than they were in England which was confronted far less with fighting on their own ground. In 1689, when the nearby city of Mainz was besieged by the French, several men were arrested on suspicion of spying for the French army.91 As a recruiting city for several large armies (most dominantly the Prussian and the Imperial army), prosecutions for desertion and illegal recruitment peaked during times of war.92 Moreover, fears about roaming soldiers and former soldiers intensified security policies and discrimination against wandering groups.93 Thus, war could also increase the prosecution of typical male offences, such as desertion, which evened out their decline in other spheres of offending.
Short-term events like war and subsistence crises evidently influenced prosecution patterns, although they did not always have the same effect. Rather than being related to short-term crises, crime patterns in Frankfurt are more likely to result from the endemic poverty of large sections of the population. The majority of offenders belonged to the lower classes of society and lived a mobile lifestyle, either temporarily or permanently. In particular those individuals who were poorly incorporated into the settled community, and thus did not have access to formal and informal relief networks, were vulnerable to prosecution for such offences as theft, vagrancy or prostitution. Being excluded from the controlling structures of belonging to a sedentary household (whether voluntarily or not) heightened the chances of attracting suspicion by the authorities, and entering the city and trying to settle independently became increasingly difficult.94 In sum, the fluctuations in female crime patterns in early modern Frankfurt cannot be explained by mono-causal factors. Overall, they were shaped by social crises and poverty, as well as by the prosecution practices of the authorities fostered by their anxieties towards unsettled and ‘masterless’ people.
6 Conclusion
The level of women among recorded offences varied considerably throughout early modern Europe. This chapter argued that the different socio-economic and demographic characteristics of the various cities contributed at least in part to this variation. Crime historians argue that the urban context had a considerable influence on the involvement of women in crime, and their chances of being prosecuted. In cities, women (especially those from migratory backgrounds) led relatively independent and public lives and were less incorporated in traditional networks of social control. Scholars found that this combination of independence and vulnerability is of key importance in explaining the extraordinarily high levels of recorded female criminality in cities like Leiden, Amsterdam, London and Glasgow (where women accounted for 30 to 50 percent of all prosecuted offenders). In Frankfurt, however, the share of women among prosecuted offenders was much lower: they accounted for ca. 22 percent of all defendants before the Verhöramt in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
This chapter argued that the dynamics of the precariousness and anonymity of urban life and its effects on female crime varied greatly throughout Europe. The connection between the ‘urban factor’ and high levels of female offending was particularly prevalent in cities where the proportion of single women living independently was high. In Frankfurt, on the other hand, the opportunities for women to settle independently were more restricted. This created a distinct urban crime pattern with relatively low levels of female offending. At the same time, women’s crime patterns in Frankfurt fit the common characteristics found across early modern Europe. For both sexes, the majority of the Criminalia dealt with property offences, although for women this was more significant than for men. The gender gap was smallest in the category of moral offences and most significant among violent offences. The chapter has argued that the different level at which men and women appeared as defendants before the Verhöramt was partially related to the organisational structures of the criminal justice system and gendered notions of what was perceived as troublesome behaviour.
Moreover, the chapter has shown that the prosecution practices of the authorities were partially fostered by the socio-economic developments of the period. It was a time in which many people became uprooted, which the authorities perceived as a threat to the existing social order. The level of female involvement in registered crime was characterised both by long-term stability and short-term changes. There was no linear development of decline or increase, as has been suggested for other places. Rising percentages of female defendants among the recorded offences of the Verhöramt were mostly related to property offences, at least in the eighteenth century. The chapter has shown that short-term events like war and subsistence crises evidently influenced prosecution patterns. But their effect was not always the same. Therefore, a more nuanced approach about the link between urbanisation, independence, economic distress and female offending is needed. Although general patterns can be detected, they say little if the local context is not taken into account.
Feeley, ‘The Decline of Women’; King, Crime and Law; Van der Heijden and Koningsberger, ‘Continuity or Change’.
Jütte, ‘Geschlechtsspezifische Kriminalität’.
Feeley and Aviram, ‘Social Historical Studies’, 153.
Feeley and Little, ‘The Vanishing Female’, 235; Beattie, Policing and Punishment, 65.
Ariadne Schmidt, Prosecuting Women : A Comparative Perspective on Crime and Gender before the Dutch Criminal Courts, c.1600–1810 (Leiden: Brill, 2019).
Dirk-Jaap Noordam, ‘Criminaliteit van vrouwen in Leiden in de 17de en 18de eeuw’, Jaarboekje voor Geschiedenis en Oudheidkunde van Leiden en Omstreken 77 (1985): 38; Schmidt, Prosecuting Women.
Gerd Schwerhoff, ‘Kriminalität in der Reichsstadt Köln um 1700—ein neuer Blick vom Turm’, Geschichte in Köln 55, no. 1 (2008): 71–72.
Feeley and Aviram, ‘Social Historical Studies’, 153.
Wolfgang Behringer, ‘Weibliche Kriminalität in Kurbayern in der Frühen Neuzeit’, in Von Huren und Rabenmüttern: weibliche Kriminalität in der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Otto Ulbricht (Köln: Böhlau, 1995), 65–66.
Härter, Policey und Strafjustiz, 539.
Behringer, ‘Weibliche Kriminalität’, 78; Härter, Policey und Strafjustiz, chap. 8.
Van der Heijden, ‘Women, Violence and Urban Justice’, 93.
Beattie, ‘Criminality of Women’, 71; Shoemaker, Prosecution and Punishment, 184–86; Moch, Moving Europeans, 2003, 146.
Anne-Marie Kilday, ‘Criminally Poor? Investigating the Link Between Crime and Poverty in Eighteenth Century England’, Cultural and Social History 11, no. 4 (2014): 511; Schwerhoff, Aktenkundig und Gerichtsnotorisch, 149–55.
Jan De Vries, European Urbanization, 1500–1800 (London: Methuen and Co, 1984), 45; Pfister, Bevölkerungsgeschichte.
King, Crime and Law, 217–18.
Paul Hohenberg and Lynn Hollen Lees, The Making of Urban Europe, 1000–1994 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 226.
Jan Lucassen, ‘Immigranten in Holland 1600–1800: een kwantitatieve benadering’, Centrum voor de Geschiedenis van Migranten Working Paper 3 (2002): 26–28; Gwenda Morgan and Peter Rushton, Rogues, Thieves, and the Rule of Law the Problem of Law Enforcement in North-East England, 1718–1800 (London: ucl Press, 1998).
Els Kloek, Wie hij zij, man of wijf : vrouwengeschiedenis en de vroegmoderne tijd: drie Leidse studies (Hilversum: Verloren, 1990), 133.
Erika Kuijpers, Migrantenstad: immigratie en sociale verhoudingen in 17e-eeuws Amsterdam (Hilversum: Verloren, 2005), 192–94; Schmidt and Van der Heijden, ‘Women Alone’, 24; Lotte Van de Pol and Erika Kuijpers, ‘Poor Women’s Migration to the City: The Attraction of Amsterdam Health Care and Social Assistance in Early Modern Times’, Journal of Urban History 32, no. 1 (2005): 44–60; Peter Earle, ‘The Female Labour Market in London in the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries’, Economic History Review 42, no. 3 (1989): 328–53; Morgan and Rushton, Rogues, Thieves, and the Rule of Law, 102.
Schmidt and Van der Heijden, ‘Women Alone’, 24.
Ogilvie, Bitter Living, 54–63; Rublack, The Crimes of Women, 154; Wiesner-Hanks, ‘Having Her Own Smoke’.
Wiesner-Hanks, Working Women, 5.
Roth, Stadt und Bürgertum, 72, 132.
Wiesner-Hanks, Working Women, 5.
Rublack, The Crimes of Women, 152–54; Eibach, Frankfurter Verhöre, 342.
Roth, Stadt und Bürgertum, 86; Inge Kaltwasser, Häusliches Gesinde in der freien Stadt Frankfurt am Main: Rechtsstellung, soziale Lage und Aspekte des sozialen Wandels 1815–1866 (Frankfurt am Main: Kramer, 1989), 75.
Kaltwasser, Häusliches Gesinde, 78.
Sylvia Hahn, Migration—Arbeit—Geschlecht: Arbeitsmigration in Mitteleuropa vom 17. bis zum Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008), 208; Steve Hochstadt, ‘Migration in Preindustrial Germany’, Central European History 16, no. 3 (1983): 202; Renate Dürr, Mägde in der Stadt: das Beispiel Schwäbisch Hall in der Frühen Neuzeit (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1995).
Jan Lucassen, ‘Female Migration to Amsterdam’, in Women of the Golden Age: An International Debate on Women in Seventeenth-Century Holland, England and Italy, ed. Els Kloek, Nicole Teeuwen, and Marijke Huisman (Hilversum: Verloren, 1994), 85; Tim Meldrum, Domestic Service and Gender, 1660–1750: Life and Work in the London Household (London: Longman, 2000), 14.
Jütte, ‘Geschlechtsspezifische Kriminalität’, 96–97; Ulbricht, ‘Einleitung’, 18–21; Van der Heijden, ‘Women and Crime’, 2016, 5–7; Beattie, Policing and Punishment, 63–71.
Walker, Crime, Gender, and Social Order, 4.
For an overview of nineteenth century discourses on the nature of female offenders, see: Karsten. Uhl, Das verbrecherische Weib: Geschlecht, Verbrechen und Strafen im kriminologischen Diskurs: 1800–1945 (Münster: lit, 2003).
Arnot and Usborne, ‘Why Gender and Crime’, 14.
IfSG, Criminalia 1600–1806.
IfSG, Criminalia 1600–1806.
Ulbricht, ‘Einleitung’, 19.
Pieter Spierenburg, ‘How Violent Were Women ? Court Cases in Amsterdam, 1650–18101’, Crime, History & Societies 1, no. 1 (1997): 17; Van der Heijden, ‘Women, Violence and Urban Justice’, 77; Schwerhoff, ‘Geschlechtsspezifische Kriminalität’, 91; Behringer, ‘Weibliche Kriminalität’, 65–66; Jütte, ‘Geschlechtsspezifische Kriminalität’, 96–97.
Spierenburg, ‘How Violent Were Women?’, 26.
Hurl-Eamon, Gender and Petty Violence, 66–67; Van der Heijden, ‘Women, Violence and Urban Justice’, 84; Also: Anne-Marie Kilday, Women and Violent Crime in Enlightenment Scotland (London: Boydell Press, 2015), 207; Sanne Muurling and Marion Pluskota, ‘The Gendered Geography of Violence in Bologna, 17th-19th Centuries’, in The Routledge History Handbook of Gender and the Urban Experience, ed. Deborah Simonton (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), 153–63.
Eibach, ‘Violence and Masculinity’, 234–35.
Criminalia 3945 (1731); Criminalia 7262 (1756); Criminalia 7723 (1761); Criminalia 7861 (1762); Criminalia 6080 (1748).
Criminalia 4823 (1738); Criminalia 6048 (1748); Criminalia 9804 (1788).
Eibach, Frankfurter Verhöre, 217–74; For the importance of women in neighbourhood conflicts, see: Van der Heijden, Women and Crime, 2016, chap. 5; Jacob Melish, ‘Women and the Courts in the Control of Violence between Men. Evidence from a Parisian Neighborhood under Louis XIV’, French Historical Studies 33, no. 1 (2010): 1–31.
IfSG, Criminalia 1600–1806.
Criminalia 4030 (1732); Criminalia 5155 (1740); Criminalia 7951 (1763); Criminalia 8888 (1776).
Criminalia 9184 (1780).
Criminalia 3850 (1730).
Criminalia 5004 (1739); Criminalia 5471 (1743) Criminalia 5745 (1744); Criminalia 5882 (1746); 8645 (1772). Also chapter 6.
Compare: Eibach, Frankfurter Verhöre, 89–108.
IfSG, Criminalia 1600–1806.
Van Dülmen, Theater des Schreckens, 187.
Ulrike Ludwig, ‘Strafvervolgung und Gnadenpraxis in Kursachsen unter dem Eindruck des Dreißigjährigen Krieges’, Militär und Gesellschaft in der Frühen Neuzeit 10 (2006): 200–219.
Eibach, Frankfurter Verhöre, 105–8; Härter, Policey und Strafjustiz, 536, 1080; Schnabel-Schüle, Überwachen und Strafen, 272.
Eibach, Frankfurter Verhöre, 95, 105–108.
Ralf Roth, ‘“… der blühende Handel macht uns alle glücklich …”: Frankfurt am Main in der Umbruchszeit 1780–1825’, Historische Zeitschrift. Beihefte 14 (1991): 362–63; Eibach, Frankfurter Verhöre, 106–7; Härter, Policey und Strafjustiz, 534–37, 553–56.
Eibach, Frankfurter Verhöre, 93–95.
Ibid., 295.
Rebekka Habermas, Diebe vor Gericht: die Entstehung der modernen Rechtsordnung im 19. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2008), 34–35, 395–96.
Schwerhoff, Aktenkundig und Gerichtsnotorisch, 152–53; Eric A. Johnson, Urbanization and Crime: Germany, 1871–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 188–89.
King, Crime and Law, 220; Van der Heijden and Koningsberger, ‘Continuity or Change’.
Eibach, Frankfurter Verhöre, 158, 178; Joachim Eibach, ‘Arme Frauen—Rebellierende Frauen: Der Aufruhr gegen die Sachsenhäuser Bäcker im Jahr 1801’, in Blickwechsel: Frankfurter Frauenzimmer um 1800, ed. Ursula Kern (Frankfurt am Main: Kramer, 2007), 78–87.
Eibach, ‘Violence and Masculinity’.
Feeley and Aviram, ‘Social Historical Studies’, 154; Ulbricht, ‘Einleitung’, 14; Peter Wettmann-Jungblut, Der nächste Weg zum Galgen? Eigentumskriminalität in Südwestdeutschland 1550–1850 (Saarbrücken, 1997), 93.
Ulbricht, ‘Einleitung’, 14.
Eibach, Frankfurter Verhöre, 294; Beattie, ‘Criminality of Women’, 65, 70–71.
Rublack, The Crimes of Women, 257.
Carsten Küther, Menschen auf der Straße: vagierende Unterschichten in Bayern, Franken und Schwaben in der zweiten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1983), 20–28; Martin Rheinheimer, Arme, Bettler und Vaganten: Uberleben in der Not 1450–1850 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2000), 15–16; Wolfgang Von Hippel, Armut, Unterschichten, Randgruppen in der Frühen Neuzeit, 2nd ed. (München: Oldenbourg, 2013), 15.
Schindling, ‘Wachstum und Wandel’, 224; Roth, ‘Der blühende Handel’.
Roth, Stadt und Bürgertum, 131.
Soliday, A Community in Conflict, 158; Eibach, Frankfurter Verhöre, 255.
Roth, Stadt und Bürgertum, 127–33.
Soliday, A Community in Conflict, 158; Heinz Karpf, Eine Stadt und ihre Einwanderer: 700 Jahre Migrationsgeschichte in Frankfurt am Main (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2013), 67–77.
Robert Jütte, ‘Poverty and Poor Relief’, in Germany: A New Social and Economic History, Vol. 2: 1630–1800, ed. Sheilagh Ogilvie and Bob Scribner, vol. Vol. 2 (London: Arnold, 1996), 399.
Moritz, Versuch einer Einleitung, 1785, 1:209.
Faber, Topographische, politische und historische Beschreibung, 1788, 1:141–42.
Daniela Heinisch, ‘Unterstützungsgesuche und Bittschreiben von Frauen an den Frankfurter Rat, 1770–1809’, in Prekariat im 19. Jahrhundert: Armenfürsorge und Alltagsbewältigung in Stadt und Land, ed. Anke Sczesny, Rolf Kießling, and Johannes Burkhardt (Augsburg: Wißner Verlag, 2014), 118.
Von Hippel, Armut, Unterschichten, Randgruppen, 21.
François Dreyfus, Sociétés et mentalités à Mayence dans la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1968), 353.
John M. Beattie, ‘The Pattern of Crime in England 16601800’, Past & Present 62, no. 1 (1974): 95.
Schwerhoff, Köln im Kreuzverhör, 358–61.
Kilday, ‘Criminally Poor’, 521; Also: Peter King, Crime, Justice, and Discretion in England, 1740–1820 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 145–53; Schmidt, Prosecuting Women.
Eibach, Frankfurter Verhöre, 93–99.
Ibid., 305.
Ibid., 350.
IfSG, Criminalia 1600–1806.
King, Crime and Law, 212–14; Beattie, Policing and Punishment, 65.
Similar patterns are found elsewhere in early modern Germany: Bernd Rüdiger, ‘Kriminalität während des Dreißigjährigen Krieges in Leipzig: Ein Sonderfall innerstädtischer Kommunikation’, in Die Stadt als Kommunikationsraum, ed. Helmut Bräuer and Elke Schlenkrich (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2001), 609–32.
King, Crime and Law, 212.
See f.e. Criminalia 1788–1791 (1689). Similar cases: Criminalia 1911 (1692) Criminalia 2492–2493 (1707).
Jeannette Kamp, ‘Between Agency and Force: The Dynamics of Desertion in a Military Labour Market, Frankfurt Am Main 1650–1800’, in Desertion in the Early Modern World: A Comparative History, ed. Matthias Van Rossum and Jeannette Kamp (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 59.
Kamp, ‘Controlling Strangers’, 57.
Jeannette Kamp, ‘Female Crime and Household Control in Early Modern Frankfurt Am Main’, The History of the Family 21, no. 4 (1 October 2016): 11–13.