Defiled Trades and Social Outcasts

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