Death and a Maiden

David Myers’s new book is fashioned from all the elements of a good mystery: a poor serving-girl taken advantage of by a wealthy son, a missing infant’s corpse, a daring defence attorney, and a city’s justice machine anxious to avoid external interference and any questioning of its authority. This is not Law and Order, but instead the surprisingly well-documented case of Margarethe Schmidt, a sixteen-year-old girl accused and doggedly prosecuted for infanticide in the city of Brunswick (Braunschweig) in 1661. Myers’s reconstruction of the incident yields insights into changes underway in seventeenth-century legal systems and the growth of new attitudes towards the prosecutorial process and legal procedures. English-speaking scholars of Germany are usually familiar with the modern city of Braunschweig only as the ‘jumping-off’ point from the train to the bus en route to the treasures of the Herzog August Library in nearby Wolfenbüttel. Although its pre-war urban core held the largest collection of medieval and early modern half-timbered houses in the German world, 90 per cent of Braunschweig’s city centre was destroyed in a relentless series of forty-two Allied air raids that reached their peak with the firestorms of 14/15 October 1944. Thus it is often difficult for the modern visitor to imagine what the pre-modern town was like, and how its various Stadtviertel were related to the urbanised whole, since its post-war rebuild was not a loving one like those of Nuremberg or Munich, but a largely utilitarian, even insipid, reconstruction more similar to those of Frankfurt or Essen. It is for this reason that the opening chapters of Myers’s work are particularly fascinating, since they brilliantly evoke a world that has truly been lost. Places such as Hagen, Altstadt, Neustadt and Sack, sites that today are little more than names adorning squares faced with bland Wirtschaftwunder blocks, are here made to live and breathe with all their pre-modern congestion, social tensions and gritty realities

Archaeology · Art history · Economic Justice · German · Girl · Political science · Sociology · Visitor pattern · Classics · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · Homicide, Infanticide, and Child Abuse · Law · Medical History and Research · Psychology