Strangers and Misfits: Banishment, Social Control, and Authority in Early Modern Germany. By Jason P. Coy. Leiden and Boston: Brill.

摘要

Jason Coy had the good idea to study the sixteenth-century practice of banish-nment as a formal punishment in the Imperial city of Ulm. He is entirely correctnthat despite historians’ fascination with torture and the more gruesome punish-nments, especially bloody executions, banishment was far more common,nranking second in Ulm only to stern verbal admonitions as a way of dealingnwith deviance and crime. All told, of the 2,531 offenders sentenced in six-nteenth-century Ulm, 1,033 suffered formal banishment, almost all of themnafter 1550, when formal, written procedures became the norm. Before 1550,nit is actually hard to tell how many offenders were expelled from the citynbecause they were usually just shoved out of town, sometimes in groups,nwithout any written procedures (and therefore with no surviving records).