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Death and a Maiden: Infanticide and the Tragical History of Grethe
Schmidt. William David Myers. De Kalb, IL: Northern Illinois
University Press, 2011. Pp. xiii+269. $35.00. ISBN: 978-0-87580669-3.
In this engaging microhistory, Death and a Maiden, William David Myers
uses the records of an enigmatic infanticide case from seventeenth-century
Braunschweig to elucidate legal procedures, power relations, and gender
norms in early modern Germany. The 1661 case, involving a poor servant
girl named Grethe Schmidt, accused of “suspected infanticide,” pitted the
town council of the city of Braunschweig against the young woman’s family
and the unlikely allies who came to its defense. Impoverished and seemingly powerless, the Schmidts enlisted the aid of a renowned jurist and a
powerful nobleman as they sought to save their daughter from the gallows.
The case is revealing and, as Myers argues, it “allows us to observe at close
range the construction of a criminal and to ponder the significance of that
fashioning for understanding the history of crime and of women” (5).
The alleged crime surfaced after pregnancy rumors began to swirl
in Braunschweig about a domestic servant named Grethe Schmidt, the
unmarried, teenaged daughter of an oxherd, who had recently been discharged by her employer, a wealthy local widow. Grethe admitted having
had sex with the widow’s son-in-law, but she denied ever having become
pregnant. The local authorities were eager to convict the young woman for
infanticide but never recovered a body. From the start, the case rested upon
hearsay and innuendo, driven more by the magistrates’ obsession with punishing infanticide and desire to assert their authority than by concrete evidence. Deftly guiding his readers through the intricacies of the case, Myers
provides a fascinating analysis of infanticide prosecution in early modern
Germany. Like witchcraft, infanticide prosecution was fueled by both elite
preoccupations and community involvement; informants provided the
authorities with denunciations of unwed women suspected of the grisly
crime. Part of a broad campaign to control female sexuality, allegations of
infanticide led to the torture and execution of thousands of women in early
modern Germany.
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401
Myers unfolds Grethe Schmidt’s sad tale in chronological fashion and
allows the various witnesses who testified in the case to speak for themselves, preserving much of the original source material in his narrative.
The book is divided into two parts. The first recounts the circumstances
surrounding the alleged crime itself; here Myers uses the rich documentation that survives from the Schmidt case to examine a wide range of issues,
including reputation and the insidious nature of gossip, the trouble midwives and physicians had determining pregnancy, the place of torture and
intimidation in early modern law enforcement, and the often forgotten role
of defense attorneys in the era’s jurisprudence. The second part of Death and
a Maiden examines the larger legal and political implications of the case.
First, Myers explores the Schmidts’ efforts to mount a legal defense of their
beleaguered daughter, until a prominent jurist, Justus Oldekop, rallied to
their defense. Determined to demonstrate the injustice of the prosecution,
the old lawyer presented the case as a particularly egregious example of the
sort of judicial excess he had spent a career trying to curtail. At the end of
the book, Myers also shows how Grethe Schmidt’s fate became entwined
with the political rivalries between the city’s magistrates and its aristocratic
rivals, such as Duke Augustus of Braunschweig-Lüneburg, who, eager to
undermine the town council’s authority, challenged its jurisdiction.
Like any work of scholarship, the book has some minor shortcomings. For example, while Myers relies upon recent scholarship on unwanted
pregnancy, abortion, and infanticide, a few recent works that might have
shed light on some of these topics are missing from his bibliography,
including Joel Harrington’s The Unwanted Child and Lyndal Roper’s
Oedipus and the Devil. He includes Thomas Robisheaux’s Last Witch of
Langenburg in his bibliography, but fails to engage with it, although with
its focus on seventeenth-century jurisprudence and medical science, not
to mention gender norms and female reputation, it would no doubt have
been instructive. Myers’s book is beautifully produced and generally well
edited, but a few small lapses in copyediting remain (endnote number 27
is missing in the introduction, for instance). Despite these oversights, the
book has much to commend it. Death and a Maiden provides readers with
a vivid look into the life of a poor young woman in trouble in the seventeenth century, showing not only the powerful forces arrayed against her,
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but also the surprisingly vigorous defense she mounted with the assistance
of her family and several unexpected allies. As Myers instructs us in this
fascinating microhistory, early modern authorities used infanticide prosecution not only to punish mothers for the murder of their infant children,
but also to declare publicly their intention to police the sexual behavior of
unmarried women. The author’s insights into early modern attitudes about
gender, pregnancy, and infanticide should interest all readers concerned
with the history of women.
Jason P. Coy
College of Charleston
Lesbians in Early Modern Spain. Sherry Velasco. Nashville: Vanderbilt
University Press, 2011. 264 pp. $55.00. ISBN: 978-0-8265-1750-0.
Sherry Velasco’s Lesbians in Early Modern Spain is the first monograph to
attempt a comprehensive analysis of Spanish women’s same-sex eroticism
for the period of 1500–1800. Velasco manages to address numerous theoretical and methodological concerns while also covering substantial ground
with regard to sources, approaches, and interpretations. This admirable
groundbreaking work extends the current understanding of early modern
Spanish women’s lives into the realm of same-sex eroticism. Situating her
work within the scholarship of important scholars of female homoeroticism such as Valerie Traub, Judith M. Bennett, Emma Donoghue, Amanda
Powell, Alison Weber, and others, Velasco examines convent writing,
Inquisition cases, staged comedies, visual arts, and moral and theological
texts to argue that “frequent representations of eroticism between women
. . . were visible to all types of cultural consumers” in the period (5). Her
chapter on “Legal, Medical, and Religious Approaches to Lesbians in Early
Modern Spain” provides a sound overview of current scholarship and
would be a useful chapter for anyone interested in teaching about early
modern female homoeroticism today. The chapter on “Criminal Lesbians”
analyzes legal and Inquisitional cases to probe the reactions by authorities
to female homoeroticism. Many of the cases discussed here have been studied in previously published work, but the chapter’s value lies in examining