Negotiating honor and state authority: The prosecution and punishment of manslaughter in Zuerich and southwest Germany, 1350--1600.

In the German Middle Ages, a Christian condemnation of violence had to be negotiated with Germanic values tolerating slayings in the defense of personal reputation, called honorable manslaughter. Germanic values and Christian beliefs met in a shared concern for the restoration of peace, and clerics were instrumental in developing rituals of reconciliation between feuding parties, rituals which at once validated a traditional toleration for honorable homicide, but also to some degree interjected into the settlement the principle that killing was wrong. Focusing on the Swiss city Zurich and Southwest Germany, I show that medieval jurisdiction was a complex balance between the demands of honor and those of the peace. Since the fourteenth century, however, this balance was increasingly tipped in favor of a more rigorous enforcement of the peace. This development was part of wider processes of state formation between 1400 and 1600, aided by the introduction of Roman law and a close alliance between Church and State during the Reformation era, promoting a state monopoly of violence which threatened the traditional settlement of honorable homicide. The creation of centralized political and legal systems resulted in a stricter surveillance and disciplining of subjects. I trace the impact of this development on cultural attitudes toward violence by analyzing changes in the legal strategies of honorable slayers. Faced with harsher sanctions in the sixteenth century, slayers distanced themselves from the values of an honor culture, abandoning a rhetoric of proud self-assertion for a rhetoric of civic honesty which evolved in the Reformation era. I argue that these changes are an important stage in the disciplining processes traced by Norbert Elias and Michel Foucault, eventually producing the modern repugnance to aggressive, violent self-assertion. The institutional and procedural changes which produced this shift, however, were not the result of a top-down process but worked out through a continuous negotiation between the goals and desires of different groups at various social levels. Drawing on rich and extensive trial records from the archives in Zurich, Reutlingen, and Stuttgart, this study argues for an ongoing and evolving interaction between cultural discourse and legal institutions.PhDEuropean historyLawMedieval historySocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/130797/2/9811159.pd