Jason Coy had the good idea to study the sixteenth-century practice of banishment as a formal punishment in the Imperial city of Ulm. He is entirely correct that despite historians' fascination with torture and the more gruesome punishments, especially bloody executions, banishment was far more common, ranking second in Ulm only to stern verbal admonitions as a way of dealing with deviance and crime. All told, of the 2,531 offenders sentenced in sixteenth-century Ulm, 1,033 suffered formal banishment, almost all of them after 1550, when formal, written procedures became the norm. Before 1550, it is actually hard to tell how many offenders were expelled from the city because they were usually just shoved out of town, sometimes in groups, without any written procedures (and therefore with no surviving records). Coy's study is one of the first in English to study this important phenomenon, but he makes some useful comparisons, for example, with Jeffery Tyler's work on Augsburg and Gerd Schwerhoff's study of Cologne as well.

Most common among the exiled were the vagrants and beggars who had no fixed or recognized place in Ulm. When times got tough in the late sixteenth century, the city fathers found it convenient and inexpensive merely to expel them, thus marking a sharp boundary between insiders and these unfortunate outsiders. It was somewhat harder to get rid of resident aliens, however, for they included many servants and workers who had come in from the surrounding countryside and enjoyed at least temporary work permits. Without their contribution, most cities of the early modern period could not function, and so urban officials were reluctant to banish them except for more serious offenses. But especially in cases of adultery, outsiders (and especially maidservants from noncitizen families) were banished, and steps were taken to preserve or restore local marriages. Most difficult were the cases of full citizens, often guildsmen, who formed the backbone of Ulm's civic society. The high court of Ulm was extremely reluctant to banish them, except for the most egregious offenses against civic order, and in many cases they were allowed to petition successfully for relaxation of their exile.

Unfortunately, we cannot tell much about what these exiled offenders experienced on the road. Were they accepted elsewhere or shunned? Did they suffer repeated banishment wherever they went? No one tracked them to tell this part of their story, but some exiles were desperate enough to return to Ulm, where they were often banished again or even a third time. A broader examination of more than just one town's records might have allowed Coy to follow such vagrants and exiles, but the yield for such difficult research might be too slight to justify the effort, at least for a preliminary work such as this. But the general problem of recidivism and of exiles who, for whatever reason, could not stand to stay away from the town that had recently banished them points to a larger problem that Coy does not discuss. How could any city council think that it was dealing effectively with the social problem of poverty and disorderly behavior (including insubordination) if it merely banished offenders, while at the same time accepting, willy-nilly, those whom other cities had just banished? Perhaps it would be too much to expect the city fathers to have reflected on this puzzle in the midst of their deliberations, but learned jurists at Germany's universities probably did consider the problem in the midst of more general reflections on punishment, social inclusion, and exclusion. Did not Ulm consult the jurists of Tübingen in difficult cases? Or were these cases deemed so numerous and so unproblematic that they did not prompt consultations with outside experts?

Coy tells us that Ulm's practice of banishment had its roots in late medieval judicial practice but that the Reformation added a boost to the growing severity of urban social discipline. Here again, comparison would be useful. Can we claim that Ulm along with other Protestant cities were more severe than Catholic cities of the same period? Answering that question would, of course, again require difficult comparative work. Staying just with the records of Ulm, one might, however, be able to say something about church discipline in the city. Did it grow more severe over the decades? Did some offenses come first or only to the attention of consistories or church courts? What do church court records reveal?

Coy believes that Ulm's city fathers became increasingly severe, or even brutal, in their punishments at the end of the sixteenth century. But here the silence of the records before 1550 suggests caution. We apparently cannot know how severely vagrants and beggars were punished in the earlier period. It does seem clear enough that as procedures became more formal, the city court bore down with increasingly well-recorded harshness on the poor. Coy also believes that the elaborate ritual of pillory, whipping, and expulsion was both brutal and intentionally terrifying, but in comparison with the almost 200 criminal executions inflicted in the sixteenth century, these 1,033 banishments represented one of the milder forms of justice available.

At certain points, Coy seems to believe that the practice of neighborly denunciation, by which the court gathered information about drunken, disorderly, and scandalous behavior, was akin to the practice of totalitarian states in the twentieth century, states that depended upon the collaboration and cooperation of their citizens. But it is clear that Ulm was far from totalitarian or even absolute in its jurisdiction and capacities. Indeed, early modern towns required the cooperation of their citizens because they had far too small a force of beadles and constables to keep the peace without the active involvement of all. This was not a sign of the power or terror of the advancing state, but rather the reverse. Coy recognizes this and shows convincingly that early modern states such as Ulm used the ritual of exposure, proclamation, and expulsion to bolster their otherwise inadequate authority.

Within its rather strict limits, this is a solid and imaginative study of a sixteenth-century Imperial city, one that sets down conclusions that will prompt comparison with other towns as future scholars look to see how widely applicable Coy's conclusions may be.