This book consists of twelve chapters, four of them previously published, which are based almost exclusively on evidence from the sentencing summaries of the city of Frankfurt am Main's Strafenbuch between 1562 and 1696. Historians of early modern criminal justice will find some useful information within, mainly in the already published chapters. The author has a keen eye for interesting anecdotes, as well as a firm grasp of the legal mechanics involved in the cases she examines, but much of this book resembles a scholar's research notes rather than her developed and considered conclusions. The work frequently relies on lengthy paraphrases of interrogations, often with no notes, and tentative suggestions of interpretations, rather than finely honed theses.

A good part of the difficulty lies in the author's ambition to establish significant trends without recourse to her sample base. Boes is on firm ground when she is dealing with the full complement of 1,338 sentences, and reveals, for instance, the astonishing speed of the judicial process in Frankfurt, where the great majority of cases were decided within four days of initiation. It is likewise a significant finding that only one-quarter of all criminal indictments ended in execution, and that the punishment in virtually all (95 percent) of the remainder was banishment. Unfortunately, these results remain mostly unexamined and are not weighed against other historians' interpretations. Moreover, analysis of the larger database occurs rarely in the book.

Eager to explore the court's treatment of various disenfranchised groups—gypsies, Jews, homosexuals, women—Boes is forced to rely on small samples to make “qualitative” (xi) generalizations that are often sweeping. This is a daunting but not impossible task, yet Boes's execution of it is frustratingly inconsistent. The chapter on Jewish victims—one of the book's best—convincingly establishes the complicity of the magistracy in promoting and tolerating violent, antisemitic attacks in the community. In this instance, the book's fine, detailed assessment of how victimized Jews were transformed into instigators effectively counterbalances the author's reliance on only eleven cases over the course of 130 years in a city where Jews comprised at least 15 percent of the population. But the chapter on “Jewish resistance,” which immediately follows this one, displays none of the same depth of analysis and is based on only two cases, concluding after lengthy paraphrasing of both transcripts that “despite increasingly difficult judicial recourse, Jewish people resisted” (131).

Large samples do not necessarily make large arguments in social history, but neither do qualitative approaches to small samples inevitably yield insightful results. Indeed, Boes's own apparent discomfort with the limitations of her evidence repeatedly leads to safe, banal conclusions. Chapter 4, based on four late seventeenth-century cases involving gypsies, reveals that members of this despised group knew how to pass themselves off in Christian society: women “camouflaged” (92) themselves in peasant Tracht; men took Christian names. The tenth chapter, on sodomy, contains some fascinating details but, in the end, infers from the low number of cases that there was a high degree of tolerance for homosexuality in German society. Perhaps this was so, but Boes's analysis does not provide sufficient support for that conclusion. Even Chapter 11, which looks at crimes committed by soldiers while away from the battlefield, relies on a relatively large sample of 114 cases and ultimately concludes that men identified as “soldiers” were more likely to be prosecuted for violent crimes in times of peace.

My frustration is aimed at Ashgate Press as much as at the author. This work contains genuine scholarship, albeit often unformulated. The two introductory chapters on Frankfurt and its courts are well written, as are some of the chapters already mentioned. When Boes situates her legal evidence in a broader context, her points become both clearer and more compelling. The seventh chapter, on women and the penal system, astutely conveys the double-edged nature of justice for women, where their perceived weaknesses both hindered and helped them. Had the author engaged with the historical literature more consistently and directly, pursued a closer analysis of language, jettisoned or better integrated weaker chapters, and minimized certain stylistic tics while pulling the evidence together into a more coherent argument with the help of a more conscientious editor, this could have been an excellent book. As it is, the intrepid reader must seek out the pearls amid the rest.