Jason Coy's monograph marks one of the first attempts by a U.S. scholar to mine the archival resources in Ulm, an important south German city-state during the medieval and early modern periods. His intriguing study of banishment and its connections to social control shows the riches Ulm possesses for legal and urban historians.

Coy focuses on the sixteenth century, when expulsion accounted for about 40 percent of the punishments in Ulm. As economic and social conditions worsened in the second half of the century, the number of criminal prosecutions in the city rose, causing the majority of banishments to occur in the 1580s and 1590s. For Coy, banishment offered Ulm's authorities a flexible tool to police the boundaries of inclusion in their community. It occupied a useful middle ground between oral admonitions and fines and the more severe punishments of maiming or execution. Ulm's authorities therefore viewed banishment as a way to reorder social and power relations by removing individuals who undermined the community's security and prosperity.

The heart of Coy's study examines how Ulm's high court used banishment to regulate three different social groups: vagrants, migrant workers, and citizens. Not surprisingly, vagrants underwent the most expulsion sentences. They were also the most prone to recidivism, a tendency that challenged the city's attempts at social control through banishment. Nevertheless, banishing vagrants served to demarcate the boundary between those included and excluded from the community, especially when combined with additional penalties like the pillory and whipping through the streets. The ways in which expulsion delineated the “sociospatial boundaries” of the community appear also in the treatment of migrant workers, noncitizens with official permission to reside in the city. When these resident aliens threatened Ulm's moral or economic stability, especially through illicit sexual behavior, Ulm's authorities employed banishment to preserve the local social order. Here Coy reveals a disparity in how authorities punished citizens and noncitizens in cases of adultery, as magistrates sought to reincorporate offending male and female citizens into their established households while removing noncitizens from the community. In the process, authorities emphasized the difference “between enfranchised insiders and unwanted outsiders” (75).

Coy builds on these findings in his final two chapters by considering the expulsion of citizens. He argues that Ulm's banishment policies rested on common goals shared by the council and its citizens, namely, the preservation of traditional ideals such as order and respectability. For Coy, social control in Ulm was not imposed from the top down but was horizontal, regulated by communal standards and public participation in the judicial process. The expulsion of citizens, most of whom were denounced by fellow citizens and displayed escalating patterns of disobedience, therefore reveals the limits of tolerance the community had for misbehavior. Coy connects these attitudes to the Reformation, arguing the majority of expelled citizens violated some aspect of reformed moral law and therefore had to be purged to protect the moral standard of Christian living.

Coy's observations are often insightful, but he could have examined the religious aspect of punishment in greater detail. This is especially important for a punishment like expulsion, which removed the individual from participation in the local church community. Coy frequently states that one goal of policing the community's boundaries was to purify a “godly community” based on evangelical morality. This claim is more asserted than developed as a separate theme, however, since Coy does not show how religious motivations might have fused with or buttressed the social control objectives he details. Indeed, Coy places great emphasis on the creation of a new patrician-led council in 1548, but he does not consider how the contemporaneous establishment of an institutional Lutheran church in the city might have affected penal policies. The city's official shift to Lutheranism culminated in the 1550s and therefore coincided with the rise in prosecution during the second half of the sixteenth century. An analysis of how this development accentuated the late medieval emphasis on communal religiosity, and how it compared to developments in Catholic or other Protestant territories, would have augmented the persuasiveness of Coy's argument. The religious dynamics in the city may well have played a lesser role for magistrates and citizens than power or social concerns, but since Coy falls back on the idea of a civitas christiana to describe many motivations, he needed to engage more fully with how local religion shaped sixteenth-century punishment.

This critique aside, Coy has done a great service in exposing an English-speaking readership to Ulm's plentiful archives. This monograph will help shift discussion of public punishment away from execution and gruesome maiming to the more quotidian methods utilized by magistrates. It makes an important contribution to our understanding of early modern punishment, and Coy's analysis of expulsion will likely spur more research into this neglected yet crucial area of penal practice.