We have learned a great deal about early-modern Europe from its most unusual characters, those who crossed the social and cultural boundaries within which they should have lived their lives. Think of Menocchio, the self-educated miller, or Arnaud du Tilh, the false Martin Guerre. Their lives reveal the constraints that defined normative behavior but also the possibility for individuals to remake themselves despite those constraints. Randolph Head now adds to the list George Jenatsch (1596–1639). But Jenatsch was no peasant imposter or rustic intellectual; he was a political and military leader in Switzerland during the Thirty Years' War. And while obscure to those not well acquainted with Swiss history, his own land has celebrated him as a national hero and made him the subject of histories, plays, novels, and films. That he should be so is perhaps surprising since Jenatsch was an apostate, a betrayer of his friends and allies, a murderer, and finally, a murder victim.

Head explores Jenatsch's indeterminate nature through language, political affiliation, religion, and social status. His native language was Romansh, but he conducted his affairs in Latin, German, French, and Italian. He was, at different times, tied to Venice, Germany, France, and Austria, but he fought fiercely for his native Graubünden. It was an autonomous region of independent communes, grouped into a federation of “Three Leagues.” Male citizens, those who bore arms for their communes, governed themselves. The powerful Planta and Salis families loomed large in local political life and in Jenatsch's story, but they did not supplant Graubünden democracy. The Graubündners mostly followed the Reformed faith, and they dominated the strategically important Catholic Valtellina region to the south. In the Thirty Years' War—which in the Graubünden pitted Habsburg Austria and Spain against Venice and France—the religiously mixed and politically open region offered great possibilities for someone like Jenatsch who was religiously flexible and ruthlessly ambitious.

Jenatsch started his career in 1617 as a Protestant pastor and client of the Salis clan, which put him in the pro-Venice faction, opposed the Salis' bitter rivals, the pro-Habsburg Plantas. In 1618 Jenatsch was one of the clerical overseers of a mass political rally called to harass Habsburg supporters. His Salis association led to an increasing involvement in local politics increasingly linked to great power strategies. When the Habsburgs occupied the Graubünden in 1621, the Salis group retaliated by assassinating one of its rivals, Pompeius von Planta. Jenatsch was among the assassins, and while he may not have wielded the axe that cut the victim down, it would come to play a large role in his story.

Jenatsch left to fight in Germany where he eventually became a lieutenant- colonel and military recruiter in a French-funded army under the Protestant Duke of Rohan that occupied the Graubünden in 1624. Jenatsch's new prominence put him in a useful position for negotiating with both sides. He used this capacity to advance the Graubündners' goal of regaining the Valtellina and his personal ambition of obtaining noble rank. However, negotiating successfully with the Habsburgs meant changing religions and betraying the Protestant cause. He became a Catholic in 1635, claiming that the conversion soothed his long-troubled conscience. His opponents, unsurprisingly, accused him of opportunism. Head offers a more complex argument. Catholicism's claim to authority based on the traditions of the church could be very appealing to a powerful man. Indeed, Head might have strengthened his case by comparing Jenatsch's conversion to that of other, often aristocratic, converts elsewhere, whose social and political sensibilities fit well with the Church's claim to unitary authority. Austria considered a grant of nobility to Jenatsch, offered the Graubünden control of the Valtellina, and expelled Rohan's army. In January 1639, Jenatsch was on the point of reaching his goals when he was assassinated, by an axe blow. Whether the assassins were his former Salis allies, revenge-seeking Plantas, or someone else remains uncertain. As Head points out, “politics and diplomacy provided a whole range of suspects” (105). Nonetheless, legend has it that the axe was the same as that used to kill Pompeius von Planta years before.

Jenatsch traversed social, cultural, and political boundaries while alive. After his death he crossed the frontier between history and myth, an itinerary Head follows perceptively and entertainingly. The Swiss Confederation created in the post-Napoleonic period, which the Graubünden joined, needed heroes to help construct a national identity. Despite his unsavory character, Jenatsch fit the bill. His role in helping to wrest local autonomy from foreign powers made him seem a forerunner to those putting together a constitution in 1848, the same year Jenatsch first appeared as a character in a play. More plays would follow along with histories and, most importantly, an 1874 novel by Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, Jürg Jenatsch. Generations of Swiss have imbibed Meyer's romantic view of Jenatsch as a patriot and a liberator. Nineteenth-century authors, like Meyer, put his failings down to his flawed nature, but they also found another way to explain his fate: they invented a woman and aptly named her Lucretia von Planta. She was a daughter of Jenatsch's murder victim, Pompeius, yet also his teenage love. But when his personal ambitions carried him away, she was among his assassins, and she wielded the fateful axe. In the twentieth century, the tragic Jenatsch gave way to other depictions of the national hero. Fascists in the 1930s admired him as someone who threw aside weak democratic practices to seize power. Post–World War II storytellers and filmmakers are more skeptical; for them Jenatsch has lost much of his heroic luster. But perhaps it has not entirely disappeared. At least he is good for the tourist trade in the Graubünden, where one can find Jenatsch hotels, mountain lodgings, and restaurants. He also attracts visitors to the cathedral in Chur where he was buried. There in 1959 archeologists excavated a skeleton whose skull had, indeed, been smashed with an axe. History and myth can rejoin in the remains of this slippery boundary crosser.