In 1527, Heinrich Haldenstein fled Zurich after stabbing Heini Bluwler. A year later, he wrote to the city council proposing a reconciliation between himself and the victim's angry father, Johann Bluwler, because he claimed the killing was unintended. Haldenstein convinced councillors to help negotiate a resolution for what they agreed was a case of honorable (ehrlicher) manslaughter. An initial agreement permitted Haldenstein to return, but banned him from attending all festivities in Zurich, joining half the city's guilds, target shooting in the town square, and visiting the city's bathhouses and hospitals. Haldenstein countered with a clever defense. By the time that negotiations were complete, Haldenstein had managed to reduce the punishment significantly. Upon returning, he was only excluded from two guilds and barred from shooting in the city square only on Sundays for one year, and he was permitted to attend weddings if he had an invitation and could attend the annual festivities for his own guild. This story and almost 900 more like it are at the center of Susanne Pohl-Zucker's fascinating new book on manslaughter trials in Württemberg and Zurich from the late fourteenth to the late seventeenth century. The author impressively shows just how flexible and contingent legal practice could be in the early modern era. The choice to look at manslaughter is smart for two reasons. First, because questions of guilt are inherently ambiguous in these cases, the legal and social complexities challenge any simple, straightforward, or predictable pattern that we might associate with social disciplining or state building. Second, because the stakes were high for accused killers, aggrieved families, and cautious political leaders, people on all sides left careful records of their efforts either to achieve reconciliation or to exact vengeance.

Pohl-Zucker organizes her book into five chapters. She devotes the first three to the duchy of Württemberg, where Roman law was embraced slowly, and did not wholly replace customary traditions for reconciling killers with the victims’ kin. Chapter 1 examines changing procedures of restitutions for manslaughter cases from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century. Chapter 2 examines how courts tried to distinguish honorable from dishonorable killing before trials began. Chapter 3 looks at how defendants, killers, state officials, and judges used testimonies from expert witnesses to serve their own interests. While it might seem that testimonies from law professors and medical experts would clarify confusing cases, in practice their advice could be interpreted diversely, second opinions could be sought, and the experts’ credibility challenged. The last two chapters look at Zurich, where the influence of Roman law was less. In chapter 4, Pohl-Zucker shows that customary practices of arbitration continued there longer, though government officials increasingly involved themselves in such negotiations. The final chapter examines the rhetoric that the killers used to defend themselves. In the late fourteenth century, defendants presented killings as in defense of their honor. By the sixteenth century, they used a wider range of defenses, including claiming self-defense and appealing to their records as law-abiding citizens. In the seventeenth century, the previous justifications continued, but killers adopted new explanations that distanced themselves from the moral implications of their acts, by appealing to an overwrought emotional state or poor judgment due to drunkenness.

Pohl-Zucker's book, based on her deep archival study, makes significant contributions to legal, political, and social history of early modern Europe. It rejects top-town linear narratives of state building and social disciplining. Instead, we can see how ordinary people contributed to the outcome of cases and to the myriad ways that diverse governmental actors involved themselves in them. Making Manslaughter also shows that even the purportedly systematic Roman law adopted in Europe during this era was in fact ambiguous, inconsistently adopted and interpreted, and it did not fully replace earlier forms of legal and extralegal decision making.

Pohl-Zucker's Making Manslaughter will be appreciated by experts on political and social history in the Holy Roman Empire and Swiss Confederation, but also by legal historians of all stripes. Those wanting to understand the operations of early modern courts in the German-speaking lands will be richly rewarded by reading this book.