Defiled Trades and Social Outcasts

A social and cultural history of 'dishonourable people' (unehrliche Leute). This book examines an outcast group in early modern Germany which included executioners, skinners, grave-diggers, shepherds, barber-surgeons, millers, latrine-cleaners, and bailiffs, and shows how the pollution anxieties of early modern Germans structured social and political relations within 'honourable' society.