ABSTRACT
One of the most fascinating aspects of criminal adjudication is the method of identifying the criminal. Who committed the crime? While crime-detecting agents of the twenty-first century use an array of sophisticated methods, such as fingerprinting, psychology and DNA sampling, no such methods were available to their sixteenth- and seventeenth-century counterparts. In fact, during the early modern period there were hardly any police forces to speak of. How, then, did contemporaries detect and report their culprits? These intriguing questions are being addressed using Frankfurt am Main from 1562 to 1696 as a case study.
