ABSTRACT
By the middle of the sixteenth century, a growing public discourse about crime paralleled the growing accumulation of official crime records. The increasingly professional jurisprudence of early modern governments borrowed from Roman law, with its inquisitorial procedures and learned tradition, and one constant feature of this trend was a new emphasis on putting things in writing. In 1565, Paul Schumacher, a young linen weaver in the village of Berenzweiler, found himself in debt and unable to pay. He had a prosperous godfather in Basel, a widowed bookbinder named Andreas Hager, whose house was kept by his granddaughter, Sara Falkeisen. Departing from the official confession, Fuglin focuses extended attention on the dissipation of Schumacher's life before the murders. Fuglin traces the origins of crime to earlier moral failures, and thus to behaviours that moral reform could address.
