When
Where
Title: Moving [Un]seen, [Un]heard, and [Un]detected in Early Modern Germany
Come join us on various Wednesdays this Fall semester for the History Lunch Lecture Symposium. We will gather in Chávez 406a to learn more about our colleagues' scholarship.
Abstract: Early modern crime involved the movement of people as perpetrators, victims, and witnesses moved throughout cities, towns, and along the roads in between. Networks of people formed by way of shared transgressive experiences that brought them to court in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This chapter examines the movements of people accused of crimes and their efforts at concealment. Actions of mobility determined where crime occurred and if knowledge about the crime circulated. In the cases examined in this chapter, efforts to conceal crimes failed because of the existence of the testimonies and investigations by authorities. Time of day, location, and people involved with the crime also tells us more about the intentions behind the transgression and the circumstances surrounding it. I argue that these details, efforts at concealment, and movement demonstrate that people committing these transgressions often tried to navigate through cities and their crimes without changing the spatial meaning of that place in a way that linked back to them. Changes to the meanings of spaces were inevitable, particularly if a crime left an imprint on peoples’ lives, but associating those changes with the actions of specific individuals added further insight into not only why those meanings were changed, but also the context and associations of those changes.
Short Bio: Abby Gibbons is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Division for Late Medieval and Reformation Studies and the Department of History. She specializes in the history of crime with interests in the history of space and social networks. She is currently a Bilinski Fellow and has conducted research as a DAAD Fellow in Augsburg, Germany. Abby spent the summer doing research at the City Archives in Augsburg and at the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbüttel, Germany. She is currently writing her dissertation entitled “Shifting Shapes in the Shadows: Crime, Space, and Networks in Early Modern Germany.”
Open to the University community!