On the feast of St. Michael, September 1659, a thirteen-year-old peasant
girl left her family's rural home to work as a maid in the nearby city
of Braunschweig. Just two years later, Grethe Schmidt found herself
imprisoned and accused of murdering her bastard child, even though the
fact of her pregnancy was inconclusive and no infant's body was found to
justify the severe measures used against her. The tale spiraled outward
to set a defense lawyer and legal theorist against powerful city
magistrates and then upward to a legal contest between that city and its
overlord, the Duchy of Brunswick, with the city's independence and
ancient liberties hanging in the balance. Death and a Maiden tells a
fascinating story that begins in the bedchamber of a house in Brunswick
and ends at the court of Duke Augustus in the city of Wolfenbettel, with
political intrigue along the way. After thousands of pages of testimony
and rancorous legal exchange, it is still not clear that any murder
happened.
Myers infuses the story of Grethe's arrest, torture, trial, and sentence
for "suspected infanticide" with a detailed account of the workings of
the criminal system in continental Europe, including the nature of
interrogations, the process of torture, and the creation of a "criminal"
identity over time. He presents an in-depth examination of a criminal
system in which torture was both legal and an important part of criminal
investigations. This story serves as a captivating slice of European
history as well as a highly informative look at the condition of poor
women and the legal system in mid-seventeeth century Germany. General
readers and scholars alike will be riveted by Grethe's ordeal.
