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Defamatory Pictures and Letters in Late Medieval Germany: The Visualisation of Disorder and Infamy

Fakultät für Geschichtswissenschaft, University of Bielefeld, Universitätsstr. 25, D-33615 Bielefeld, Germany

This essay examines a corpus of material including defamatory letters and pictures that comprised one of the peculiarities of socio-legal systems in late medieval Germany. Drawing upon anthropological insights, the argument posits that in a society whose workings were determined to a large extent by unwritten laws and personal ties, the intended effect of such 'out of court' defamatory sanctions-and of medieval legal measures in general-was not so much the need to punish, but instead the restitution of social equilibrium. After tracing the legal and social background of the German practice of using injurious letters and images, the essay proceeds to characterise the mechanisms through which such materials, asserting their claims to legality in specific ways, functioned as media of social exclusion.

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