Rage, Revenge, Regret—Judging Emotions in Eighteenth-Century German Murder Trials

This paper explores the expression of emotions by murder defendants in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Germany. Extensive documentation of murder trials make it possible to reconstruct killers’ emotional demeanor as it was perceived by the numerous participants in the trials. Witnesses, interrogators, medical doctors, and pastors described defendants’ expression of emotion, including facial expression and gestures. The killers’ confessions were "ego documents" in which they described their emotions prior to the crime, their feelings towards their victims, and their emotional state as they committed the murders. These varied narratives shaped the course of the trial. The interpretation of emotions was ambivalent: “rage” could be a sign of exceptional malice, or it might be a sign of mental disturbance and justify an insanity defense; “despair” might be viewed as a diabolical rejection of God’s promise of salvation, or as a sign of mental illness. The social status of the defendants (gender, age, class) and of the observers influenced the reading of such emotional signs.  In seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century cases, emotional norms of common people (the killers and their communities) and of elites (judges, medical doctors, theologians) overlapped to a large extent, but by mid-century emotional expectations of commoners and elites often clashed. Common people continued to experience their emotions as something beyond their control and attributed prohibited emotions and the actions they inspired to satanic tribulations. Increasingly secularized elites favored somatic or moral explanations of criminal defendants’ emotional deviance, and used gendered language to express their condemnation: for example, when male defendants expressed despair this was now condemned as “unmanly” rather than diabolical.