This book presents a social and cultural history of �dishonourable people� (unehrliche Leute), an outcast group
in early modern Germany. Executioners, skinners, grave-diggers, shepherds, barber-surgeons, millers, linen-weavers,
sow-gelders, latrine-cleaners, and bailiffs were among the �dishonourable� by virtue of their trades. This dishonour
was either hereditary, often through several generations, or it arose from ritual pollution whereby honourable
citizens could become dishonourable by coming into casual contact with members of the outcast group. The dishonourable
milieu of the city of Augsburg from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries is reconstructed to show the extent
to which dishonour determined the life-chances and self-identity of dishonourable people. The book then investigates
how honourable estates interacted with dishonourable people, and how the pollution anxieties of early modern Germans
structured social and political relations within honourable society.