Murder, Melancholy and the Insanity Defence in Eighteenth-century Hamburg

Abstract

Let me begin with two strikingly similar cases of homicide, separated by two centuries. In his book on madness in sixteenth-century Germany, Erik Midelfort relates the story of Conrad Herman, a master dyer from the town of Laufen on the River Neckar. On 12 January 1590 Herman murdered his wife and attacked his four slumbering children. The subsequent investigation revealed that he ‘often displayed melancholy and practised weird nonsense’. Perplexed by Herman’s behaviour, the authorities consulted the Tübingen legal faculty. In the sixteenth century, such practices had become, according to Midelfort, ‘routine … in all difficult cases’. The jurists in Tübingen accepted the existence of an insanity defence, referring to the then thousand-year-old legal code of Justinian, yet concluded that despite his obvious ‘melancholic disorder’, Herman had been compos mentis when he slew his wife ‘fiercely, but … knowingly and intentionally’. They based that opinion on his demonstration of ‘good understanding’ before and after the crime, and their suspicion that his madness was counterfeit. He was beheaded. Midelfort observes that in this case, ‘[n]o one thought of consulting a physician, because the legal question was framed in such a way that lawyers and laymen themselves could judge the relevant issues’.¹