"Pohl-Zucker’s book, based on her deep archival study, makes significant contributions to legal, political, and social history of early modern Europe. It rejects top-town linear narratives of state building and social disciplining. Instead, we can see how ordinary people contributed to the outcome of cases and to the myriad ways that diverse governmental actors involved themselves in them. Making Manslaughter also shows that even the purportedly systematic Roman law adopted in Europe during this era was in fact ambiguous, inconsistently adopted and interpreted, and it did not fully replace earlier forms of legal and extralegal decision making. Pohl-Zucker’s Making Manslaughter will be appreciated by experts on political will be appreciated by experts on political and social history in the Holy Roman Empire and Swiss Confederation, but also by legal historians of all stripes. Those wanting to understand the operations of early modern courts in the German-speaking lands will be richly rewarded by reading this book." - Jesse Spohnholz, in: Renaissance Quarterly, 62 (4), pp. 1495-1496

Susanne Pohl Zucker, Ph.D (1997), University of Michigan, is an independent historian living near Mainz (Germany). She has published articles on late medieval and early modern criminal justice in Württemberg and Zurich.