The book examines how women were prosecuted for theft, infanticide, and sexual crimes and challenges the assumption that women were treated more leniently than men. It uses criminal trials to illuminate the social status and conflicts of women living through the Reformation and the 30 Years War; it relates the stories of cutpurses, maidservants’ dangerous liaisons, and artisans’ troubled marriages. The book analyzes labeling and sentencing processes, the punishments inflicted on those found guilty and the way “ordinary” women experienced authority and sexuality, household, and community. It is primarily a study of female deviance and its treatment. It observes the changing cultural, confessional and political attitudes which determined how that deviance was regarded. It also proposes to record the large social consequences of the perception of femininity as the embodiment of unruly desire, how this construction of the “dangerous female” was reproduced by the law and by common men and women in their daily lives. Abbreviations, notes, appendix, bibliography, index