"Poor sinner's pamphlets" are mostly four-page leaflets, printed and sold cheaply on the occa-sion of an execution. They contain the official court document with death sentence, confession, a religious or moralistic poem, and at times an illustration. During the transitional period of 1750-1820, they were a wide spread cultural practice in Bavaria and the neighboring regions in southern Germany. While the authorities aimed at deterrence and social discipline, bourgeois readers enjoyed an illicit pleasure. Based on the extensive, yet unexplored holdings of Michigan State University's German Criminology Collection, this study investigates form, function, devel-opment and commercialization of the medium and places it within the historical, juridical, liter-ary and medial context. It analyzes the literary features of the poems and how they indicate a change in the conception of the criminal. Five extensive case studies focus on different im-portant aspects: the oral and written publication, crime investigation and confession, the spec-tacle of the execution, robbers' threat to inner security, as well as the connections between several documents related to the same murder case. A detailed comparison of the variants of-fers insights into the succession and adaptation of prints. An excursus presents parodies of death sentences ranging from mere puns to the subversive political satire.
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