Uncompromising guardians of the boundary of honor, artisans pushed the social exclusion of dishonorable people to new extremes in the course of the early modern period. What was at stake for Augsburg's honorable artisans in dishonor conflicts? What did they stand to gain by excluding dishonorable candidates from their guild? What did the authorities stand to lose if the stigma of dishonor spread? We have examined the symbolic logic of pollution and the ambivalent and paradoxical effects of dishonor in the contexts of punishment and healing. Now we turn to the role of dishonor in urban politics and economics, and in the social practices of daily life.

The analysis of the politics of dishonor will proceed on several levels. First we will consider the feasibility of an economic explanation of the phenomenon of dishonor. Were artisans using their stringent honor requirements as a pretext to exclude as many people as possible from their guilds and thus limit economic competition, as many historians have argued? We then survey different types of dishonor conflicts to determine what sets of circumstances tended to trigger dishonor pollution. This typology of conflicts will illustrate that dishonor pollution did not depend on religious sanctions, and that confessional boundaries were not relevant in dishonor conflicts. It will also be shown that dishonor was male-centered. The wives and daughters of defiled tradesmen were less polluting than dishonorable men, and women from the artisan classes were less easily polluted than honorable men.