Who Are You?: Identification, Deception, and Surveillance in Early Modern Europe

Who are you? And how can you prove it? How were individuals described and identified by people who had never seen them before, in the centuries before photography and fingerprinting, in a world without centralized administrations, where names and addresses were constantly changing?

In Who Are You?, Valentin Groebner traces the early modern European history of identification practices and identity papers. The documents, seals, stamps, and signatures were — and are — powerful tools that create...