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

The prehistory of modern passport and identification technologies: the documents, seals, and stamps, that could document and transform their owner's identity.

Who are you? And how can you prove it? How were individuals described and identified 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 o…