If you look carefully, you will see a corpse dressed in white lying in a coffin in this illustration of the Laws of Hamburg from 1497. This painting shows the Medieval practice of _cruentation_, a type of jurisprudence where someone convicted of murder would put their hands on their alleged victim – the idea was that God would make the victim bleed if the murderer touched the corpse. Cruentation continued to be used as a way of determining guilt until the Middle of the 1700s.
