The "woodstruck" (mukat ets) deed, a Hebrew document that officially records the accidental defloration of a young girl, appears in sixteenth-century Italy, in a block of deeds recorded by Jewish notaries in Rome, in a rabbinic responsum and in the record book of the Padua community. Prior to that, there is no record of such an instrument anywhere in Jewish history and literature, despite the fact that the frequency of accidental defloration must have been a constant. Moreover, the registers of the Jewish notaries of sixteenth-century Rome contain over a hundred such deeds for the sixteenth century alone. The appearance of the woodstruck deed seems to reflect the formalization and bureaucratization of Jewish life in the early modern era. An early sign of this development is the creation, in the fourteenth century, of a formal process of ordaining rabbis and granting them communal appointments. The early modern era also witnessed the emergence of new public institutions and the records of their regulations and activities. Henceforth public institutions, principally the Jewish community, intruded into the life of the individual, as details of his personal life and activities came into the public purview, and, theoretically at least, became subject to supervision and intervention.