Petrus Cornelis Spierenburg

Anton Schuurman

Families and Life-styles in the Netherlands and Europe, 1550 to the Present

Private Domain, Public Inquiry

Samenvatting van het denken en voelen van de Europese mens in de periode van ca. 1000 tot ca. 1800.

mentaliteit en cultuur in preïndustrieel Europa

De verbroken betovering

Pieter Spierenburg

Pieter Spierenburg traces the long period of evolution that gave rise to the modern debate about punishment, and relates it to the development of Western European society.

Executions and the Evolution of Repression: From a Preindustrial Metropolis to the European Experience

The Spectacle of Suffering

Corporal Punishment, Executions, and Torture in Amsterdam, 1650-1750

Judicial Violence in the Dutch Republic

A Cultural and Anthropological History of Preindustrial Europe

The Broken Spell

"Pieter Spierenburg narrates two sensational murder cases among intimates in eighteenth-century Amsterdam. The cases recounted here both resulted from fatal attraction. They represented the darker side of the eighteenth-century revolution in love. This period witnessed great cultural changes affecting personal relationships and emotions. The new ideal of love demanded that couples spend much of their time together and explore each other's feelings. But this new ideal was meant for married and engaged couples only; for others it meant disaster. Love gone wrong was the theme of the sentimental novels of the age, but it also happened to real people, with fatal consequences." "Written in Blood traces the life and ultimate fate of Nathaniel Donker, who, together with the help of his mistress, brutally murders and dismembers his wife. The second tale focuses on J.B.F. van Gogh, who falls in love with a prostitute; she later rejects him and, when a letter written with his own blood fails to change her mind, he stabs her to death in a fit of passionate rage." "In Written in Blood, the reader gets two stories for the price of one. And, whereas earlier microhistories have been situated in a village or a small town, the scene here is Amsterdam and its canals. Spierenburg reveals in detail what concepts like honor and gender roles came down to in individual lives. He also shows that these murders produced a strange mixture of modern romantic feelings and traditional notions of honor and shame."--BOOK JACKET.

Petrus Cornelis Spierenburg

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