Pieter Spierenburg

Sophie Body-Gendrot

Historical and Contemporary Perspectives

Violence in Europe

Clive Emsley

Herman Roodenburg

Eric Arthur Johnson

This first volume of a two-volume collection of essays provides a comprehensive examination of the idea of social control in the history of Europe. The uniqueness of these volumes lies in two main areas. First, the contributors compare methods of social control on many levels, from police to shaming, church to guilds. Second, they look at these formal and informal institutions as two-way processes. Unlike many studies of social control in the past, the scholars here examine how individuals and groups that are being controlled necessarily participate in and shape the manner in which they are regulated. Hardly passive victims of discipline and control, these folks instead claimed agency in that process, accepting and resisting -- and thus molding -- the controls under which they functioned. The essays in this volume focus on the interplay of ecclesiastical institutions and the emerging states, examining discipline from a bottom-up perspective. Book jacket.

Social Control in Europe

Though the prison is central to the penal system of most modern nations, many believe that imprisonment did not become a major judicial sanction until the nineteenth century. In this readable history, Pieter Spierenburg traces the evolution of the prison during the early modern period and illustrates the important role it has played as both disciplinary institution and penal option from the late sixteenth century onward. Placing particular emphasis on the prisons of the Netherlands, Germany, and France, The Prison Experience examines not only the long-term nature of prisons and the historical conceptions of their prisoners but also looks at the daily lives of inmates—supplementing our understanding of social change and day-to-day life in early modern Europe.

Disciplinary Institutions and Their Inmates in Early Modern Europe

The Prison Experience

Violences

Petrus Cornelis 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

A Cultural and Anthropological History of Preindustrial Europe

The Broken Spell

This innovative book tells the fascinating tale of the long histories of violence, punishment, and the human body, and how they are all connected. Taking the decline of violence and the transformation of punishment as its guiding themes, the book highlights key dynamics of historical and social change, and charts how a refinement and civilizing of manners, and new forms of celebration and festival, accompanied the decline of violence. Pieter Spierenburg, a leading figure in historical criminology, skillfully extends his view over three continents, back to the middle ages and even beyond to the Stone Age. Ranging along the way from murder to etiquette, from social control to popular culture, from religion to death, and from honor to prisons, every chapter creatively uses the theories of Norbert Elias, while also engaging with the work of Foucault and Durkheim. The scope and rigor of the analysis will strongly interest scholars of criminology, history, and sociology, while the accessible style and the intriguing stories on which the book builds will appeal to anyone interested in the history of violence and punishment in civilization.

Civilizing the Body Through Time

Violence and Punishment

This book offers a fascinating and insightful overview of seven centuries of murder in Europe. It tells the story of the changing face of violence and documents the long-term decline in the incidence of homicide. From medieval vendettas to stylised duels, from the crime passionel of the modern period right up to recent public anxieties about serial killings and underworld assassinations, the book offers a richly illustrated account of murder’s metamorphoses. In this original and compelling contribution, Spierenburg sheds new light on several important themes. He looks, for example, at the transformation of homicide from a private matter, followed by revenge or reconciliation, into a public crime, always subject to state intervention. Combining statistical data with a cultural approach, he demonstrates the crucial role gender played in the spiritualisation of male honour and the subsequent reduction of male-on-male aggression, as well as offering a comparative view of how different social classes practised and reacted to violence. This authoritative study will be of great value to students and scholars of the history of crime and violence, criminology and the sociology of violence. At a time when murder rates are rising and public fears about violent crime are escalating, this book will also interest the general reader intrigued by how our relationship with murder reached this point.

Pieter Spierenburg

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