Description
Book SynopsisMedieval Violence provides a detailed analysis of the practice of medieval brutality, focusing on a thriving region of northern France in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. It examines how violence was conceptualised in this period, and uses this framework to investigate street violence, tavern brawls, urban rebellions, student misbehaviour, and domestic violence. The interactions between these various forms of violence are examined in order to demonstrate the complex and communicative nature of medieval brutality. What is often dismissed as dysfunctional behaviour is shown to have been highly strategic and socially integral. Violence was a performance, dependent upon the spaces in which it took place. Indeed, brutality was contingent upon social and cultural structures. At the same time, the common stereotype of the thoughtlessly brutal Middle Ages is challenged, as attitudes towards violence are revealed to have been complex, troubled, and ambivalent. Whether violenc
Trade ReviewSkoda's overview of the medieval theory and norms with regard to aggression and its punishment, on the one hand, and the concrete violations of these customs and the penalties imposed upon the perpetrators, on the other, is one of the most complete summaries of the use of violence in medieval France available. It rightly stresses the fact that the vengeful acts of citizens were not meaningless or aberrant irregularities, but phenomena at the heart of urban life. * Jelle Haemers, The American Historical Review *
Skoda must be applauded for the strength and coverage of her analysis of gender and medieval violence and her successful approach to integrating archival and literary sources. * Zrinka Stahuljak, French Studies *
Skoda not only fills an important lacuna but also articulates, in a highly nuanced manner, how violence functioned as a popular form of communication and was integral to premodern communities sense of self. Interdisciplinarity was a prerequisite for this book, and Skoda's is an accomplished one. She has gone where earlier social and criminal historians were reluctant to venture... The result is a thought-provoking cultural history of premodern and mainly urban violence that will be read with great profit, especially by social and urban historians, and by students of violence in general. * Guy Geltner, Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis *
Table of ContentsIntroduction ; 1. Grammars of Violence ; 2. Violence on the Street in Paris and Artois ; 3. 'Oes comme il fierent grans caus !': Tavern violence in thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century Paris and Artois ; 4. Student Violence in Thirteenth- and Early Fourteenth-Century Paris ; 5. Urban Uprisings ; 6. Domestic Violence in Paris and Artois ; Conclusion
