A broad-ranging survey of violence in western Europe from the Reformation to the French Revolution. Julius Ruff summarises a huge body of research and provides readers with a clear, accessible, and engaging introduction to the topic of violence in early modern Europe. His book, enriched with fascinating illustrations, underlines the fact that modern preoccupations with the problem of violence are not unique, and that late medieval and early modern European societies produced levels of violence that may have exceeded those in the most violent modern inner-city neighbourhoods. Julius Ruff examines the role of the emerging state in controlling violence; the roots and forms of the period's widespread interpersonal violence; violence and its impact on women; infanticide; and rioting. This book, in the successful textbook series New Approaches to European History, will be of great value to students of European history, criminal justice sciences, and anthropology.

Violence and Emotions in Early Modern Europe examines the purposes for which specific forms of violence and particular emotional states functioned, how they operated in relation to each other, or indeed how one provoked, sustained or diminished the other. These twelve original essays demonstrate the complexities of violence and emotions and the myriad possibilities of their inter-relationships. They emphasize the great efforts that were made by early modern societies to control modes of violence and emotional regimes to achieve positive as well as negative effects, such as creating order, healing, and bringing individuals and communities together around productive identities. Authors consider legal documents, news reports, memoirs, letters, confraternity statutes, and medical consultations to investigate the bodily and textual practices in which violent and emotional acts were created, supported and disseminated to investigate the power, aims, effect and outcomes of relationships between violence and emotions. The chapters look at a range of topics and countries including Renaissance Italy and sixteenth-century Germany, France in the grip of the religious wars, and England’s Civil Wars as well as a wide range of topics including murder, punishment, community healing, insults, threats, prophecy and medical and devotional practices. This collection will be essential reading for students and scholars of the history of emotions or violence.

Shakespeare, Violence and Early Modern Europe broadens our understanding of the final years of the last Tudor monarch, revealing the truly international context in which they must be understood. Uncovering the extent to which Shakespeare's dramatic art intersected with European politics, Andrew Hiscock brings together close readings of the history plays, compelling insights into late Elizabethan political culture and renewed attention to neglected continental accounts of Elizabeth I. With fresh perspective, the book charts the profound influence that Shakespeare and ambitious courtiers had upon succeeding generations of European writers, dramatists and audiences following the turn of the sixteenth century. Informed by early modern and contemporary cultural debate, this book demonstrates how the study of early modern violence can illuminate ongoing crises of interpretation concerning brutality, victimization and complicity today.

The volume explores the relationship between religion and violence in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Early modern period, involving European and Japanese scholars. It investigates the ideological foundations of the relationship between violence and religion and their development in a varied corpus of sources (political and theological treatises, correspondence of missionaries, pamphlets, and images).

Interrogating how medieval and early modern communities have acted as participants, observers, and interpreters of events and how they ascribed meaning to them, the essays in this collection explore the experience of individual or collective beholders of violence during the period. Addressing a range of medieval and early modern art forms, including visual images, objects, texts, and performances, the contributors examine the complexities of viewing and the production of knowledge across temporal moments.

Gender, Violence and Attitudes explores the history of gender-based violence in early modern Europe, particularly intimate-partner violence and sexual violence. It also investigates the legacy of gender-based violence through the Enlightenment to the present day and offers a historical background to highly topical human rights issues. Although the individual subjects of gender and the history of violence are not new topics, the gendering of violence has received little examination. Within this book, the history of attitudes and practices related to gender and power are analysed, and the nature of violence, justice and societal considerations of gender are explored as cultural constructs: they have the capacity to change over time, although there also is a tendency for continuity. The study is based on a wide range of sources including marriage guides, poems, plays, legal texts and court records exploring deep-rooted violence phenomena in Sweden (including historical Finland), the German territories, England and, to some extent, France. Offering a detailed analysis of gender and the culture of violence, Gender, Violence and Attitudes is essential reading for students and general readers who wish to understand the history of violence and its continual association with gender from early modern Europe to the present day.

This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. This is the first extensive analysis of large-scale violence and the methods of its restraint in the early modern world. Using examples from Asia, Africa, the Americas and Europe, it questions the established narrative that violence was only curbed through the rise of western-style nation states and civil societies. Global history allows us to reframe and challenge traditional models for the history of violence and to rethink categories and units of analysis through comparisons. By decentring Europe and exploring alternative patterns of violence, the contributors to this volume articulate the significance of violence in narratives of state- and empire-building, as well as in their failure and decline, while also providing new means of tracing the transition from the early modern to modernity.