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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 e

"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."--Jacket

This 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. In both volumes, an introduction outlines the origins and the continuing value of the concept of social control. The introductions are followed by two substantive sections. The essays in part one of volume I focus on the interplay of ecclesiastical institutions and the emerging states; those in part two of volume I look more explicitly at discipline from a bottom-up perspective. The essays in part one of volume 2 explore the various means by which communities--generally working-class communities--in nineteenth-and twentieth-century Europe were subjected to forms of discipline in the workplace, by the church, and by philanthropic housing organizations. It notes also how the communities themselves generated their own forms of internal control. Part two of volume 2 focuses on various policing institutions, exploring in particular the question of how liberal and totalitarian regimes differed in their styles of control, repression, and surveillance.

This 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. In both volumes, an introduction outlines the origins and the continuing value of the concept of social control. The introductions are followed by two substantive sections. The essays in part one of volume I focus on the interplay of ecclesiastical institutions and the emerging states; those in part two of volume I look more explicitly at discipline from a bottom-up perspective. The essays in part one of volume 2 explore the various means by which communities--generally working-class communities--in nineteenth-and twentieth-century Europe were subjected to forms of discipline in the workplace, by the church, and by philanthropic housing organizations. It notes also how the communities themselves generated their own forms of internal control. Part two of volume 2 focuses on various policing institutions, exploring in particular the question of how liberal and totalitarian regimes differed in their styles of control, repression, and surveillance.