The rise of civilized conduct and behaviour has long been seen as one of the major factors in the transformation from medieval to modern society. Thinkers and historians alike argue that violence progressively declined as men learned to control their emotions. The feud is a phenomenon associated with backward societies, and in the West duelling codified behaviour and channelled aggression into ritualised combats that satisfied honour without the shedding of blood. French manners andcodes of civility laid the foundations of civilized Western values. But as this original work of archival research shows we continue to romanticize violence in the era of the swashbuckling swordsman. In France, thousands of men died in duels in which the rules of the game were regularly flouted.Many duels were in fact mini-battles and must be seen not as a replacement of the blood feud, but as a continuation of vengeance-taking in a much bloodier form. This book outlines the nature of feuding in France and its intensification in the wake of the Protestant Reformation, civil war and dynastic weakness, and considers the solutions proposed by thinkers from Montaigne to Hobbes. The creation of the largest standing army in Europe since the Romans was one such solution, but themilitarization of society, a model adopted throughout Europe, reveals the darker side of the civilizing process.
This book also examines the communal and religious pressures for peace, and how notions of good neighbourliness and civil order finally worked to underpin trust in the state.
... Public Life in Toulouse , 1463-1789 : From Municipal Republic to Cosmopolitan City ( Ithaca , NY , 1989 ) , 107–10 ; Michael Sonenscher , Work and Wages : Natural Law , Politics and the Eighteenth - Century French Trades ( Cambridge ...
Through an exploration of conflict and peacemaking, this volume provides innovative accounts of state formation, community and religion in the early modern period.
Combining careful scholarship with popular history, the book will interest historians of early modern Europe, legal scholars, and anthropologists of law, as well as students and general readers interested in the history of violence.
Presents a history of violence in Europe and discusses the theory that violence has actually been in decline since the thirteenth century.
The study of peace has, however, not yet gained a comparable readership, and the subject is attracting an increasing amount of scholarly research. This volume presents the first work of academic research to tackle this imbalance head on.
Focusing on interpersonal violence and the huge role it played in human affairs in the post-medieval West, this timely collection brings together the latest interdisciplinary and historical research in the field.
Civil Wars in Sixteenth-Century France Henry Heller. 11 Vaissières , Gentilsbommes campagnardes de l'ancienne France ... conteste , de 1600 à nos jours . 17 Mousnier's approach can be elicited from “ Recherches sur les soulèvements ...
This collection of essays seeks to offer new insights and approaches to the relationship and significance of religion and violence as well as paying tribute to the immense contribution made in this field by the writings of Natalie Zemon ...
He is the polymorphously perverse Other, merging in Protean style with any number of other enemies of the people, so that the lexical combinations “foreigners and nobles,” “foreigners and moderates,” “nobles, foreigners, the idle, ...