Crime And Social Control In Medieval And Early Modern Swedish Towns

In Royal Police Ordinances in Early Modern Sweden, based on analysis of a large amount of empirical material Toomas Kotkas claims that a new, voluntaristic understanding of law emerged in 17th-century Sweden.

What explains the rapid growth of state power in early modern Europe? While most scholars have pointed to the impact of military or capitalist revolutions, Philip S. Gorski argues instead for the importance of a disciplinary revolution unleashed by the Reformation. By refining and diffusing a variety of disciplinary techniques and strategies, such as communal surveillance, control through incarceration, and bureaucratic office-holding, Calvin and his followers created an infrastructure of religious governance and social control that served as a model for the rest of Europe—and the world.

Dying Prepared in Medieval and Early Modern Northern Europe offers an analysis of the various ways in which people made preparations for death in medieval and early modern Northern Europe.

This book explores the judicial treatment of suicides in early modern Sweden, with a focus on the criminal investigation and selective treatment of suicides in the lower courts in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Riikka Miettinen shows that reactions and attitudes towards suicides varied considerably despite harsh condemnation by officials. The indictment, investigation, and classification of suspected suicides and the mental state of a person already deceased were challenging, and depended on local co-operation and lay testimonies. Not all suicides were considered alike; a widespread view on the heinousness of suicide was not the same as agreement about specific cases, and did not result in uniform handling of them. The social status and local ties of the deceased influenced the interpretations and responses at the local lower courts and communities. Esteemed local community members had a better defence and greater chance to escape the shameful penalties.

This book offers an in-depth analysis of several national case studies on family violence between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, using court records as their main source. It raises important questions for research on early modern Europe: the notion of absolute power; sovereignty and its applicability to familial power; the problem of violence and the possibility of its usage for conflict resolution both in public and private spaces; and the interconnection of gender and violence against women, reconsidered in the context of modern state formation as a public sphere and family building as a private sphere. Contributors bring together detailed studies of domestic violence and spousal murder in Romania, England, and Russia, abduction and forced marriage in Poland, infanticide and violence against parents in Finland, and rape and violence against women in Germany. These case studies serve as the basis for a comparative analysis of forms, models, and patterns of violence within the family in the context of debates on political power, absolutism, and violence. They highlight changes towards unlimited violence by family patriarchs in European countries, in the context of the changing relationship between the state and its citizens. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of the History of the Family.

A pioneering text which covers the urban society of early modern Europe as a whole. Challenges the usual emphasis on regional diversity by stressing the extent to which cities across Europe shared a common urban civilization whose major features remained remarkably constant throughout the period. After outlining the physical, political, religious, economic and demographic parameters of urban life, the author vividly depicts the everyday routines of city life and shows how pitifully vulnerable city-dwellers were to disasters, epidemics, warfare and internal strife.

Six essays explore the evolving cultural and material life of the early modern European street, a contested place of shaded meanings where public met private space, and state and society vied for control of urban form.