When introducing a special issue on Historical Criminology one is almost bound to ponder the question: what are the relationships between history and criminology? The topics that today belong to the categories of 'crime' and the 'criminal justice system' are by no means new forms of inquiry in historical research. Murder, adultery and theft, for example, address deeply moral issues in the Western canon and Western politics and seem to have fired the (historical) imagination throughout time. Control, safety and the boundaries of power and territory also conflate with issues of crime and punishment. The famous Florentine statesman Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527) tells the story of Cesare Borgia, Duke of Romagna, who sought to pacify a province in his territory which was known for strife and conflict. The Duke commissioned Messer Ramiro de Lorqua, widely known for his brutality. De Lorqua duly crushed the resistance and took control of the province. When control was established Borgia no longer saw the need for de Lorqua. Borgia established a civil court, whose head, a famous legal scholar familiar with the regime, sentenced de Lorqua to death. In the month of December 1502, Messer Ramiro de Lorqua was torn in half in the town square. According to Machiavelli, the effect of the spectacle was to increase the loyalty of the inhabitants of the city: "The barbarity of this spectacle caused the people to be at once satisfied and dismayed" (Machiavelli, 1988: 26). Reinhart Koselleck's (1973/1959) classic study of the sattelzeitt 1 argues that Europe's religious wars of the 16th century caused a rise in secular technique for control-a secular 'raison d'état'. Hobbes' Leviathan is the prime example. In the wake of the early Enlightenment period this secular technology was re-moralized (Koselleck, 1973/1959). In return for safety
Paradoxically, in the 19th century, an era very concerned with public virtue, prostitutes were increasing being represented in Western European cultural expressions. Prostitution was a prevalent social phenomenon due to the rapid urbanization of Western Europe. People were on the move as both urban and rural areas underwent considerable material and normative change; the majority of Western European cities grew rapidly and were marked by harsh working and living conditions, as well as unemployment and poverty. A seeming rise in prostitution was one of the results of these developments, but its centrality in culture cannot be explained by this fact alone. Prostitution also came to epitomize broader social ills associated with industrialization and urbanization: “the prostitute” became the discursive embodiment of the discontent of modernity.
The surge in cultural representation of prostitutes may also be seen as an expression of changing norms and a driver for change in the public perception of prostitution. In particular, artists came to employ the prostitute as a motif, revealing contemporary hypocrisy about gender and class.
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