The Cambridge World History of Violence

Abstract

Any study of sexual and family violence in early modern Europe must first acknowledge and confront the problems of language and meaning. Modern terminology can obscure rather than illuminate past understandings of violence. Widely used current terms like 'domestic violence', 'rape' and 'infanticide' are not easily transferrable across time. Definitions of domestic violence in Europe today prioritise heterosexual couples and usually refer to violence by men against female partners in the home, although they can include violence perpetrated by women against male partners. But this concept of domestic violence simply did not exist within early modern Europe's legal frameworks. Rape and infanticide, on the other hand, were certainly crimes according to early modern European legal codes, but how contemporaries understood them is markedly different from how they are understood today. And even today, while sexual violence has specific legal definitions, these definitions vary according to jurisdiction. Under modern German law, for example, the term 'rape' covers both male and female victims and does not necessarily assume sexual penetration, whereas, under Swiss law, it is defined specifically as forced sexual penetration of a woman. 1 How, then, do we investigate and analyse forms of violence in the past that were by their very nature often hidden or lacked witnesses? Analysis of criminal laws, court cases and trial outcomes is vital to any investigation of the boundaries of historical sexual and family violence. Criminal prosecutions and convictions can also be quantified and very usefully compared over time and between different territories. Historians have done this most productively with murdera crime that leaves a corpse and as such is hard to hide. But justice in the past, as still today, was always inflected by class and by gender. Barriers to litigation based on such factors need therefore to be