Aspects of Violence in Renaissance Europe ed. by Jonathan Davies (review)

This volume, edited by Jonathan Davies, brings together nine essays from a variety of disciplines—including art history, war studies, literature, and history—that serve as case studies that, collectively, point toward the varied and often dissimilar modes violence assumed between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe. Such a capacious topic has been explored before, of course; violence in the medieval period was widely experienced and universally articulated, constituting a “universal social language” until well into the early-modern period (1). Some recent scholarship, Davies notes, has worked to articulate in quantitative terms the decline in violence across the period. “The early-modern period,” Davies writes, “is also significant because it witnessed a dramatic drop in the number of recorded homicides in some parts of Europe” (2). Rather than directly refuting scholarly work that suggests acts of violence gradually declined in Europe along traceable, linear lines, the essays collected here speak to the varieties of violent behavior not captured by homicide statistics alone.

Davies turns to Jean-Claude Chesnais for an analysis of violence that structures the rest of the volume. In Chesnais’s view, violence can be divided into two categories, interpersonal and collective. In addition to the individual criminal violence easily quantified in homicide reports, this analysis includes acts of deviancy, non-lethal behavior, riots, strikes, executions, and even war—a conception of violence that “challenges the traditional division of war from violence by historians” (5). Thus the volume contains essays examining “murder, manslaughter, assault, riots, war and justice” (6). Indeed, the widening of violence as a topic of scholarly treatment is reflected in the variety of methodologies employed within this relatively short volume. The approach suggested here, rather than reducing ubiquitous violent behavior to a single, quantifiable category, does justice to its specificity and its particular ability to articulate focused meaning across an array of contexts. If at times the volume lacks coherence or unity, it is perhaps entirely appropriate it do so.

The book is divided into three sections: interpersonal and ritual violence; war; and justice. Hannah Skoda’s comparative essay opens the first section and examines student violence in both Paris and Oxford during the fifteenth century. In Skoda’s estimation, student violence is particularly significant not only because of the centrality of misbehavior to student life, but also because of its role in defining and articulating identities of masculinity, nationalisms, and political loyalties. In addition to violence’s role in forming identities, a concept that appears in other essays in the volume, Skoda’s essay points to the ways in which representations of student violence re-informed—and reinforced—the very behavior being depicted. As a response to the stereotypes being attached to student groups, “violence provided a way to engage with and manipulate these labels” (40).

Eschewing the political and religious readings typically associated with the 1527 Sack of Rome, Joëlle Rollo-Koster’s essay refigures the event along cultural lines, reframing the Sack “within the context of interregnum violence,” suggesting it may have been “a brutal exacerbation of behaviors embedded in Roman and papal culture which, by their repetition and frequent occurrences, were familiar to contemporaries” (44). Rollo-Koster’s approach, rather than closing off the Sack to interpretive analysis, helpfully raises new, invigorating questions about both the Sack itself and the wider cultural legibility of the sede vacante.

Miriam Hall Kirch’s essay reexamines the murder of evangelical Juan Díaz, which was orchestrated by his Catholic brother, Alfonso. Because of the obvious religious overtones, the murder has often been understood as an incident resulting from Europe’s contemporary religious conflicts; Kirch suggests the incident be couched in a study of the city of Neuberg’s government, which “shaped the story for both external and internal consumption alike” (62).

Rounding out the first section, Justine Semmens’s fascinating essay explores how the bubonic plague was linked to “rites of violence” in Lyon in 1577. Semmens suggests that a treatise published by civic magistrate Claude de Rubys...