Medieval Violence: Physical Brutality in Northern France, 1270–1330 by Hannah Skoda (review)

Focusing on popular, quotidian violence in streets, taverns, and domestic spaces, student violence and collective uprisings in Paris and in Artois towns during the period of remarkable economic prosperity and socio-demographic growth before the Hundred Years’ War, Hannah Skoda’s book fills a lacuna in studies of medieval violence, which hitherto have centred mostly on three areas: chivalric violence, violence and the development of states and legal systems, and honour. Skoda’s premise is that violence is socially embedded, and that its meanings, semiotically elaborated as ‘grammars of violence’, both shape and are shaped by society. The medieval assessment of the harmfulness of this double — performative and performing — function of violence hinges on ambivalence: medieval society, suffering the consequences of overlapping jurisdictions (ecclesiastical and secular, municipal and royal, etc.) and from the uncertain boundaries between interpersonal and communal, private and public, struggled in each individual case of recorded or prosecuted violence to determine the limits between disruptive, unreasonable violence and reasonable violence as an ordering force. This indeterminacy stimulated remarkable communal memories, and in Artois in particular gave rise to a flourishing vernacular literary scene, in the form of theatre, poetry, fabliaux, sermons, and exempla. Skoda takes a sociological-semiotic approach to violence as communication, whereby popular, interpersonal violence is seen through the lens of negotiation of social, gender, and civic identities. Building on an impressive array of archival and manuscript evidence and an almost exhaustive survey of secondary sources, in each instance of street and tavern violence, domestic abuse, urban rebellions, and student unrest, she comes back to the idea of the fundamental medieval ambivalence about whether violence was a ‘message directed at individuals’ or ‘at the community as a whole’ (p. 46). This distinction, together with a nuanced reading of intention and emotion (reasonable versus irrational anger), is both convincing and productive in the chapters dealing with the shifting boundary between public and private — street, tavern, domestic space — but does not apply in the chapters analysing crowd violence (students and uprisings). While it is certain that physical force is socially meaningful, the degree of flexibility with which cases — mostly of murder or mutilation — were judged is overshadowed by the homogeneity of the interpretative semiotic framework. In other words, where interpersonal violence can be read as self-fashioning, collective violence is harder to read merely as urban theatre. Precisely because interpersonal violence claimed to mimic the law, as legitimate violence and collective violence competed for the right to define authority and jurisdiction, it is unfortunate that questions of community formation and the development of state and governmentality are sidelined in this study. The book’s conclusion illuminates, to some extent, the separation of the exercise of violence and the role of law. Nevertheless, individual chapters are very rich and meticulously researched, and Skoda must be applauded for the strength and coverage of her analysis of gender and medieval violence and her successful approach to integrating archival and literary sources.