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Furor et Rabies: Violencia, conflicto y marginacion en la Edad Moderna (review)
- Journal of Interdisciplinary History
- The MIT Press
- Volume 35, Number 1, Summer 2004
- pp. 120-122
- Review
- Additional Information
Journal of Interdisciplinary History 35.1 (2004) 120-122
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Violence takes many forms, physical and verbal, as well as spontaneous and premeditated, and it can be the work of individuals, institutions, andgroups. This volume, as its title suggests, examines the ways in which all forms of violence, except warfare, was integral to the fabric of early modern European life. Yet for all their diversity, the sixteen essays incorporated into this interdisciplinary volume revolve around a common theme—the relationship of violence to what is generally understood as the rule of law as well as the various institutions, secular and ecclesiastical, charged with its implementation. The book also explores [End Page 120] the related topic of what the Germans call sozialdisziplinierung, the Spanish policia, or what English readers can understand as the social discipline of a generally accepted and widely enforced code of social and sexual behavior.
The book's editors have organized the essays around four sub-themes. The first examines violence in relation to social discipline and the uses of justice, and includes both a historiographical essay on sozialdisziplinierung by Heinz Schilling—who traces the concept back to Max Weber as well as Norbert Elias and Gerhard Oestreich—and a broadly comparative piece on the uses of justice in early modern Europe by Martin Dinges, another German scholar. Peter Spierenburg examines violence in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Amsterdam, especially the kind of gendered violence associated with the city's bordellos. Mantecón offers an excellent account of the extent to which recourse tothe courts in seventeenth-century Castile was hurt by judges with areputation for corruption and dishonesty. Finally, Xavier Rousseaux takes a statistical look at patterns of violence in the small Brabant town ofNivelles across five centuries. Of particular interest in this chapter isthe extent to which, starting in the seventeenth century, violence against individuals in Nivelles moved from the town into the countryside, essentially replicating a pattern commonly associated with the earlymodern Mediterranean, where rural banditry was a particular problem.
The next section, focused almost entirely on Spain, examines violence in a communal context, although it begins with an essay principally concerned with domestic violence and the extent to which violence, either in the form of abduction or rape, served as a pretext for marriage in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Castile. The communal theme is more pronounced in José Fortea Pérez's nuanced account of "abuses of power" by municipal governments in Castile, whereas Gelabert relates Castile's political stability and relative tranquility during most of the early modern period to a system of justice that, its failings aside, managed to provide individuals and communities a mechanism for resolving various grievances and thus helped the kingdom to avoid the kind internal conflicts and revolts associated with most other European states. This section closes with Tamar Herzog's essay on how small agricultural communities at the end of the eighteenth century used local ordinances to deny citizenship to certain classes of salaried workers and other individuals who did not fit the traditional mold of a stable, rooted citizen with a stake in the land. Herzog's otherwise interesting essay, however, fails to address the question of whether this policy of exclusion actually led to the kind of stable, tranquil community that local officials envisioned.
Herzog's essay also serves as a segue into the next section, which examines violence with reference to both marginalization and poverty in early modern Spain. Rocio Sánchez and Isabel Testón expertly examine the extent to which violence, collective and individual, figured in [End Page 121] the emigration of Spaniards to the Americas. Their essay offers the poignant example of a family of converted Jews from Extremadura who, seeking to escape inquisitorial persecution, sought refuge in the New World. Of equal interest is the plight of Isabel Gómez. Caught in...