Sacrificing the Self: Perspective on Martyrdom and Religion ed. by Margaret Cormack (review)

REVIEWS 262 riographical and theoretical discussions, he ultimately casts his lot in with Norbert Elias, citing the “civilizing process” as the key factor in making life in 1800 significantly less violent than it was in 1500. Given the evidence Ruff presents, this is a puzzling point of emphasis. While it is true that the cultivation of human behavior during the late medieval and early-modern periods was responsible for the decrease in both the perpetration and acceptability of violent activity, Ruff presents scant hard evidence from etiquette books, popular literature , or other forms of cultural production to back up this assertion. Instead, the lion’s share of his evidence explaining the change regards the growth of the state and its concomitant bureaucracies: the development of military codes and discipline (66); the extension of state criminal law to supplant infrajudicial means of conflict resolution (73); the retrenchment of state power so it no longer needed to rely on rituals of public execution to discipline the populace (113); the extension of state control to streets, squares, and areas outside of city walls (181); the establishment of regular police forces (181, 199); proactive steps by the state to eliminate the causes of social unrest (233). Most of this evidence, which is presented clearly and thoroughly, seemingly supports the frameworks of authors concerned with the bureaucratization and consolidation of the early modern state. Ruff explains these developments as subject to the dictates of a broader cultural shift, with the state “reflect[ing] popular standards of behavior and justice in early modern society” (105). Yet save for a few select passages, he presents little convincing evidence as to how these “popular standards of behavior and justice” changed, or how these changes influenced more concrete developments in the growth of the state and refinement of force. Thus while Ruff presents abundant proof that commonplace violent behavior began to subside in the early modern period, he could have devoted more pages to explaining the cultural mechanisms through which this decrease in violence occurred. This critique aside, Ruff’s work effectively achieves its goal, which is to serve as an introductory overview of violence, and more broadly the cultivation of behavior, in the early-modern period. For the non-specialist, it promises to be a valuable resource, effectively surveying both the historical and historiographical issues at hand in any study of human interaction. Like the other books in the “New Approaches” series, Violence in Early Modern Europe is light in scholarly apparatus and annotation, though a full supplementary bibliography opens the way for the reader to further explore the thoughtprovoking sketch Ruff provides. HOWARD PADWA, History, UCLA Sacrificing the Self: Perspective on Martyrdom and Religion, ed. Margaret Cormack (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2002) 156 pp. (paperback) With the events of September 11, 2001, the term “martyr” took on a very narrow and largely negative connotation. Associated with religious fanaticism and fundamentalism, the contemporary religious martyr, now virtually always assumed to be Muslim, stands as the representative of absolute alterity, a person so radically “other,” so thoroughly marginalized that he (and in rarer cases she) is willing to sacrifice himself and others in the name of religious truth. But martyrdom has a long and varied history, playing a prominent role in at least REVIEWS 263 three of the world’s great religious traditions. Sacrificing the Self, a selection of essays based upon papers presented from 1993 to 1994 in a series entitled “Martyrdom Past and Present” attempts to expand our conception of martyrdom by providing a historical and culturally comparative perspective on this phenomenon. Cormack looks to “challenge traditional ideas of what a ‘martyr’ may be”(xi), and she does this by providing a set of “objective” criteria which can then be employed in determining the nature of motivations behind various behaviors that are labeled or construed as martyrdom.6 This shared point of references serves as a cohesive element among the essays themselves and provides a starting point for considerations of a kind of comparative martyrology. What becomes clear quite early on in this format is the widely divergent understanding of “sacrifice” and the problematic nature of the individual in the context of faith. The essays here deal...