Recounting Deviance: Forms And Practices Of Presenting Divergent Behaviour In The Late Middle Ages And Early Modern Period ed. by Jörg Rogge (review)

Jorg Rogge's edited volume of essays considers the nature of "deviance" and the relationship between "recounting deviance" and the actual divergent event. The articles in this collection all look at examples of recounted religious, social, or political deviance during the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries (largely from court records and Inquisitor trials) to analyze the nature and bounds of deviance as a socially defined phenomenon. Rogge defines "deviance" in his introduction as the "behavioural divergence" from perceived "social norms," which are gradually translated into "specific rules of conduct or codes of behavior" (9). The authors all consider how such divergent behavior was recounted, defined, and imagined across the late Middle Ages. Yet because "norms are not static," what constituted deviance also shifted according to the writer's environment and perspective and was not necessarily "regarded as criminal conduct"—which allows the authors of this volume to take a broad approach to what constituted divergent behavior (10). Following Howard Becker, Rogge's volume looks at deviance "that has been successfully labeled" as deviant behavior by their society (13). From this, Rogge asserts "we can learn how writers described situations in which norms had been negotiated, applied, rejected or enforced. The manner in which this is presented in the text or narrative is influenced by the power imbalance between the norm or lawgivers and their enforcement staff on one hand and those subjected to the social norm or law on the other" (14). Mostly using legal documents and chronicles, the authors take a historical approach to their material in order to gage shifting cultural climates. While some of the chapters are very narrowly focused on one specific historic and regional moment, others offer broader implications to their claims which are valuable to scholars outside this volume's Early Modern focus.

Regina Schafer begins by noting that law court records only give us traces of criminality rather than merely socially inappropriate or disorderly conduct. She argues that based on these criminal cases of violence and insulted honor in the Ingelheim court records, judges drew a line between inappropriate deviance and delinquent criminal behavior. Schafer concludes that in most cases, deviant behavior "was ignored as far as possible" by the court in an attempt to maintain public order and peace (48). Schafer's argument would benefit from wider analysis, as it raises questions about the extent to the court's willing blindness to deviance, but her claims are intriguing and well supported. Judith Mengler similarly looks at the division between transgression and legal delinquency in the religious cases of Crowland Abbey. In these cases, legal deviance was frequently connected to breaking "norms in the moral sense." In many cases, the chronicles of Crowland detail incidents where unlawfulness directly correlates to the abbey's sense that neighbors were infringing or threatening the rights (and profits) of the abbey. While the chronicles phrase deviance against the abbey or against religion as a moral failure, the cases are frequently more informed and directed at the economic and political realities (66). In the cases Mengler examines, she convincingly argues that "religious norms were employed to fortify legal claims" (74).

Monika Frohnapfel-Leis considers the fabrication of religious deviance during the Spanish inquisition, again demonstrating a pattern where "deviance" is circumstantial and socially monitored. The Inquisition obliged society to denounce the participants of "un-Orthodox" behavior to the inquisitor on pain of excommunication—turning deviance into delinquency, and made the community the prosecutor of itself. However, Frohnapfel-Leis argues that when members of the community submitted denunciation, it was a kind "of social translation" where a certain kind of normal behavior is translated into a newly perceived deviance (78). For example, a case in the Canary Islands denounced a mother for sorcery because she would shut her house during the day and pray outside at night (for privacy in a crowded...