Blood and Violence in Early Modern France

Vengeance in the Middle Ages, S Throop & P Hyams (eds), 2010

Memoria y civilización: anuario de historia de la …, 1999

The period after the fall of the Roman Empire is still widely regarded as one of untrammelled violence. In some formulations it is (to caricature the approach only slightly) thought that the end of Roman civilization was followed by a period wherein: 'the labours and happiness of peaceful development are ... wiped out by the upburst of elemental passions which have only slumbered. The long tranquillity of the Roman sway ended in the violence and darkness of the Middle Age' 2 .

Political Ritual and Practice in Capetian France: Essays in Honour of Elizabeth A. R. Brown, ed. M. Cecilia Gaposchkin & Jay Rubenstein (Brepols), 2021

In the judicial duel, procedure and ceremony collapsed into one another in a way that had powerful resonances for the later Capetians kings of France. What bothered King Louis IX and his grandson Philip IV about duel was its violent and vengeful aspects. What allowed Philip IV and his son Philip V to reconsider was duel’s discrete and formal practice. It was this that allowed their governments to decouple judicial duel from seigneurial (private) war. Although war was similar to duel in being an avenue for the violent pursuit of one’s rights, it differed in its wider scope and therefore essentially uncontrollable nature. Duel’s dual nature as ritual and procedure thus ensured its survival in the courts of later medieval France. Duel’s formalism also meant that it could serve to express chivalric values like honour, bravery, and luxury. These aspects may help to explain duel’s renewed efflorescence in the early modern period, in which duelling became an avenue for the vindication of aristocratic honour. The development of an elaborate, aristocratic ceremonial practice, however, happened much later than has been previously understood. Indeed, chivalric spectacle is only one aspect of the later medieval history of duel, a subject that requires fuller study.

This book reassesses the relationship between the late medieval rise of the state in France and aristocratic violence. Although it is often assumed that resurgent royal government eliminated so-called private warfare, the French judicial archives reveal nearly 100 such wars waged in Languedoc and the Auvergne from the mid-thirteenth through the fourteenth century. Royal administrators often intervened in these wars, but not always in order to suppress ‘private violence’ in favour of ‘public justice’. Their efforts were strongly shaped by the recognition of elites’ own power and legitimate prerogatives, and elites were often fully complicit with royal intervention. Much of the engagement between royal officers and local elites came through informal processes of negotiation and settlement, rather than through the coercive imposition of official justice. The expansion of royal authority was due as much to local cooperation as to conflict, a fact that ensured its survival during the fourteenth-century’s crises

2017

L'étude des duels d'honneur et des violences entre courtisans à la cour de Charles II d'Angleterre en exil aux Pays-Bas espagnols à la fin des années 1650 éclaire les relations de pouvoir et d'honneur entre les souverains et leurs élites à l'époque moderne. En étudiant les suites de deux duels qui, directement ou indirectement, concernaient un noble irlandais, Théobald, vicomte de Taaffe, cet article examine les motifs de ces violences et le point de savoir si l'exil a modifié les pratiques de duel au sein de celle-ci. Il éclaire aussi la manière dont les nobles défendaient leur implication dans ces conflits et les efforts de Charles II, pater familias de cette cour royale, pour les prévenir ou les contrôler. En définitive, cette étude remet en cause la thèse de Norbert Elias visant la manière dont les familles royales civilisaient et contrôlaient les pulsions violentes de l'élite et de la noblesse qui leur était attachée. Elle conclut en effet que Charles II partageait la même conception de l'honneur que ses courtisans, ce qui implique qu'en dépit de ses efforts pour les contrôler, il ne pouvait dénier à son entourage le droit de défendre sa réputation et sa position sociale d'une manière socialement acceptable, telle que le duel. Through an examination of honour duels and violence between the courtiers within Charles II's exiled court in late 1650s Spanish Netherlands, this article casts light on the power and honour relationships between monarchs and their elites in the early-modern period. It does this by primarily studying the fallout from two duels that, directly or indirectly, involved an Irish nobleman, Theobald Viscount Taaffe. The article considers the reasons that motivated elite violence in this court and also examines if exile changed duelling practices within it. It also throws light on how the courtiers defended their involvement in such clashes. The efforts of the pater familias of this royal household, Charles II, to prevent or limit such violent behaviour are

2021

V. G. Kiernan, The Duel in European History. Honour and the Reign of Aristocracy, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1988. This book is an ambitious attempt to trace the history of duelling practices from primitive times to the present. Kiernan 's central aim is to account for the emergence and the demise of the modern duel peculiar to the West, and to determine its social functions. As he points out, the history of the topic has received insufficient attention by modern scholars of the nobility. This neglect is all the more surprising as the duel "distilled an essential part of the moral life of a dass , a civilization, a long span of history" (p. 326), and because it "became a unique point of convergence of political, social, artistic, and many other currents" (p. 327).

2017

Debates over the issue of violence in late medieval and early modern England tend to focus on ways that the legal system and institutions attempted to control it, or on the influence of wider political or economic forces that generated violence and criminality. This overlooks, or minimises, the cultural and social meaning of violence, particularly as it was performed by members of the social elite. This thesis re-evaluates the meaning of violence for socially elite performers of violence, their victims, and their audiences through a survey of case studies drawn from the records of the central Court of King's Bench and other sources. Using research drawn from criminology, anthropology, and sociology, meaning is found in the performances of violence and their contexts. This method contrasts with previous attempts at studying violence quantitatively or through the lens of the civilizing process. Violence is a form of communication and the way violence is performed communicates mean...

Journal of Social History 44, no. 1 (2010): 288-90.

This article considers the implications of both Catholic and Calvinist types of violence during the Reformation of mid-Sixteenth-Century France. Historical texts and academic discourses exhibit the extent to which French Catholics tended to enact physical torment on their Huguenot victims, whereas French Huguenots typically assaulted their Christian counterparts through iconoclasm and symbolic desecration of sacred objects. From these perspectives, my interest is in the multiple violent acts, which were not sadistic or pathological attempts to inflict agony on religious opponents, but were initially fundamental concerns for establishing and maintaining religious uniformity and orthodoxy through purgative actions. Analysis of such historical violence through individual Christian writings at this time is conducive to understanding attempts at Church reform in France, especially with consideration of the religious dynamics on the part of both Catholics and Protestants. These actions culminated in political, social and religious transformations and confrontations that have come to designate the European Reformations.

Journal of Early Modern History, 2007

Press, 2005), xiv + 225 pp.; ISBN 0 8223 3459 3 (hardback), 0 8223 3471 2 (paperback). Sometimes one of the hardest concepts for students to grasp when studying history is that the systems and structures laid before them by historians do not always reflect the reality of a functioning system. History is not science. People are always people and cannot be expected to act according to a neat trajectory. A Tale of Two Murders by James Farr is an excellent resource for illuminating this point. In it, he provides full details of the actual functioning of one of the most complex structures of Early Modern Europe, the judiciary. Sometimes these details come close to overwhelming in their tedium, but that is part of the point: justice was never concise, nor swift in seventeenth-century France, and wading through evidence and counter-evidence was as tough a job then as it is now. Farr's major point in this regard comes towards the very end of the work, in the section titled "Analytical Essay" (pp. 195-204), in which he discusses the task of the historian to use whatever documentary evidence survives to sift truth from fiction. Farr highlights the role of the historian not as discovering truth for its own sake, but as a way of understanding how "facts" were presented at the time in order to best represent their reality, either as they believed it was, or perhaps as they wished it was: the "management of perceptions" (p. 200). As such this book is a useful teaching tool for students first approaching history as a discipline, aided by its easy reading style and the drama of its subject. The basis for A Tale of Two Murders is a series of documents Farr came across in the departmental archives in Dijon. Two men vanished in the autumn of 1638, Pierre Baillet and his valet Neugot. Baillet was one of the most prominent men in Burgundy, as a Président of the Chambre des Comptes and a major landowner. The chief suspect was his cousin Philippe Giroux, also a senior official in the provincial judiciary. The two men represented the pinnacles of power in seventeenthcentury Burgundy, and were linked via blood, politics, and an alleged passion for a woman. Marie Fyot, wife of Baillet, was herself a member of one of Burgundy's leading robe families, and a key player in this murder drama. Farr makes the point early on that this is a matter of