Introduction
1: Grammars of Violence
2: Violence on the Street
3: 'Oés comme il fierent grans caus !' Tavern violence in
thirteenth and early fourteenth-century Paris and Artois
4: Student Violence in Thirteenth- and Early Fourteenth-Century
Paris
5: Urban Uprisings
6: Domestic Violence
Conclusion
Hannah Skoda was Junior Research Fellow at Merton College, Oxford.
She has published on the subject of concepts of the law in medieval
France, co-editing an interdisciplinary volume on legalism with the
anthropologist, Paul Dresch, and she is currently embarking on
research into the misbehaviour of students in fifteenth-century
Oxford, Paris and Heidelberg. Other publications have ranged from
Dante to the experience of disability in the Middle Ages. She
is
particularly interested in the relationship between constructions
of deviance, and the ways in which those thus labelled react to
these stereotypes.
Skoda's overview of the medieval theory and norms with regard to
aggression and its punishment, on the one hand, and the concrete
violations of these customs and the penalties imposed upon the
perpetrators, on the other, is one of the most complete summaries
of the use of violence in medieval France available. It rightly
stresses the fact that the vengeful acts of citizens were not
meaningless or aberrant irregularities, but phenomena at the heart
of urban life.
*Jelle Haemers, The American Historical Review*
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.
*Zrinka Stahuljak, French Studies*
Skoda not only fills an important lacuna but also articulates, in a
highly nuanced manner, how violence functioned as a popular form of
communication and was integral to premodern communities sense of
self. Interdisciplinarity was a prerequisite for this book, and
Skodas is an accomplished one. She has gone where earlier social
and criminal historians were reluctant to venture... The result is
a thought-provoking cultural history of premodern and mainly urban
violence that will be read with great profit, especially by social
and urban historians, and by students of violence in general.
*Guy Geltner, Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis*
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