Any study of sexual and family violence in early modern Europe must first acknowledge and confront the problems of language and meaning.
Modern terminology can obscure rather than illuminate past understandings of violence. Widely used current terms like ‘domestic violence', ‘rape' and ‘infanticide' are not easily transferrable across time.
Definitions of domestic violence in Europe today prioritise heterosexual couples and usually refer to violence by men against female partners in the home, although they can include violence perpetrated by women against male partners. But this concept of domestic violence simply did not exist within early modern Europe's legal frameworks. Rape and infanticide, on the other hand, were certainly crimes according to early modern European legal codes, but how contemporaries understood them is markedly different from how they are understood today. And even today, while sexual violence has specific legal definitions, these definitions vary according to jurisdiction. Under modern German law, for example, the term ‘rape' covers both male and female victims and does not necessarily assume sexual penetration, whereas, under Swiss law, it is defined specifically as forced sexual penetration of a woman.1How, then, do we investigate and analyse forms of violence in the past that were by their very nature often hidden or lacked witnesses? Analysis of criminal laws, court cases and trial outcomes is vital to any investigation of the boundaries of historical sexual and family violence. Criminal prosecutions and convictions can also be quantified and very usefully compared over time and between different territories. Historians have done this most productively with murder - a crime that leaves a corpse and as such is hard to hide. But justice in the past, as still today, was always inflected by class and by gender. Barriers to litigation based on such factors need therefore to be
1 Francisca Loetz, A New Approach to the History of Violence: ‘Sexual Assault' and ‘Sexual Abuse' in Europe, 1500-1850, trans. Rosemary Selle (Leiden: Brill, 2015), p. 30. taken into account when employing legal records to trace early modern meanings of family and sexual violence.
Many historians have fruitfully used other types of documentary evidence to fill in the gaps in the legal record. These might include personal narratives and anecdotal accounts contained in letters or pamphlets. This material, showing how families and communities negotiated and managed violent behaviour, is extremely valuable, even though it cannot be quantified and thus remains impressionistic. Such material can be employed, however, to investigate instances in which, according to modern understandings, sexual or family violence occurred, although it was not considered criminal at the time. Through such an investigation the boundaries of popular early modern understandings of violence can be delineated, throwing into sharp relief the differences between past and present perceptions.
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