Bibliographic Essay
Scholarly interest in early modern European family and sexual violence has developed in tandem with changing modern attitudes towards women and violence, so that the literature on this type of early modern violence is now substantial.
Whereas research in the 1970s and 1980s scoured legal records for relevant cases, studies since the late 1990s have combined legal research with analysis of popular culture, autobiographical writings, letters and various forms of literature. This in-depth archival analysis has, since about 2000, allowed the production of synthetic accounts that situate family and sexual violence within broader cultural frameworks. Wide-ranging studies, such as Robert Muchembled's A History of Violence from the End of the Middle Ages to the Present, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012), offer stimulating pictures of long-term change in all aspects of violence, including family and sexual violence. The work of Peter Spierenburg has been very influential in this regard, including, for example, his A History of Murder: Personal Violence in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Present (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008). Julius Ruff s useful Violence in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) includes a chapter on interpersonal violence, covering rape, marital violence and infanticide.Regional and national studies of violence that contain chapters on family and sexual violence have enriched our understanding of the culturally specific meanings of violence in different early modern communities. Extensive research has been carried out on the surviving records of the English regions, with Garthine Walker's work combining legal and literary analysis in publications such as Crime, Gender and Social Order in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Local variations in how household violence functioned and was managed are revealed in detailed urban and regional studies, such as Arlette Farge's Fragile Lives: Violence, Power and Solidarity in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993) and Tommaso Astarita's Village Justice: Community, Family and Popular Culture in Early Modern Italy (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).
Another rich vein of scholarly research has concentrated on the violence accompanying marital breakdown. For England the scholarship is especially large: Joanne Bailey, for example, has examined marriage failure in Unquiet Lives: Marriage and Marriage Breakdown in England, 1660-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); while Elizabeth Foyster concentrates specificially on violence within marriage in Marital Violence: An English Family History, 1660-1857 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). The legal and social frameworks in which marital violence occurred in Sweden have been explored by Jonas Liliequist in ‘Changing Discources of Marital Violence in Sweden from the Age of Reformation to the Late Nineteenth Century', Gender & History 23.2 (2011),1-25. Studies of particular cities and towns are also instructive. For informal boundaries and meanings of marital violence in southern France, see Susan McDonough, ‘She Said, He Said, and They Said: Claims of Abuse and a Community's Response in Late Medieval Marseille', Journal of Women's History 19.4 (2007), 35-58.
Women who killed their husbands provoked acute anxiety throughout early modern Europe. Even though prosecutions were relatively few, a wealth of evidence survives, particularly in popular culture. For Germany, Ulinka Rublack's research is foundational on this and other aspects of women and criminality: The Crimes of Women in Early Modern Germany (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999). Frances Dolan makes fruitful use of popular ballads and gallows speeches in her important study of attitudes towards violent women: Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England, 1550-1700 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994).
How communities problematised and managed sexual violence has been the subject of considerable scholarly attention over the past twenty years. An insightful overview of this research is Garthine Walker, ‘Sexual Violence and Rape in Europe, 1500-1750', in The Routledge History of Sex and the Body, 1500 to the Present, edited by K.
Fisher and S. Toulalan (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 429-43. Regional studies are also crucial in revealing variations in the laws and meanings surrounding sexual violence; see, for example, Guido Ruggiero, The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). Sexual violence in war is revealingly explored by Penny Roberts in ‘Peace, Ritual, and Sexual Violence during the Religious Wars', Past & Present 214 (2012), 75-99.The anxiety early modern European societies felt about the sexuality of single women was expressed in particular through harsh laws against infanticide. Anne Marie Kilday, A History of Infanticide in Britain, c. 1600 to the Present (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2013) investigates this topic for England, Wales and Scotland. In other places, such as Ireland, where there are few surviving records of infanticide, folklore is a potentially valuable research tool, as Anne O'Connor demonstrated in ‘Women in Irish Folklore', in Women in Early Modern Ireland, edited by M. O'Dowd and M. MacCurtain (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991), pp. 304-17. Close analysis of individual cases is another way of exploring the complexities of infanticide. An intriguing study of a well-documented case is William David Myers's Death and a Maiden: Infanticide and the Tragical History of Grethe Schmidt (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2011).
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