Bibliographical Essay

Just how violent were the Middle Ages is a debate with a long history. The foundational works depicting the medieval world as a society that thrives on violence are: Henry Charles Lea, Superstition and Force: Essays on the Wager of Law, the Wager of Battle, the Ordeal, Torture (Philadelphia: Henry Charles Lea, 1866); Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages: A Study of the Forms of Life, Thought and Art in France and the Netherlands in the Dawn of the Renaissance (London: Edward Arnold, 1924); Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, trans.

In terms of measuring rates of violence, the two groundbreaking studies are J. B. Given, Society and Homicide in Thirteenth-Century England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1977) and Barbara A. Hanawalt, Crime and Conflict in English Communities, 1300-1348 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979). The difficulties of comparing medieval and modern crimes rates have been addressed by J.

The violence of medieval Christianity has been studied by a wide variety of authors. For an excellent analysis of the origins of clerical violence, see Lester K. Little and Barbara H. Rosenwein, ‘Social Meaning in the Monastic and Mendicant Spiritualities', Past & Present 63 (1974), 4-32. Ascetic self-violence is best understood psychologically. See Jerome Kroll and Bernard Bachrach, The Mystic Mind: The Psychology of Medieval Mystics and Ascetics (New York: Routledge, 2005). For canonical views on violence and the role it plays in Christianity, see Charles P. Nemeth, Aquinas on Crime (South Bend: St Augustine's Press, 2008).

Domestic violence is a particularly rich area of research. For a general overview, see Isabel Davis, Miriam Müller and Sarah Rees Jones (eds.), Love, Marriage, and Family Ties in the Later Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003). For the Mediterranean world, see Eva Cantarella, ‘Homicides of Honor: The Development of Italian Adultery Law over Two Millennia', in David I. Kertzer and Richard P. Saller (eds.), The Family in Italy: From Antiquity to the Present (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), pp. 229-44. For England, see Sara M. Butler, The Language of Abuse: Marital Violence in Later Medieval England (Leiden: Brill, 2007) and also her ‘A Case of Indifference? Child Murder in Later Medieval England', Journal of Women's History 19.4 (2007), 59-82. Studies of religious perspectives on violence have been particularly fruitful.

Much has been written recently on the subject of women and violence. Because of the nature of the sources, the research is localised. For Scandinavia, see Christine Ekholst, A Punishmentfor Each Criminal: Gender and Crime in Swedish Medieval Law (Leiden: Brill, 2014). For England, see Karen Jones, Gender and Petty Crime in Late Medieval England: The Local Courts in Kent, 1460-1560 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006). For Iberia, see Connie L. Scarborough, ‘Women as Victims and Criminals in the Siete Partidas', in Albrecht Classen and Connie Scarborough (eds.), Crime and Punishment in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age: Mental-Historical Investigations of Basic Human Problems and Social Responses (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), pp. 225-46.

Studies of homicide in England have been particularly good. Apart from those by Given and Hanawalt mentioned above, see also Carl I. Hammer, Jr, ‘Patterns of Homicide in a Medieval University Town: Fourteenth-Century Oxford', Past & Present 78 (1978), 3-23. For a discussion of law enforcement in the Italian context where police forces existed, see William M. Bowsky, ‘The Medieval Commune and Internal Violence: Police Power and Public Safety in Siena, 1287-1355', American Historical Review 73.1 (1967), 1-17. On the process of communal policing, see Miriam Müller, ‘Social Control and the Hue and Cry in Two Fourteenth-Century Villages', Journal of Medieval History 31.1 (2005), 29-53. Concerning the subject of bloodfeud or vendetta, studies are regional in nature. For Iceland, see two quite diverse perceptions with William Ian Miller, Bloodtaking and ‘Peacemaking’: Feud, Law, and Society in Saga Iceland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997) and Hugh Firth, ‘Coercion, Vengeance, Feud and Accommodation: Homicide in Medieval Iceland', Early Medieval Europe 20.2 (2012), 139-75. For Italy, the definitive work is Trevor Dean, ‘Marriage and Mutilation: Vendetta in Late Medieval Italy', Past & Present 157 (1997), 3-36.

The subject of suicide has been studied extensively. For larger overviews of the subject, see Georges Minois, History of Suicide: Voluntary Death in Western Culture, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), Alexander Murray, Suicide in the Middle Ages, vol. I, The Violent against Themselves (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), and Suicide in the Middle Ages, vol. ii, The Curse on Self-Murder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).