Theoretical Approaches to Violence II

In other words, the justification or condemnation of violence depends on different perspectives; on those who are in charge and hold the authority as lawmaker, or on those who as leaders of their people enjoy general support and are regularly entitled to decide on their own whether a violent act was to be viewed as legitimate or illegitimate.

For our purposes, we at least do not have to engage with the difficult issue of how to differentiate between ‘gewalt' as a form of political expression and ‘gewalt' as the term for physical violence, as is the case in German.12 To make the subsequent discussion easier, we can limit ourselves to those situations in pan-European medieval literature where protagonists' actions are globally viewed as negative, if they are transgressing the common laws, and hence would deserve punishment by the authorities according to the law books, for instance. To make sense of our text selection, the focus will be the experience of physical victimisation, whereas psychological torture, for instance, would be a very different topic.

Whether we may be able to observe in this investigation a process of or towards civilisation, a change of society at large, depends on so many contradictory factors that it will be advisable not to venture into such theoretical reflections. In his seminal study The Civilizing Process, first published in German in 1939, ‘rediscovered' by modern scholars only some thirty years later, Norbert Elias assumed that the emergence of the absolutist state with its monopoly on violence and the development of highly ritualised forms of courtly life in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries created innovative control mechanisms and imposed heretofore unknown levels of shame, heavily reducing the degree to which impulses could dominate human behaviour,¹³ hence leading to a notable decline in aggression and violence.

This optimistic perspective of historical progress from the early to the high Middle Ages, and from there to the Renaissance and the Baroque, has undergone dramatic reversals in recent years, and a more realistic evaluation of human relationships seems to indicate the pervasiveness, continuity and regular re-emergence of violent phenomena because of love, hatred and aggression.¹⁴ Our literary analysis will confirm that premodern authors already had a very clear sense of legal norms and the dangers of violence if it erupted within the framework of courtly society. In this regard, it would be rather questionable, if not even dangerous, to weigh the medieval world against the Renaissance, for example, since we could argue that the degree of physical violence (e.g., the witch craze, the development of mercenary armies, women's common brutalisation by their husbands, etc.) actually

also Siegfried R. Christoph, ‘Violence Stylized', in Albrecht Classen (ed.), Violence in Medieval Courtly Literature: A Casebook (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 115-25.

13 Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners and State Formation and Civilization, trans. EdmundJephcott, 2 vols (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994); orig. published in German in 1939.

14 See the contributions to this question in Barbara H. Rosenwein (ed.), Anger's Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998); for a critique of Elias's theory, see Gerd Schwerhoff, ‘Zivilisationsprozeß und Geschichtswissenschaft. Norbert Elias' Forschungsparadigma in historischer Sicht', Historische Zeitschrift 266 (1998), 561-605; see also Karl-Siegbert Rehberg (ed.), Norbert Elias und die Menschenwissenschaften: Studien zur Entstehung und Wirkungsgeschichte seines Werkes (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996). increased. The process of civilisation within the concept of ‘violence' appears as a rather relative concept then.

In fact, as has been pointed out by many sociologists, especially by representatives of the Chicago School, the breakdown of family and community, the rise of mass society, the emergence of modern industrialisation with its subsequent features of mass alienation, the new development of a capitalist class structure, and, above all, unprecedented degrees of aggression by the state against its citizens, led to unforeseen levels of violence in modern times.

We are obviously faced with two contradictory paradigms, built on very different sets of criteria for determining violence. Nevertheless, we still need to ask whether Elias's theories can be supported in the light of these phenomena in modern times.^{^[1152]} For instance, Julius Ruff, among others, contradicts the notion that violence has dramatically increased over the last hundred years, but especially since the end of the Second World War. A careful comparison of late medieval society with the modern world, for instance, would demonstrate, as Ruff suggests, rather a remarkable decline in violent crimes. Indeed, by ‘the mid-nineteenth century, in fact, the collective violence... was an anachronism in much of western Europe'.^{^[1153]} Even if this observation holds true, violence as such both on an individual and on a state level has not abated even today, though its targets and strategies may have shifted, especially as state violence has tremendously multiplied worldwide.

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Source: Gordon Matthew, Kaeuper Richard, Zurndorfer Harriet (eds.). The Cambridge World History of Violence. Volume 2: AD 500-AD 1500. Cambridge University Press,2020. — 696 p.. 2020

Theoretical Approaches to Violence II

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