Domestic Disturbances, Patriarchal Values Violence, Family and Sexuality in Early Modern Europe, 1600-1900

This book offers an in-depth analysis of several national case studies on family violence between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, using court records as their main source. It raises important questions for research on early modern Europe: the notion of absolute power; sovereignty and its applicability to familial power; the problem of violence and the possibility of its usage for conflict resolution both in public and private spaces; and the interconnection of gender and violence against women, reconsidered in the context of modern state formation as a public sphere and family building as a private sphere. Contributors bring together detailed studies of domestic violence and spousal murder in Romania, England, and Russia, abduction and forced marriage in Poland, infanticide and violence against parents in Finland, and rape and violence against women in Germany. These case studies serve as the basis for a comparative analysis of forms, models, and patterns of violence within the family in the context of debates on political power, absolutism, and violence. They highlight changes towards unlimited violence by family patriarchs in European countries, in the context of the changing relationship between the state and its citizens. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of the History of the Family.

Introduction – ‘A king in his own household’: domestic discipline and family violence in early modern Europe reconsidered Marianna Muravyeva 1. Violence or justice? Gender-specific structures and strategies in early modern Europe Satu Lidman 2. Judicial archives and the history of the Romanian family: domestic conflict and the Orthodox Church in the eighteenth century Constanta Vintila -Ghitulescu 3. Vigilante violence vs. freedom of choice in marriage: the Foray/Zajazd in the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth of the 18th century Lynn Lubamersky 4. Marital cruelty: reconsidering lay attitudes in England, c. 1580 to 1850 Joanne Bailey and Loreen Giese 5. ‘Till Death Us Do Part’: spousal homicide in early modern Russia Marianna Muravyeva 6. Violence between parents and children: courts of law in early modern Finland Raisa Maria Toivo 7. Female serial killers in the early modern age? Recurrent infanticide in Finland 1750 – 1896 Mona Rautelin

Marianna Muravyeva is a Professor and Marie Curie senior research fellow at Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK. Her research focuses on the history of crime, legal history, gender history, and the history of sexuality in early modern Europe.