Violence in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1800. .

Violence in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1800. By Julius R. Ruff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 269 pp.).

The appearance of a general textbook on the history of European violence is, in itself, a significant event. Historical violence studies proliferated in the 1990s as violence--previously treated largely as a sub-topic of crime--emerged as a subject in its own right. However, focused studies have been, with some exceptions, confined to journals and collections of essays. The time is ripe for a sustained synthesis of what we know, or think we know, about the history of violence. That Julius R. Ruff's ambitious book, the latest addition to the Cambridge New Approaches to European History series, is well written, clearly organized and laced with engaging evidence makes it an even more welcome contribution to the growing field of violence studies.

Ruff's methodology is informed by cutting-edge concerns while giving well-established classics due credit and/or criticism. The result is a clear distillation of decades of detailed research and scholarly debate. Having taken on the difficult task of addressing three centuries and most of Western Europe, Ruff draws necessary limits, leaving aside warfare and revolution (although considering the impact of armies on civilians) and focusing instead on more quotidian banditry, homicide, assault, rape and riot. Diverse themes, regions and times are tied together by an approach influenced by Norbert Elias's "civilizing process," which has become a principal, though debated, analytical tool of violence history. Direct discussion of theory is in large measure confined to the introduction and conclusion, but Ruff's claim that "Europeans half a millennium ago constituted a society far more violent than that of their modem descendants" (2) clearly echoes recent Elias-inspired trends that have reversed the view--closely associated with early twentieth-century sociology--that industrialization and urbanization are inseparable from rising violence.

The book is organized thematically, and the chapters "Justice" and "The Discourse of Interpersonal Violence" seem to form its conceptual core. Their focus on "infrajudicial" dispute settlement (i.e., without recourse to state courts) and community self-regulation of everyday life (83-92) points to the vitality of alternative modes of maintaining order and the difficulties states faced in establishing monopolies on the legitimate use of force. Here, Ruff builds on the insights that the definition of violence "is a moving target" (5) and that violence "erupted as part of the discourse of human relations" (117) by exploring brawling, dueling, policing, domestic violence, judicial torture, state punishment and rape. These issues are brought together elegantly and vividly, drawing on materials from various regions and contexts to create a convincing portrait of a society in which violence was a widespread and normal part of everyday social life.

Other chapters move in different directions. "Representations of Violence," concerns the depiction of violence in early modem media. While the chapter is strong on the production, forms, styles and motifs of these depictions, it is rather vague on the admittedly more elusive issue of their reception. Three chapters--"Ritual Group Violence," "Popular Protest," and "Organized Crime"--provide very capable summaries of heavily investigated fields in crime and social history. Emphasizing fundamental changes in rural life and the withdrawal of elites from traditional mores, Ruff finds by the end of the eighteenth century a broad assault on popular culture from state and church. Regarding organized crime, Ruff is convinced by the revisionist denial of "social crime," the capability of crime to express social protest.

"States, Arms and Armies," concerning the impact of armies on civilian populations through violent atrocities, rape, looting, and the forced levying of supplies, is the closest that the book comes to dealing with warfare. That chapter's uneasy position on the frontier of Ruff's topic area perhaps contributes to it being the most problematic section of the book. His conclusion that military codes, improving discipline and better conditions diminished the "wanton cruelty" of military forces and "hastened the process of restricting the destruction wrought by soldiers" (66) appears relatively accurate within the period he considers. However, the general argument that more disciplined or "civilized" armies have a declining impact on civilians strikes me as overly optimistic in the longer term.

A handful of more general issues remain. First, perhaps inevitable in tackling such a broad topic in a way accessible to non-specialists, one senses at times a tendency toward overgeneralization. Second, although Ruff notes the inherent mutability of violence's definition, he sometimes seems to describe it as something concrete and quantifiable. Third, he verges toward overconfidence regarding the solidity of "factual" sources of violence despite vigorous debates within the field that have questioned such evidence: although court records, statistics and official publications are necessary and valuable, they too are stories that seek to define, as well as simply measure, "violence." Fourth, while he successfully describes the contours of traditional community views of violence, these older narratives seem at times to be treated with some amount of condescension or are judged, perhaps inappropriately, according to a distinctly modern sensibility. Fifth, while undermining the notion of an ever-increasing spiral of violence over the centuries is valuable, inverting the argument is, in some ways, equally troubling and overlooks the contradictions within the civilizing process itself (e.g., its in-built tendency to create new perceptions of violence and new forms of fear), the always contested definition of violence, the paradoxical pacification of civilian life alongside more destructive warfare, and the wider world picture in which Europeans--as they were developing more restrained and "civilized" societies (in Elias's sense of the term)--expanded their often-violent reach throughout the world. Sixth, despite references to Michel Foucault, the notion of power and its relationship to changing standards of behavior is somewhat underdeveloped.

Notwithstanding these criticisms, this is an excellent achievement and a valuable addition to the field of violence history: it will be a useful summary and reference for specialists and a clear introduction to students or general readers interested in the topic of violence.