History 442/542
Popular Culture
in Early Modern Europe:
Ritual, Religion, Power (1400-1750)
| History 442/542 Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe: Ritual, Religion, Power (1400-1750) |
Readings
We will be discussing the following books in this course:
Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge
UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983).
Carlo Ginzburg, Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a
Sixteenth-Century Miller (Baltimore : Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1980).
Anke te Heesen, The World in a Box: The Story of an
Eighteenth-Century Picture Encyclopedia (Chicago :
University of Chicago Press, 2002)
In addition, we will be reading a large number of scholarly articles and primary documents, which are contained in a two-volume course packet. These readings are also available to you through E-Reserves. This webpage also contains study questions to help you navigate your way through these texts.
Here are the contents of each volume, with complete bibliographical citations. You can use the citation to locate any particular article in books reserved for the course.
2) Ronald Hutton, “The Ritual Year in England, c. 1490-c. 1540”: from his The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year, 1400-1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 5-48.
10) Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980)<>Four Early Versions of “Little Red Riding Hood”: from Jack Zipes, ed., The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood, 2d. ed. (New York: Routledge, 1993), 91-98, 135-138.
The assignment for Thursday is to read and decipher four early
versions
of the story “Little Red Riding Hood”: the earliest, a version from
Charles
Perrault (1697); an anonymous rendition from 1726; Robert Samber's
rendition
from 1729; and finally the famous story by the brothers Grimm, Jacob
and
Wilhelm (1812).
Read them as closely as you can, and try to formulate ideas in response
to the following questions:
1) What are the principle narrative elements in the stories?
2) How do these elements change over time from 1697 to 1812?
3) How are we to interpret the trajectory of these changes?
4) Can these stories be interpreted psychologically? How?
5) Can they be interpreted sociologically? How?
6) What are the strengths of these sources as evidence of 'popular
culture' in the period before industrialization and revolution?
7) What are their limitations as evidence of 'popular culture'?
Ronald Hutton, “The Ritual Year in England, c. 1490-c. 1540”: from
his The Rise and Fall of Merry
England: The Ritual Year, 1400-1700 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1994), 5-48.
E.P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism”: from
his Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (New
York: The New Press, 1993), 352-403.
“The Ritual Year in England”
On Tuesday, we'll discuss a chapter by Ronald Hutton on the structure
of the ritual year in England on the eve of the Reformation. It is part
of a larger argument, in which Hutton shows which elements of “popular”
culture in late medieval England -- the elements we associate with an
image of “merry old England” that every year are reproduced ad
nauseam in so-called “Renaissance fairs” throughout Britain and
North America -- were truly popular and medieval, and which elements
were in fact the latter-day contributions of elites and city folk. As
you read, try to formulate ideas in response to the following questions:
1) What are Hutton's sources? As you know, “popular culture” is
unusually elusive quarry for historians to hunt. How does Hutton pull
it off? What are the advantages and disadvantages of his approach? Are
there any viable alternatives?
2) Some historians argue that the Christian ritual year divided the
calendar into two main seasons, a sacred cycle and a profane one. What
evidence do you find in favor or against this proposition?
3) Hutton is at pains to distinguish between truly medieval customs of
ritual observance and later additions; what are these? Hutton also is
eager to distinguish the ritual practices of urban and rural parishes;
how would you characterize the main differences? How would you explain
these differences? What significance do you attach to them?
4) A very general question: what was the ritual year for?
There are many possibilities; some say the ritual year took form and
meaning from the cycle of planting and harvest, that it was inseparable
in other words from a certain mode of production. Others point to such
rituals as the Corpus Christi processions and argue that the ritual
year was primarily about community. Yet others analyze the ritual year
as evidence of Christianity's pervasive influence; still others analyze
it for lingering traces of pre-Christian, pagan belief. What do you
think?
“Time, Work-Discipline, and
Industrial Capitalism”
The assignment for Thursday is to read E.P. Thompson's classic essay,
“Time, Work, and Industrial Capitalism.” Ronald Hutton familiarized us
with the many-layered and cyclical structure of liturgical and festive
time in the agrarian cultures of early modern Europe; Thompson add's
the layer of merchant's time and charts the rise and dominance of the
clock in Europe's transition from an agrarian to an industrial society.
As you read, try to formulate ideas in response to the following
questions:
1) Thompson's goal is to show how the 'transtion to mature
industrial
society entailed a severe restructuring of working habits' were related
to 'changes in the inward notation of time.' What is the basic
structure
of his argument?
2) What, specifically, does Thompson mean by the distinction between
'task-oriented' and clock time, and why does he think that the former
'more
humanly comprehensible'?
3) What can we deduce from the availability of clocks in early modern
Europe? Who owned them? What cultural function did they fulfill, and
how
did this function shift as industrialization progressed?
4) How would you interpret the phenomenon of 'Saint Monday'? As a form
of resistance to clock time? As an adaptation to clock time?
5) What, for Thompson, is the crucial causal connection? What,
in other words, are the forces that cause people to think about time in
a particular way?
6) Thompson's argument hinges on the proposition that people internalized
the
new, rationalized concept of time. Are you persuaded by his argument?
Why
or why not?
7) What kinds of sources does Thompson use to make his case? Do you
find his use of anthropological comparisons useful or convincing? Why
or
why not?
Week
3: Dangers
Arthur Imhof, “Dangers”: from his Lost Worlds: How Our European
Ancestors
Coped with Everyday Life and Why Life is So Hard Today (Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia, 1996), 68-104.
Keith Thomas, “The Magic of the Medieval Church”: from his Religion
and the Decline of Magic (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971),
25-50.
“Dangers”
The assignment for Tuesday is to read “Dangers,” by Arthur Imhof. This
is part of a larger study examination of peasant life in early modern
Europe,
which Imhof examines through the experiences of a German peasant named
Johannes Hooss (1670-1755). We don't know much about Johannes Hooss'
thoughts
or feelings, but we do know a great deal about his social and material
circumstances--his network of kinship, his circles of acquaintance, his
wealth and property, and so forth. In this chapter, Imhof tries to
reconstruct
the mental worlds of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century
rural
people, in particular how they coped with the mortal dangers that
surrounded
them--war, plague, famine, death. As you read the chapter, try to
answer
some of the following questions:
1) Imhof distinguishes between “immediate” fear of plague--the kind
you would get knowing that the infection had arrived in a village
nearby--and
“latent” anxieties about it--the sort engendered by the knowledge that
plague could recur at any time. Do you find this distinction
compelling?
2) Since plague didn't strike everywhere with the same frequency or
intensity, we should be able to discern geographies of trauma, so to
speak.
How does Imhof arrive at his geographies? How did these different kinds
of fear manifest themselves in the reproductive habits of ordinary
people?
3) Imhof compares two villages, one with high birth rates and the other
with low, and argues that patterns of fear had led to different
attitudes
among men toward their wives, mothers, and daughters, and among women
toward
childbirth and birth control. Are you persuaded? How, in Imhof's view,
did these attitudes reflect different ideas about life after death?
4) In view of all these dangers, Imhof asks, "How did the church and
its representatives...shape the everyday lives" of ordinary people in
early
modern Europe. What kind of spiritual climate resulted from the
interaction
of fear and faith? What conceptualization of cosmic time equipped them
best to deal with danger?
5) Imhof is a demographic historian--a scholar who studies the grand
averages of birth and death rates, age at first marriage, and so forth.
This chapter represents his venture into the realm of cultural history.
What do you think of the results? Do you find his approach satisfying?
“The Magic of the Medieval Church”
On Thursday, we'll discuss an essay by Keith Thomas entitled “The Magic
of the Medieval Church,” in which he describes the ways in which ritual
and religion served as “technologies” for protection in world full of
natural and supernatural dangers. The loss of this “function”--which
Max Weber characterized as the “disenchantment of the world”--is one of
the great, overarching themes in the history of popular culture. As you
read, try to formulate ideas in response to the following questions:
1) Keith Thomas insists that religion must be seen as a kind of
magic.
But what exactly does he mean by “magic”? Is he right to interpret the
rituals of medieval Christianity in this manner? What might an
alternative
understanding of Christian religious ritual look like?
2) We've already considered the relationship between saints and
communities
in the early Middle Ages; how did that relationship tend to operate in
the late Middle Ages, the period with which Keith Thomas is concerned?
What changes had taken place?
3) Can we discern a distinction between rituals or other instruments of
the Church that were “magical” and those that were not? What about the
sacraments? Was their performance a magical event? How did elite
attitudes toward these matters differ from those of the general
population?
Week
4: Festivity
Natalie Zemon Davis, “The Reasons of Misrule”: from her Society
and
Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University
Press,
1975), 97-123.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), “The Roman Carnival” (1788):
from his Italian Journey (1786-1788), translated by W.H. Auden
and
Elizabeth Mayer (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1982), 445-469.
Robert C. Davis, “The Chronicler's Art” and “Horatius on the Bridge”:
from his The War of the Fists: Popular Culture and Public Violence
in
Late Renaissance Venice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994),
3-12,
47-87.
“The Reasons of Misrule” and “The Roman Carnival”
This week we take up what are arguably the central themes of lay
festivity
in early modern Europe, ritual or symbolic inversion, the
“carnivalesque”,
and the celebration of the “lower body.” On Tuesday, we'll discuss an
influential
essay by the Princeton historian, Natalie Zemon Davis, entitled “The
Reasons
of Misrule,” her attempt to decode the social language of popular
festivity
in early modern France. We'll also discuss an eye-witness account of
the
Roman Carnival by the great German poet and playwright, Johann Wolfgang
von Goethe, written at the end of his famous tour of Italy in
1786-1788.
As you read, try to formulate ideas surrounding the following
questions.
1) Natalie Davis begins the “The Reasons of Misrule” with a
description
of the non-official festivities surrounding the Feast of Fools and the
role played in them by so-called “Abbeys of Misrule.” How do you
account
for the fact that their profane antics so often took place within the
sacred
spaces of church and cathedral?
2) “Real life,” she writes, was deeply embedded in their rituals
“because
misrule always implies the rule that it parodies.” How would you
characterize
the social function of parody? Did it serve to undermine social order
or
to reinforce it?
3) Davis argues that the “Abbeys of Misrule” have origins in medieval
village life as a kind of sexual and marital police with “jurisdiction”
(loosely defined) over the behavior of married people. In what sense
does
she mean “jurisdiction”? What prevented their rowdiness from spilling
into
violence and rebellion?
4) How were urban “Abbeys of Misrule” different from their rural
predecessors?
What conditions of city life ior habits of mind nfluenced the structure
and activities of urban “Abbeys”? Under what conditions did the
mocking
laughter of the urban “Abbeys” transform into derision against
political
authorities?
5) What would you say was the social function of the Roman Carnival,
as Goethe presents it? Are we justified in seeing it as a kind of
safety-valve
for pent-up social tensions, and occasion when everyone can let off a
little
steam, but harmlessly and without challenging the existing order of
things?
6) How would you compare what Goethe saw with charivari and
the “Abbeys of Misrule”? Goethe emphasizes the invitation to license it
offered -- there is plenty of cross-dressing, sexual ribaldry, and
masking
-- yet it comes off as a comparatively stately affair. How have the
Romans
succeeded in taming Carnival?
7) How do you address the fact that Goethe is an foreign observer of
these goings-on? Does taking that fact into account cause you to modify
your understanding of the things he describes?
“The War of the Fists”
The focus of Thursday's discussion will be Robert C. Davis' analysis
of the guerre dei pugni, or “Wars of the Fists,” a form of
ritualized
violence carried out on the bridges of Venice, sometimes in honor of
visiting
foreign
dignitaries, most notably the King of France, Henri III, in 1574. But
the
guerre
dei pugni were more than simply celebratory brawls. They were also
symbolic turf battles between the two great factions of Venice, the
Castellani
and the Nicolotti, and
in this sense the guerre dei pugni
described
the forces of cohesion and division in Venetian society generally.
This,
of course, raises the question of carnivalesque violence and its
relation
to social order. As you read, try to formulate ideas surrounding the
following
questions.
1) What were the “carnivalesque” elements of these fights, in your
view? Can you detect elements of symbolic inversion? What about
“grotesque realism” (Bakhtin's famous phrase)? If violence is a kind of
language, how would you read it?
2) Davis rejects “sociopathic” explanations of guerre dei pugni--explanations
that depend on a diagnosis of the participants as somehow irregular or
“sick.” What are some of the alternatives? Is it appropriate to apply
the “safety-valve” theory here? What was all the fighting actually for?
3) How would you analyze the guerre dei pugni as a social
phenomenon? Who participated? Who observed? How did a person make the
transition from observer to combatant? What was the relationship
between participants and observers once an all-out frotte began?
4) We are accustomed to think of violence as aberrant behavior, and it
is clear that the Venetian authorities were of more than one mind about
the guerre dei pugni. Yet it is equally clear that this was the
position of a tiny minority. How did the rest experience violence? What
were its ritualistic elements? How did participants and observers
estimate prowess?
Carlo Ginzburg, Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980).
With Goethe's description of the Roman Carnival, we began an exploration into the problems involved with using primary sources in the study of early modern popular culture. Goethe's account is full of insight about ritual and performance on the Corso, but methodologically his text raises a problem of perspective: Goether was a first-hand witness, but not a participant-observer. In the case of the Domenico Scandella, better known as Menocchio, we are confronted with a different set of issues and methodological challenges. Menocchio was an ordinary miller charged with heresy who came for trial before the Venetian office of the Italian Inquisition, and his interrogation reveal a host of unorthodox ideas about the nature of God and the origin of the universe. Yet it is clear that Menochhio considered himself a faithful and obedient Christian. Bear the following questions in mind as you try to disentangle this paradox:
1) What was the specific charge against Menocchio? Here's a tactical
suggestion: as you read through the text, take careful note of who is
speaking,
her or his relationship to Menocchio, and why he or she is under
interrogation.Should
we trust the testimony of one sort of witness over another?
2) What were Menocchio's beliefs, as far as you can discern them from
the transcript of his trial, about the nature of God? About the "truth"
behind the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary? About the
sacrament
of confession? About the sacrament of communion? About divine
omnipotence?
About the requirements for salvation? About life after death? How would
you characterize his concept of Christianity in light of these ideas?
3) Menocchio has some odd ideas about the origin of the universe, first
intimated before the court by the chaplain Gaspare (9)? What were they,
and how do you interpret them in light of his other ideas about the
Christian
God?
4) Menocchio propounds a novel theory that human beings have a soul
and a spirit, which are distinct and opposed, and that the one is
mortal
and the other eternal. How do you interpret these ideas of his?
5) We know from his own testimony and that of many others that
Menocchio
could read and write and owned several books. Where did Menocchio get
his
ideas? What sorts of books did he own? What, in other words, were the
channels
of communication that led into and out of the mind of Menocchio? The
chaplain
Gaspare suggests that Menocchio was a closet Lutheran; what credence do
you give to such an accusation?
6) Menocchio was never tortured, but that does not mean he suffered
no coercion. In light of this, how are we to interpret the content of
his
confessions before the tribunal? Doesn't the coercive circumstances
under
which he made his confessions somehow pollute the content of his
testimony?
7) How do you explain the strange notions Menocchio had about the
origins
of the universe and the nature of Jesus, and what might our conclusions
suggest about the relationship between church doctrine and popular
belief
in the sixteenth century?
 Week 7: Discipline Image: Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), Portrait of Erasmus (1520). Black chalk, 0.373 m x 0.268 m. Musée du Louvre, RF 4113. Image source: Musée du Louvre, http://www.louvre.fr. Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536), “On Good Manners in Boys”
(1529): from Collected Works of Erasmus: Literary and Educational
Writings, vol. 4 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), 297-346.
“The Civilizing Process” |
1) In this small treatise, Erasmus makes an impassioned plea for the
liberal instruction of young children. Behind this lurks a concept of
childhood
and the particular characteristics of that condition. What is that
concept,
and why does it encourage early liberal education?
2) According to Erasmus, there is nothing so monstrous as the mind
of a beast inhabiting the body of a human.What, in Erasmus' view, are
the
essential differences between humans and beasts? What, in other words,
are the essential characteristics of human nature? How far do innate
characteristics
determine the formation of personality, in his view?
3) How should a human being turn out, if the proper educational methods
are applied? And what educational methods are most likely to produce an
ideal outcome, in Erasmus' view? Why, for instance, does he emphasize
so
strongly the importance of learning a language? What, by the same
token,
are the marks of a failed upbringing? Is there a unifying,
underlying
theme to his choice of educational methods?
4) Based on his admittedly polemical descriptions, how would you
characterize
the state of education in the early sixteenth century, when Erasmus
wrote?
He argues vehemently against the use of corporeal punishments in
education.
What is his reasoning for this? More broadly: Erasmus stresses the
importance
of finding good instructors for one's children. What, for Erasmus, were
the marks of a good teacher?
5) Similarly, how would you characterize the state of parenting in
Erasmus' time, going by what he had to say about it? How should fathers
behave, ideally? How should mothers raise their children? What are the
sorts of mistakes parents commonly make? What are the attitudes toward
parenting that Erasmus is arguing against?
“A Revolution in Ritual”
On Thursday, we'll begin our study the impact of Protestant Reformation
on the ritual life, a topic that will occupy the following week as
well.
We'll begin with a short pamphlet by Andreas Karlstadt, one of Martin
Luther's
earliest associates, on the theological necessity (as he saw it) of
removing
images from the sacred space of church interiors. His reasons, as we
shall
see, were integral to a broad-based campaign for the transformation of
ritual life.
Lyndal Roper, “Discipline and Marital Disharmony”: from her The
Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg (Oxford:
Clarendon Press 1989).
Craig M. Koslofsky, “Bodies: Placing the Dead in the German
Reformation”:
from his The Reformation of the Dead: Death and Ritual in Early
Modern
Germany, 1450-1700 (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), 41-77.
“Gendering Popular Culture”
This week's readings confront us with the attempts of sixteenth-century
reformers to transform basic structures and attitudes surrounding
family
and kinship. On Tuesday, we'll look at the ways in which gender norms
changed,
partly as a result of the Reformation, and how efforts to enforce these
norms affected the lives of married people in Augsburg, a major city in
southern Germany. Two issues are paramount in Tuesday's readings:
first,
the extent to which the new norms be attributed to the Reformation, and
second, the extent to which these norms, whatever their origin,
succeeded
or failed in “gendering” key structures in early modern popular
culture.
As you read, try to formulate answers to the following questions:
1) At the center of Lyndal Roper's study of marriage in Augsburg are
records of the Marriage Court. What were the laws it was charged with
enforcing?
What was the scope of its jurisdiction? What was the ideal of marriage
its members hoped to realize?
2) A great deal of the court's energies were directed at enforcing
ideals about the mutuality of marriage--in the division of labor, of
money.
What can these records tell us about the nature of “women's work” in
the
sixteenth century? What can they tell us about the “genderedness” of
social
life more broadly.
3) Roper's sources describe unspeakable violence and cruelty in
marriage.
How did the court deal with it? What assumptions did it bring to bear
on
its treatment of marital violence? Similarly with adultery--the ground
for most divorces. How did the court respond when marriages had so
manifestly
failed?
4) What are the strengths and weaknesses of Roper's sources as a window
on sixteenth-century marriage?
“The Living and the Dead”
On Thursday, we'll look at kinship from an unfamiliar vantage--that of
the dead--to see how a transformation in ideas about salvation and the
afterlife transformed attitudes toward ancestors and reconfigured
anxieties surrounding them. In the chapter by Craig Koslofsky, we'll
also see how these new ideas fused with the Protestant revolution of
ritual to transform funerary rituals and practices.
1) The inhabitants of German cities resisted strenuously the
attempts of authorities to introduce “extramural burial,” i.e., burial
of the dead in cemeteries located outside the town. What were the
reasons for this hesitance? What does it suggest about notions of
kinship between the living and the dead?
2) What factors explain the perceived need to remove burial to
extramural cemeteries? Which among them were the most compelling? How
did Protestant theology affect rituals surrounding burial of the dead?
Why should Luther's followers have been so enthusiastic about extramural
burial? Why were they so anxious about physical and spiritual
proximity between the living and the dead?
3) Why did Catholic polemicists such as Georg Witzel find Luther's
doctrines on death and burial so objectionable? What dangers to
Christian community attached to extramural burial, in their view?
4) What was at stake in the Leipzig Burial Controversy of 1536? What
broader tensions and controversies were drawn into this dispute, and
how?
Douglas Hay, “Property, Authority, and the Criminal Law”; from
Douglas
Hay et al., Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in
Eighteenth-Century
England (New York: Pantheon, 1975), 17-63.
Thomas W. Laqueur, “Crowds, Carnivals and the State in English
Executions,
1648-1868”: from A.L. Beier et al., eds., The First Modern Society:
Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone (Cambridge:
Cambridge
University Press, 1989), 305-355.
“Theaters of Horror”
This week we confront the exercise of power through popular culture--or
against it, for as we will see, historians disagree sharply about how
best
to interpret the highly theatrical quality of early modern criminal
punishment.
As everyone knows, the early modern centuries were an era of harsh
corporeal
and public punishments, when it was taken for granted that certain
crimes
should be punished through the infliction of physical pain and that the
display of horror was the best instrument of deterrence. But as we have
seen time and again, beliefs about popular culture and its actual ways
of operating were not always in accord. On Tuesday we'll read to
differing
views of capital punishment in eighteenth-century England. As you read,
try to formulate some ideas around the following questions:
1) One of the most remarkable transformations in the criminal law of early
modern England was an enormous increase in the number of capital offenses after
the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688. For Douglas Hay, the crucial
point about 1688 is that established the freedom for “men of property”--not
just anyone. How, in Hay's view, did this reorientation affect the structure
of criminal law?
2) Hay notes the paradoxical fact that few executions were carried out in relation
to the number of convictions and the size of the rapidly expanding English population.
What significance does Hay derive from this fact? Why the contradiction between
law and enforcement? Shouldn't it have diminished the deterrent effect of capital
punishment?
3) In Hay's interpretation, the criminal law was useful primarily as a tool
for “maintaining bonds of obedience and deference, in legitimizing the
status quo, [and] in constantly recreating the structure of authority which
arose from property” (25). How, exactly, were the concepts of justice,
majesty, and mercy acted out in a manner that contributed to “maintaining
bonds of obedience and deference”? How was the criminal law likened to
the majesty of God?
4) For Hay, criminal justice was class justice proclaiming, falsely, to preserve
equality before the law. But doesn't this argument depend on proving that ordinary
people were successfully indoctrinated by the drama of execution and mercy?
What evidence is there for the awe-inspiring and terrorizing effects this symbolic
system was supposed to induce?
5) Thomas Laqueur argues, in opposition to Hay's interpretation, that the crowd
at English executions was no passive object of theatrical terror but instead
“the central actor.” Part of his reasoning has to do with the limitations
of public execution as a ceremony for the display of power. Why does he argue
that the “theater of horror” displayed power poorly?
6) Laqueur thinks that we ought to take the idea of public execution as theater
very seriously. What expectations, in his view, did people bring to public execution,
and how did these resemble the expectations people brought to theatrical performances?
What dramatic forms did the rituals of public execution typically follow?
7) If deterrence wasn't the purpose of public execution, what was? How did contemporary
observers criticize the spectacle of capital punishment, and on what grounds?
Laqueur argues that the crowd at English exeuctions was “specifically
a carnival crowd.” What made the English crowds “carnivalesque”?
In what sense were public executions a form of sacrificial killing by the community?
In what sense did they express “community values”?
8) Ultimately, argues Laqueur, executions remained public because people wanted
them to stay that way. But doesn't this require us to regard the English state
as the helpless participant? Doesn't this interpretation require us to place
the blame of state violence on the shoulders of its victims?
The Body of the Condemned
On Thursday, we'll discuss a seminal arguments of Michel Foucault concerning
the transformation of criminal punishments during the period, roughly, between
1750 and 1850. Specifically, Foucault was interested in the “target(s)
of penal repression”: in the eighteenth century, criminal punishments
were still focussed on the body and crafted to inflict pain on it; by the mid-nineteenth
century, criminal punishments were designed to reform the mind and soul
of the criminal. Also, Foucault was interested in the transformation of
criminal punishments as a public phenomenon: in the eighteenth century, executions
were still public spectacles, but by the mid-nineteenth, they had retreated
behind the high walls of prisons and penitentiaries. All this, he argued, reflected
a fundamental shift in the exercise of power, as well as the relationship between
power and culture, including popular culture. As you read, try to formulate
some ideas around the following questions:
1) Foucault observes that the transformation of criminal punishments entailed
a “slackening of the hold on the body.” What examples does he summon
in support of this observation, and what is its significance? What new forms
of punishment accompanied the “elimination of pain” from the system
of punishments?
2) What changes in penal practices were associated with the shift in focus on
the soul of the criminal? Foucault argues that the new forms of punishment
reflect a new understanding of what crime is, “the quality, the nature,
in a sense the substance of which the punishable element is made.” What
does he have in mind? Why, specifically, does it become so much more important
to know a criminal's motivations?
3) What, according to Foucault, are the consequences of this new preoccupation
with the mind of the criminal? Why, for example, does the shift make
a “judicial absurdity” to punish an insane person for murder? How,
more broadly, have the activities of judges and “magistrates concerned
with the implementation of sentences” changed as a result of the shifts
Foucault is describing?
4) Foucault describes a major shift, but he is also mindful to point out how
the old regime of criminal punishments continued long into the nineteenth century.
What were some of these survivals, and what is their significance?
5) For Foucault, the history of criminal punishments is ultimately about the
history of the body, about changes in the “political economy of the body.”
What does he have in mind with this statement? What does he mean when he writes
that systems of criminal punishment always reflect a certain “knowledge”
or “political technology of the body”?
6) How is power exerted through criminal punishments, according to Foucault?
What role do the participants in an execution play in its exercise? Is it somehow
a manifestation of properties class interests, as Douglas Hay would argue; or
would Foucault agree that public executions in early modern Europe were in some
fundamental sense “carnivalesque,” as Thomas Laqueur insists? Is
the audience at an public hanging merely an assembly of passive spectators,
or do they participate actively in the production of power and “knowledge
about the body”?
Anke te Heesen, The World in a Box: The Story of an
Eighteenth-Century Picture Encyclopedia (Chicago : University of
Chicago Press, 2002)
Study questions coming soon!