Aspects of Violence in Renaissance Europe

Jonathan Davies, Jonathan Davies

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317178057
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Antropologia culturale e sociale

Interest in the history of violence has increased dramatically over the last ten years and recent studies have demonstrated the productive potential for further inquiry in this field. The early modern period is particularly ripe for further investigation because of the pervasiveness of violence. Certain countries may have witnessed a drop in the number of recorded homicides during this period, yet homicide is not the only marker of a violent society. This volume presents a range of contributions that look at various aspects of violence from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, from student violence and misbehaviour in fifteenth-century Oxford and Paris to the depiction of war wounds in the English civil wars. The book is divided into three sections, each clustering chapters around the topics of interpersonal and ritual violence, war, and justice and the law. Informed by the disciplines of anthropology, criminology, the history of art, literary studies, and sociology, as well as history, the contributors examine all forms of violence including manslaughter, assault, rape, riots, war and justice. Previous studies have tended to emphasise long-term trends in violent behaviour but one must always be attentive to the specificity of violence and these essays reveal what it meant in particular places and at particular times.

Part I
Interpersonal and Ritual Violence

Chapter 1
Student Violence in Fifteenth-Century Paris and Oxford

Hannah Skoda

Introduction

Student misbehaviour in fifteenth-century Paris and Oxford was wide-ranging. Much of it was petty: smearing faeces on the masters’ chairs, and, according to outraged college authorities, playing tennis in public.1 But the same students could be involved in interpersonal beatings and the abuse of prostitutes, or ritualised and often ludic stagings, casting one’s enemies as pigs to be slaughtered.2 At the other extreme, full-scale battles between town and gown or rivalrous groups of students occurred.3 This wide range of deviant behaviour took place on a continuum: this chapter focuses upon physical violence, but such brutality often sprang from verbal taunts and over-exuberant games.4

Student brutality was part of a spectrum in another sense also: fifteenth-century society was characterised by high levels of violence in a variety of contexts and physical hurt was, in many ways, an everyday occurrence.5 Yet violence by students was specific in its forms, whilst playing on the resonances with violence in other spheres of life. Student violence and misbehaviour, fatalities aside, was often highly amusing, and was intended to be so, but it is nevertheless profoundly revealing of the social history of universities, as well as providing insights into youth culture more broadly. Violence and misbehaviour are worth studying because they were integral features of medieval student life, and because they were one of the main ways open to students to express themselves: in this sense, they provide useful perspectives on the history of masculinities, histories of ‘nationalisms’ and political loyalties and research into life-cycles.6 The historiography of medieval universities is voluminous, and, whereas most works have focused upon institutional or intellectual history,7 increasing numbers of historians are addressing the question of student violence with a view to illuminating the relationship and interactions between universities and society.8 This chapter adds this historiography by using a comparative framework to clarify those interactions. Violence in Oxford and Paris did not take exactly the same forms or function identically, revealing the contingency of even the most brutal and drunken gestures.

Student violence, then, did not just consist of meaningless pranks. These were actions which responded to specific contexts and which were shaped by their socio-political milieu. Some, as we shall see, were driven by political engagement and the sensed need to defend university privileges: such has been the focus of much historiography since the events of 1968 stimulated interest in student power.9 But this cannot be said of all student violence, much of which was too petty to be subjected to such interpretation. Recent historians have productively applied anthropological techniques to analyse such quotidian violence, particularly with regard to youth violence, life-cycles and the ritual year.10 Comparative study further sharpens the picture. Even cases of students drunkenly beating prostitutes or urinating on passers-by took different forms in the two universities, demonstrating that violence had complex motivations and was dependent, at least in part, on the institutional structures, constraints and political contexts of the towns in which they lived.

Students at the universities of Oxford and Paris were young, particularly by comparison with their southern European counterparts: whilst the sources sadly lack detail regarding the precise ages of perpetrators of violence, many of these men were as young as 14.11 Not only their immaturity, but their desire to prove themselves and to explore their sense of identity, shaped their actions at a transitional stage in their lives.12 Such a focus on youth and transitional identities has informed several recent treatments of medieval and early-modern violence,13 but the analysis only takes us so far in accounting for the particular forms of misbehaviour and their relationship with the reactions they engendered. There is a further element to add to the analysis. Students in both cities were subjected to powerful processes of stereotyping: indeed, it is such stereotypes which are revealed in the majority of the source material rather than direct observations of student behaviour.14 Repeated labelling as deviant, drunken and sexually uncontrolled inevitably had an effect upon the ways in which students then chose to behave, particularly since at a formative age, labels and identities would have been powerful motivating factors. Stereotyping by repressive university authorities, hostile townspeople or moralising preachers shaped the ways in which students behaved. Criminological labelling theory provides a useful conceptual paradigm for analysing this relationship. Although controversial, a convincing argument has been expounded which claims that repeatedly labelling certain social groups as deviant can push them into recidivism, or at least shape the types of deviant behaviour in which they are likely to engage.15 This conceptual framework permits a comparative approach by helping to pinpoint reasons for differences in misbehaviour in different areas. Analysis of student misbehaviour needs then to assess the tropes by which students were labelled and to examine how actual behaviour contested and negotiated these categorizations; as youths eager to explore a sense of self, students were even more susceptible both to being stereotyped and to reacting violently to those labels.

The Universities and the Sources

Both universities were prestigious centres of learning, famous throughout Europe; both taught a curriculum focused upon the arts, with elite higher faculties of theology.16 Students in both universities assumed clerical status, at least for the duration of their studies. Nevertheless, these institutions were profoundly different. First, in size: whereas under 1,000 students studied in mid-fifteenth-century Oxford, estimates of the student population in Paris reached around 11,000.17 This contrast in numbers corresponded to the very different nature of the two towns. Paris was, by the fifteenth century, a centre of trade, an extremely cosmopolitan city and centre of royal power. The university welcomed students from all over Europe and dealt with this administratively by a structural division of masters of arts into so-called ‘nations’.18 However, the conflict of the Hundred Years War and the effects of the Papal Schism engendered the disintegration of this cosmopolitanism. Numbers of English students dropped dramatically because of the war, and German students were increasingly on the wrong side of the fault-line established by Schism allegiances.19 Moreover, the factionalism which tore at the polity in the early fifteenth century affected the university particularly brutally: although the university swiftly declared its allegiance to the Burgundians once they overran the town, this was not enough to protect students and masters from brutalization and massacre at the hands of rampaging Burgundian soldiers.20 The troubles of the university did not end with the return of peace in the second half of the century. Rather, it found itself punished for attempts to maintain neutrality during the war and the victim of an increasingly strident royal policy: compulsory reforms were instigated and university privileges were drastically reduced to the chagrin of the masters.21

The role of Oxford University was bound to be very different since Oxford was a small town where the university was always going to be the dominant entity: there was no flourishing international trade here and no centre of diplomacy or royal court with which to compete. Indeed, over the course of the Middle Ages, the privileges of the university vis-à-vis the town increased dramatically.22 Nevertheless, Oxford University also suffered in this period. After its association with the Lollard heresy, the university became a closely watched and morally repressive institution.23 Comments from within the university point to a sense of decline owing to the effects of war, even if a war essentially fought on foreign shores could never engender the kind of immediate suffering which plagued Parisian students.24 Oxford University had never been a particularly cosmopolitan institution, and differed dramatically from Paris in this respect: Oxford had only two loosely defined ‘nations’ of ‘northerners’ and ‘southerners’.25 Nevertheless, numbers declined still further in the fifteenth century and French students in particular were understandably reluctant to consider studying in such a hostile land.26

The structures of the two universities were very different. Paris had a few colleges by this stage, but these were essentially charitable institutions to provide opportunities for poorer students. Most Parisian students continued to live independently in the jumbled streets of the Quartier Latin.27 Oxford still had its panoply of residential halls, but a number of colleges were founded over the course of the fifteenth century, often to favour a particular educational programme and, most importantly, to enforce discipline.28 Despite the charitable possibilities in Paris, prosopographical studie...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• PART I: INTERPERSONAL AND RITUAL VIOLENCE
• PART II: WAR
• PART III: JUSTICE
• Bibliography
• Index