Shame, Blame, and Culpability ─ Crime and Violence in the Modern State

This ground-breaking collection of research-based chapters addresses the themes of shame, blame and culpability in their historical perspective in the broad area of crime, violence and the modern state, drawing on less familiar territories such as Russia and Greece, not just on material from familiar locations in western Europe. Ranging from the early modern to the late twentieth century, the collection has implications for how we understand punishments imposed by states or the community today.

Shame, blame and culpability is divided into three sections, with a crucial case study part complementing two theoretical parts on shame, and on blame and culpability; exploring the continuance of shaming strategies and examining their interaction with and challenge to 'modern' state-sponsored blaming mechanisms, including allocations of culpability. The collection includes chapters on the deviant body, capital punishment and, of particular interest, Russian case studies, which demonstrate the extent to which the Russian, like the Greek, experience need to be seen as part of a wider European whole when examining ideas and themes.

The volume challenges ideas that shame strategies were largely eradicated in post-Enlightenment western states and societies; showing their survival into the twentieth century as a challenge to state dominance over identification of what constituted 'crime' and also over punishment practices. Shame, blame and culpability will be a key text for students and academics in the fields of criminology and crime, gender or European history.

Judith Rowbotham is Director and co-founder of SOLON, the academic network behind the Crime, Violence and the Modern State conference series. She is an Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London, and the Legal History co-ordinator for the Society of Legal Scholars annual conference. She is also an experienced editor, with two SOLON collections as well as a number of other edited initiatives behind her. This includes the forthcoming volume, edited with Shani D’Cruze and Efi Avdela: Problems of Crime and Violence in Europe 1750-2000: Essays in Criminal Justice. She is currently working with Kim Stevenson on a monograph on media reportage from the courts, 1850-2000.

Marianna Muravyeva is Associate Professor of Law at Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia (St. Petersburg) and currently is a fellow at Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki, working on the project ‘Criminalizing Sexuality in 18^th Century Europe’. She is a co-founder of the Russian National Committee of the International Federation of Research in Women’s History and a member of the board. She has also worked as a member of St. Petersburg governmental committee on gender equality and as a policy adviser on protection of women-survivors of domestic abuse and sexual violence for St. Petersburg government and the police.

David Nash is Professor of history at Oxford Brookes University and has worked extensively in the area of blasphemy, blasphemous libel, and religious crime/law for over fifteen years. He is a panel member of the Centre for Legal Research and Policy Studies (Oxford Brookes University) and a member of the Academic Board of the Galleries of Justice Museum of Law Punishment and Policing (Nottingham). His most recent monograph is entitled Blasphemy in the Christian World (2007). He has written numerous articles which have been published in the magazines History Today and BBC History Magazine.