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

The issues of shame, blame, and culpability are scarcely studied in their historical context. Yet such study provides insights into the important contemporary dimensions associated with the perceived collapse of existing forms of punishment and the growing interest in the revival of shame punishments and restorative justice. Thus the history of shame, blame, and culpability speaks to the past history of society, culture, and law – yet it also has an important role in showing contemporary societies how past societies theorized these issues. This volume brings together a range of work by leading writers in the field and engages with the comparative dimensions of shame, blame, and culpability and their fundamentally important impact upon modern multicultural states.

Tracing the use, abuse, and negotiation of the related concepts of shame, blame, and culpability between the 17th and 20th centuries in a number of different geographical locations, this book forms a part of the movement within criminal and legal history to turn the focus away from capital and serious crime to look at the impact of lesser (and more common) criminality which has a daily impact on people's lives. In studying the interaction of how people understand the boundaries of acceptable behaviour, the volume illustrates perceptions of crime and morality at work in previously unstudied societies at different historical junctures.

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.

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.