Violence and Honor in Prerevolutionary P廨igord

This book focuses on the intersection of honor and violence in prerevolutionary France, in particular in the Périgord region, between 1770 and 1790. It has long been known that late medieval and early modern Europe had high rates of violent crime, and historians and scholars across other disciplines have sought an explanation for why society tolerated such high levels of interpersonal violence. Most of our existing explanations focus on the macro level, looking at causes like the rise of the state or the concomitant cultural shift toward civility. In this study, author Steven Reinhardt utilizes a more microlevel, descriptive approach, drawing on archival sources (interrogations, petitions, inquests, and so on) that vividly convey the texture of ordinary people's everyday experiences.BR> Using a large sample of court cases from a region poorly integrated into the emerging capitalist economy, Violence and Honor in Prerevolutionary Périgord presents a series of extraordinarily rich narratives illustrating their subjects' understanding of the imperatives of the honor code. Combining careful scholarship with the broader appeal of popular history, the book will interest historians of early modern Europe, legal scholars, and anthropologists of law, as well as students and general readers interested in the history of violence. Steven G. Reinhardt is associate professor of History at the University of Texas at Arlington.