The Language of Violence: Symbolic Body Parts in Marital Conflicts in Early Modern France

Abstract

In Early Modern Europe, physical violence was a ubiquitous part of sociability and, as such, culturally coded to an extremely high degree.1 In this context, recent studies have repeatedly emphasized the importance of gender as one of the principal factors that determined acts of violence and their perception.2 Most research, though, presents physical violence as a quasi exclusively male phenomenon, in particular when analysing violence as a means of establishing and maintaining the gender hierarchy. Even the few studies that explicitly address the question of female violence generally conclude that Early Modern Europe’s culture of violence was a male culture, in which women participated, if at all, only marginally.3 The same is true for most of the studies that, due to the growing interest concerning domestic violence, deal with the question of intra-marital violence. For example, Nicole Castan for Early Modern France, Laura Gowing for England and Heinrich Richard Schmidt for Switzerland focus above all on male violence towards women.4 Elizabeth Foyster’s recent study on marital violence in England from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, despite claiming to present a “balanced view” of both male and female violence, nevertheless addresses physical violence mainly as male violence endured by women. Female violence is mainly described as “verbal violence”, whereas physical violence by women is hardly addressed at all and simply appears as “violent response”, or “resistance”, to male violence.5