Medieval Violence: Physical Brutality in Northern France, 1270-1330 [Book Review]

Abstract

Skoda's book deals with violence in a very specific context: Paris and the cities of Artois in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. She likewise has a particular focus: violence as a means of communication. Her violence is therefore carried out in public view, or joins private to public spaces: violence in the streets, in taverns, by university students, in the service of urban uprisings, and within the home. To find it, Skoda surveys an impressively broad array of sources: judicial and other legal sources, but also literature of various stripes, such as hagiography, sermons and religious exempla.

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