Zwischen Hauptwache Und Stockhaus. Kriminalität Und Strafjustiz in Thorn Im 18. Jahrhundert

Martina Thomsen. Zwischen Hauptwache und Stockhaus. Kriminalitat und Strafjustiz in Thorn im 18. Jahrhundert. Materialien und Studien zur Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung 13. Marburg: Verlag Herder-Institut, 2005. viii, 332 pp. Paper.Just as it seems that interest in the history of deviant behaviour has peaked, this new study of urban crime and punishment proves the continued attraction this topic has among young historians. Martina Thomsen's doctoral dissertation on criminality in eighteenth-century Thorn (Polish: Torun)-a city under the crown of Poland until the second Partition of Poland in 1793, with a mixed, Polish- and German-speaking population-tests several well-established commonplaces: Norbert Elias's civilizing process, which assumes that violent behaviour declined in the more civilized eighteenth century, Michel Foucault's emphasis on the disciplining of individuals as basis for an increasingly oppressive control over the whole of society, Pierre Chaunu's thesis of 'violence au vol, which perceived a shift from early modern crimes of violence to crimes against property during the Enlightenment, and Eric Hobsbawm's stress on gang criminality as social protest. Almost three hundred pages and many case-studies later, however, none of these paradigms seems particularly suitable. As Thomsen demonstrates, the reason was not the city's position in East Central Europe or the specific circumstances of the Culm Law Code (to some extent influenced by Polish law), which applied in the city, but the complexities of and historical reality which elude rigorously-applied concepts. This approach is refreshing but constantly clashes with the author's sometimes superficial and unwarranted attempts to cater to an expectation (by whom?) of a theoretical underpinning of the interesting picture she draws of an eighteenth-century urban society.The author clearly found large bounty in the city archives of Torun, from which she unearthed 1130 tragic, sometimes quirky, and often desperate individual fortunes in a city under almost constant occupation by Swedish, Polish-Saxon, Russian and BrandenburgPrussian troops for much of the eighteenth century. The focus on capital and violent crimes, homicide, infanticide, slander and defamation, crimes against property (including arson), sex crimes (including sodomy, bigamy, incest, adultery and rape) as well as witchcraft is based on documents from urban law courts, but with few opportunities to chart variations from earlier centuries as the city archive was almost completely burnt in the Swedish attack in 1703. Many cases, particularly those involving violent crime, rape and attacks against burghers' honour, involved soldiers who were subject to military but not civilian jurisdiction. Their outcome remains unclear, often because they did not even lead to prosecution. …

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.