Enmity and Violence in Early Modern Europe

Description

In this original study Stuart Carroll transforms our understanding of Europe between 1500 and 1800 by exploring how ordinary people felt about their enemies and the violence it engendered. Enmity, a state or feeling of mutual opposition or hostility, became a major social problem during the transition to modernity. He examines how people used the law, and how they characterised their enmities and expressed their sense of justice or injustice. Through the examples of early modern Italy, Germany, France and England, we see when and why everyday animosities escalated and the attempts of the state to control and even exploit the violence that ensued. This book also examines the communal and religious pressures for peace, and how notions of good neighbourliness and civil order finally worked to underpin trust in the state. Ultimately, enmity is not a relic of the past; it remains one of the greatest challenges to contemporary liberal democracy.

Stuart Carroll is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of York. He is one of the editors of the Cambridge World History of Violence (2020). His other publications include Blood and Violence in Early Modern France (2006) and Martyrs and Murderers: the Guise Family and the Making of Europe, which won the J. Russell Major prize of the American Historical Association in 2011. He has also been awarded the Sixteenth Century Society's Nancy Lyman Roelker Prize an unprecedented four times.