288 journal of social history fall 2010

dence?). Numerous other editorial lapses testify to the press’s inattention; like
many early consumers, the editors seemingly were beguiled by the world of goods.
Caveat emptor.

Virginia Military Institute Turk Mc Cleskey

ENDNOTES

1. The Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery has been accessible to the public since
early 2004 via its website at http://www.daacs.org.

2. Turk McCleskey, review of A.G. Roeber, Palatines, Liberty, and Property: German Lutherans in Colo-
nial British America (Baltimore, 1993), in Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 102 (Oct. 1994),
556-557.

SECTION 6
DEVIANCE AND SOCIAL CONTROL
A History of Murder: Personal Violence in Europe from the Middle Ages to the
Present. By Pieter Spierenburg (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2008. 274 pp.).
The historical study of interpersonal violence in Europe has grown significantly
in recent decades, and there is a need for an effective synthesis that can bring to-
gether diverse research findings and introduce non-specialists to this now highly
active field. The unavoidable difficulties with such a summary would be covering
the broad (and somewhat shifting) spectrum of behavior referred to as “violence”
over the last several centuries and accounting for cultural, regional and national
differences. Addressing historical specificity and historiographical complexity
while also offering a coherent narrative poses a particular challenge. It is, there-
fore, a testament to Pieter Spierenburg’s skill as a historian of violence that his
book so often strikes the right balance.
Spierenburg’s main theme is the long decline in serious interpersonal vio-
lence (of the sort which today largely falls under the category of “crime” rather
than war or mass-killing) from the Middle Ages to the mid-twentieth century.
The author focuses on violence among men, especially that motivated by estab-
lishing or defending personal honor. The generally accepted place of such vio-
lence in the medieval period is highlighted: then, the willingness to resort to
violence made sense with regard to both social status and the protection of per-
sonal safety. There was an “omnipresence of feuds—feuds between rival families,
competing factions, neighboring lords and their retainers, members of opposed
camps in a military conflict, or between two groups that had close internal bonds
for still other reasons” (14-15). Many specific factors changed this state of affairs,
and Spierenburg gives particular attention to state development and shifting no-
tions of honor.
REVIEWS 289

The importance of state development is brought out clearly through the ex-
amination of the “criminalization” of violence: violent acts previously seen as le-
gitimate and/or private matters were brought under the jurisdiction of expanding
justice systems. This complicated process occurred at different rates—and through
somewhat different means—from place to place; however, in this way and across
Europe, previously acceptable (or at least tolerated) violence was ever more sub-
ject to official censure and punishment. An “open consent to murder formed part
of medieval culture” (31); that consent became increasingly limited.
Following a first chapter on the medieval starting point of his study, Spieren-
burg outlines the significant decline in violence from the fifteenth through the
eighteenth centuries. Thematic chapters then consider male fighting, women’s
violence, physical conflict in the domestic sphere and understandings of insanity
and diminished responsibility. The next main chronological step runs from about
1800 to the 1950s, during which time violence rates seem to have continued their
downward trajectory. Such declines, seemingly paradoxically, were met by in-
creasing concerns: violence diminished, but its residual image “darkened” (167),
with growing anxieties about crimes passionnels, serial killing and a violent crimi-
nal underworld. Still, he concludes: “In Europe west of the Iron Curtain, the 1950s
were, on average, the least violent period in history” (203). A final chapter ex-
amines the last half-century, during which violence rates rose in most European
countries. Although a significant trend, the author makes the point (also attested
to by the preceding chapters) that even these heightened homicide rates remain
low by historical standards. Moreover, rather than an across-the-board reversal of
social pacification, that rise has been narrowly concentrated among younger and
poorer urban males and partly driven by organized crime, especially the global
trade in illegal drugs (207-08).
Given the book’s broad scope, it is helpful that it is tied together by various
themes, especially Norbert Elias’s theory of the “civilizing process.” Spierenburg
typically assumes the validity of Elias’s approach rather than engaging directly
with its critics, but, at times, he argues particular points, such as the relationship
between “ritual” and “impulse” in violence (35-38) or the key role played by the
“pacification of the elites” (112). On the latter issue, he highlights the growing dis-
tance between those who regularly used violence and those who did not. Through
the “spiritualization of honor,” social status became focused less on the body and
more on “inner virtue” (9). (Spierenburg suggests that a “partial revival in tradi-
tional macho honor” (207) in some contexts may have been a factor in the post-
1970 resurgence in violence.) The complex relationship between real violent
behaviors and their cultural meanings and institutional contexts is also considered.
This leads to the speculation that the post-1970 statistical rise in non-fatal vio-
lence—though likely a genuine trend—may partly be the result of increasing sen-
sitivities and a greater willingness to involve the police in the wake of physical
altercations (211).
Overall, the book achieves a readable balance between general trends and
regional variation. Non-specialists are offered a coherent and vivid introduction
to the history of violence, while scholars working in specific national contexts
should find its European perspective useful. There are some questionable claims.
For example, Spierenburg too easily concludes from the absence of a “discourse of
security” in the Middle Ages that people had few personal fears about violence
290 journal of social history fall 2010

(51), and, at times, his depiction of the ritualization of violence seems to insuffi-
ciently appreciate the tendency of violence to break through culturally accepted
rules. The book has a dismissive attitude toward the insights into violence offered
by evolutionary psychology, favoring “cultural explanations” (9). Significant and
persistent differences in male and female participation in violence (which are well
described in these chapters) are thus explained purely—and unpersuasively—by
a “learning process” and women’s conformity to a “cultural stereotype of passivity”
(121). The “great historical shift” proposed here from “punishment-related” to
“tension-related” (136) spousal violence is not entirely convincing given the sig-
nificant underlying psychological continuities in much male violence against
women. Those who reject the notion of the civilizing process may also be dissat-
isfied by some of the assumptions here; others may think that local complexities
are insufficiently attended to. Nonetheless, these criticisms should not overly de-
tract from Spierenburg’s remarkable achievement in drawing together an unusu-
ally broad and cross-cultural collection of materials, summarizing a complex field
and offering a strong and coherent statement about the causes and contexts of
historical changes in violent behavior. This is, and will remain, an important book.

The Open University John Carter Wood

Cruel and Unusual: The Culture of Punishment in America. By Anne-Marie

Cusac (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009. 336 pp.).
Perhaps readers of Cruel and Unusual should begin with chapters 10-12, which in
my view constitute the book’s core. These are excellent pieces of investigative
journalism, revisions of articles that first appeared in The Progressive. They reveal
some stunning features of American law enforcement since the 1990s that at least
this reviewer was not fully aware of. All examples point at a heightened level of
punitiveness and restraint, which Cusac associates with the better known increase
in incarceration rates since the 1970s. Thus, chapter 10 deals with the evolving
technology of restraint through electric shocks, used in prisons, court-rooms and
in the street by police. It took me a few times before I immediately realized that,
when I read that someone was shocked, I had to take this literally. As observed
more often in such cases, the principle of “net-widening” applies: Ostensibly, the
new instrument is meant as a mitigation of law enforcement, because it substi-
tutes for something more brutal. However, this legitimizes its extension to
target groups not subjected to the harder instrument before. On balance, there-
fore, there is a brutalization of law enforcement instead of a mitigation. In
Phoenix, for example, the number of police shootings dropped from 28 to 13 in
2003, but at the same time tasers were used in no less than 354 cases. And elec-
troshocks are dangerous too. In 2006 Amnesty International counted 156 deaths
due to tasers in the US during the previous five years. Citizens, too, can buy these
devices now, though the models in question operate from a shorter maximum dis-
tance than police tasers.