- Violence in Early Modern Europe

Catalog description

A seminar that explores and interrogates the roles, purposes, impacts, and views of violence in early modern European societies (1500–1800). The notion that early modern Europeans gradually repressed societal violence through a “civilizing process” continues to shape Western perceptions of the world and decisions regarding geopolitics today. The overarching goal of this course is to interrogate those assumptions about early modern European societies by examining a wide variety of categories of violence including: legitimate/illegitimate, domestic, gendered, state/official, popular, religious, intercultural/imperial, and military/wartime.