Making sense of violence ? Reflections on the history of interpersonal violence in Europe

Abstract

Over the last thirty years, historians of crime and criminal justice have taken a keen interest in the extent and nature of interpersonal violence in medieval, early modern and modern Europe. Drawing inspiration from Ted Robert Gurr’s ground-breaking study of long-term homicide rates from the late middle ages to the latter half of the twentieth century, historians have sought to map and explain long-term patterns in lethal interpersonal violence and, in particular, the reasons behind the seem...