The language of violence: Symbolic body parts in marital conflicts in early modern France

Abstract

In EarlyModern Europe, physical violence was a ubiquitous part of sociability and, as such, culturally coded to an extremely high degree. In this context, recent studies have repeatedly emphasized the importance of gender as one of the principal factors that determined acts of violence and their perception. Most research, though, presents physical violence as a quasi exclusively male phenomenon, in particular when analysing violence as a means of establishing and maintaining the gender hierarchy. © 2008 Springer-Verlag New York.