London’s Bridewell: Violence, Prostitution, and Questions of Evidence

Abstract

Whether we are examining state-inflicted violence against “criminal behavior” or privately initiated violence between acquaintances or domestic partners, historians and cultural critics alike have tended to understand physical brutality as a more or less transparent expression of coercion and control.1 It has seemed obvious, for instance, that the practice of branding thieves was designed to control errant behavior or that a husband who beats his wife is trying to coerce her compliance to his patriarchal authority, or, as Michel Foucault described matters, that the “festival of punishment” attending early modern executions was designed to bind spectators to judicial and political authorities.2 Regardless of how many people witnessed the violence in question, the assumption has always been that theaters of discipline are effective because they function as social adhesives. I argue here, however, that the late Stuart Bridewell records suggest that public punishment underwent an ideological transformation beginning in the 1670s and culminating in the 1690s. Particularly as violence was directed at sexually dissident women during the early modern period, public punishment sought to dissociate spectators from the spectacle and frustrate any possibility for affiliation among the various subject positions—judges, condemned, and audience—alike.