Violence and Honor in Prerevolutionary P rigord

Drawing on rich archival sources, explores the relationship between honor and violence in the Périgord region in prerevolutionary France.

Historians and scholars across other disciplines have long sought an explanation for why late medieval and early modern Europeans experienced elevated rates of violent crime, and for why society apparently tolerated such high levels of interpersonal violence. Most of our existing explanations focus on the macro level, looking at causes like the rise of the...