Sophie Body-Gendrot How much related are present and past violence? The answers are complex due to the limited knowledge scientists have gathered, even after spending a life-time studying this very enigmatic and most serious social phenomenon called violence. All authors agree that the present level of interpersonal violence cannot be sufficiently understood without taking the earlier long-term decrease into account. Ted Robert Gurr (1981, 1989) was one of these pioneers who und- took a statistical overview of the development of homicides from the Middle Ages to the present, looking at...

Pieter Spierenburg traces the long period of evolution that gave rise to the modern debate about punishment, and relates it to the development of Western European society.

Has violence changed over the centuries? Has it always held the same meanings for us?

Will it always be a given in society?

Taking the sociocultural long view, Violence in Europe analyzes the prevalence and role of violence from street crime to terrorist attacks, homicide to genocide in the evolution of human and national behaviour. The editors and 14 colleagues in history, anthropology, sociology, and psychology focus on Northern and Western Europe, examining centuries of violent phenomena, from the cultural logic of the Middle Ages to today s soccer riots and security...

There is growing interest in the history of masculinity and male culture, including violence, as an integral part of a proper understanding of gender. In almost every historical setting, masculinity and violence are closely linked; certainly, violent crime has been overwhelmingly a male enterprise. But violence is not always criminal: in many cultural contexts violence is linked instead to honor and encoded in rituals. We possess only an imperfect understanding of the ways in which aggressive behavior, or the abstention from aggressive behavior, contributes to the construction of masculinity...

Sophie Body-Gendrot How much related are present and past violence? The answers are complex due to the limited knowledge scientists have gathered, even after spending a life-time studying this very enigmatic and most serious social phenomenon called violence. All authors agree that the present level of interpersonal violence cannot be sufficiently understood without taking the earlier long-term decrease into account. Ted Robert Gurr (1981, 1989) was one of these pioneers who und- took a statistical overview of the development of homicides from the Middle Ages to the present, looking at...