From: Wade T. Smith (wade.t.smith@verizon.net)
Date: Sat 03 May 2003 - 14:54:46 GMT
Did Knives and Forks Cut Murders?
By ALEXANDER STILLE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/03/arts/
03MURD.html?pagewanted=print&position=
In 1939, at one of civilization's lowest points, a little-known Swiss
sociologist, Norbert Elias, published a book called "Über den Prozess
der Zivilisation" ("On the Civilizing Process") with a strange and
unlikely thesis: that the gradual introduction of courtly manners —
from eating with a knife and fork and using a handkerchief to not
spitting or urinating in public — had played a major part in
transforming a violent medieval society into a more peaceful modern one.
Hitler invaded Poland that year, and Elias's book was consigned to
obscurity. It was not published in the United States until 1978 (with
the title "The History of Manners"). But since then his seemingly
eccentric thesis has been revived, and Elias has posthumously become
the theoretical guru of a field that did not exist in 1939: the history
of crime. It was then that pioneering historians began to do what most
historians had thought impossible: create crime statistics for eras
that did not systematically keep crime data.
"The Elias theory got revived through the statistical approach to
history," said Elizabeth Cohen, a historian at York University in
Toronto who has written extensively on crime in Renaissance Italy.
Although there were no national statistics centuries ago, some
historians discovered that the archives of some English counties were
intact back to the 13th century. So in the 1970's they began diligently
counting indictments and comparing them with estimated population
levels to get a rough idea of medieval and early modern crime rates.
Historians in Continental Europe followed suit and came up with
findings that yielded the same surprising result: that murder was much
more common in the Middle Ages than it is now and that it dropped
precipitately in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. Something very
important changed in Western behavior and attitudes, and it stood much
prevailing social theory on its head. "It was very surprising because
social theory told us that the opposite was supposed to happen: that
crime was supposed to go up as family and community bonds in rural
society broke up and industrialization and urbanization took hold,"
said Eric H. Monkkonen, a professor of history at the University of
California at Los Angeles and the author of several works on the
history of criminality. "The notion that crime and cities go together
made emotional sense, particularly in America, where at least recently
crime is higher in cities."
Some scholars argue that many of the prevailing theories about why
crime rises and falls could be further upended as scholars use new
computer models to estimate population figures for past eras more
accurately. "With modern computing we may end up with some very good
estimates in the homicide rates in many nations right back to the 17th
and 16th centuries," said Randall Roth, a historian at Ohio State
University who has recalculated murder rates for the 15th and 16th
centuries in many countries. "The data we are getting doesn't line up
with most theories of either liberals or conservatives about crime. The
theory that crime is determined by deterrence and law enforcement, by
income inequality, by a high proportion of young men in a population,
by the availability of weapons, by cities, most of those theories end
up being wrong."
Historians have offered various explanations for the unexpected fall in
the crime rate. Initially some wondered whether the decline in early
modern crime might be a result of industrialization and urbanization
themselves. But James A. Sharpe, a historian at the University of York
in England, said the big statistical dip in violence preceded
industrialization and urbanization by more than a century.
Other scholars then theorized that crime had not diminished but only
shifted from bodily assault to crimes of property, reflecting the
change from a world of medieval scarcity to one of greater prosperity
and availability of material goods. But this theory, too, has not stood
the test of time. "The great decline in homicide in the 17th century
was not accompanied by a rise in property offense prosecutions, but
rather by their diminution," Mr. Sharpe noted in a recent essay.
All these discredited theories helped change "the status of Elias from
curiosity to prescient thinker," Eric A. Johnson (a professor at
Central Michigan University) and Mr. Monkkonen wrote in the recent book
"The Civilization of Crime." That the decrease in crime appears to have
happened independently of industrialization or economic growth seemed
to suggest that an internal, psychological shift had taken place in
attitudes toward crime.
So did its changing nature. Widespread evidence indicates that in the
Middle Ages physical violence, even to the point of death, was a widely
accepted way of resolving disputes and defending one's honor. Most
killings occurred in public in front of many witnesses when a dispute,
generally among neighbors, got out of hand.
"People don't yet treat it as a crime and the perpetrator is not a
social outcast," said Dan Smail, a historian at Fordham University in
New York who has studied crime in southern France in the 14th century."
(Still, Mr. Smail said, Elias got it only half right, arguing that it
was the greater resources available in the early modern period that
made it possible for people to get even with their enemies through law
suits and conspicuous consumption rather than with fists and knives.)
That murder was accepted is reflected in the leniency with which it was
generally treated, said Barbara A. Hanawalt, a historian at Ohio State
University whose work on 14th-century England helped stimulate the
interest in the history of murder. "Only 12 percent of homicides
actually end in conviction," she said. "That's lower than larceny,
which was 23 percent, and crimes of stealth, burglary and counterfeit,"
for which the rate was about 100 percent.
But after the late Middle Ages, Ms. Hanawalt detects a marked shift.
"There is a real change in community tolerance," she said. "The state
is more prominent, the local community has less control."
"I think Elias is onto something: people begin to change their notions
of how people should behave," Ms. Hanawalt continued. "In the 14th
century people are concerned with whether someone is of good or ill
repute; it's a collective, community judgment. When you get into the
15th century, the question is about someone's `governance.' There is a
shift from community reputation to an emphasis on internal control." A
proliferation of tracts and manuals on proper behavior trickle down to
common, illiterate folks in the form of rhymes and ditties.
One recent scholarly book on the history of murder, "Mad Blood
Stirring" by Edward Muir at Northwestern University, describes one way
in which this process may have occurred. In the book Mr. Muir describes
how the Republic of Venice tried to put an end to violent feuding among
unruly nobles as it extended its influence into remote rural areas in
the 17th century. The wars fought over generations by the area's
leading families left the region vulnerable to foreign invasion. Venice
reacted by first meting out stiff punishment, then by drawing the rural
noble families into Venetian aristocratic life. Here they learned to
replace the clan feud with the individual duel, an important shift from
collective violence to individual responsibility and violence. Finally,
the feuding clans, who now prided themselves on their courtly behavior,
fought it out through the publication of dueling pamphlets, trying to
best their rivals through elegant put-downs and masterly argument.
With the expansion of the state in many parts of Europe in the 16th and
17th centuries, violent and unruly behavior came to be seen as an
affront to the prince or king. Manuals and proverbs about proper
behavior proliferated, and townsfolk and merchants did their best to
imitate the courtesy of court life.
Other scholars agree that the emphasis on self-control increased but
think that it may have stemmed not only from the diffusion of courtly
manners. "Both the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic
Counter-Reformation put a lot of emphasis on individual conscience,"
said Tom Cohen, who teaches history at York University in Toronto. "The
conscience becomes the internal gyroscope. There is the growth of
introspection — the diary, the novel, the personal essay. Along with
the kind of personal self-control that Norbert Elias describes."
Of course, Elias's civilizing theory still has its skeptics, with Mr.
Roth of Ohio State University as a chief one. He argues there was
little change in rates of violence between the 14th and the 16th
centuries. "Then in the 17th century, there is a very big, dramatic
drop," he says. "It's so sudden and rapid that it seems too hard to
explain with a gradual, civilizing process. Here in the U.S. we have
seen how quickly crime rates can both rise and drop, suggesting that
countries don't become more or less civilized that quickly."
Nonetheless, Mr. Roth agrees that the 17th-century decline in crime
does partly fit Elias's idea of the pacifying effect of the rise of the
state.
"I think it has to do with political stability and political
legitimacy," he said. "It may have to do with the rise of nationalism
and the sense of fellow feeling."
Conversely, Mr. Roth noted, one sees significant increases in violence
at times of political tension when the legitimacy of government is
under serious attack, before and after the Civil War, as well as after
World War I in Europe. The fact that murder rates did not go down in
Italy and Greece until the 19th centuries, when each country won its
political independence and formed a modern national state, suggests
that the decline may have had more to do with state formation than with
the trickling down of court culture.
"The Elias theory, with its emphasis on civility, has great appeal in
Europe because the Europeans have enjoyed this protracted period of
peace," Mr. Roth said. "But national identity, state formation,
political legitimacy all seem to play a role in why people kill their
friends and neighbors or prey on strangers."
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company
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