History Department

How to Cite: Muurling, S., 2019. Katie Heyning, Turbulente tijden: zorg en materiële cultuur in Zierikzee in de zestiende eeuw.. TSEG/ Low Countries Journal of Social and Economic History, 15(4), pp.124–125. DOI: http://doi.org/10.18352/tseg.1044

https://www.rivista-incontri.nl/articles/abstract/10.18352/incontri.10289/

Quest’articolo indaga il rapporto tra affronto verbale, genere e agentività legale nella Bologna della prima età moderna. Per molto tempo gli studiosi hanno trascurato di considerare l’impegno delle donne nell’attività criminale, o ne hanno sottolineato la distinzione. In tale contesto l’insulto è spesso stato caratterizzato una forma criminale tipicamente femminile e considerato in rapporto all’incapacità delle donne di agire in altri ambiti sociali, economici e politici della vita. Il presente studio intende sottoporre a meditazione critica tale assunto, esaminando il linguaggio e la pratica dell’affronto verbale quale discorso deviante attraverso il casellario giudiziario del Tribunale del Torrone, la corte penale di Bologna nella prima età moderna. Mentre tale fonte conferma l’esistenza di un lessico altamente sessista degli insulti, si sostiene che l’insulto maschile e femminile non vadano trattati distintamente, dal momento che i protagonisti maschili e quelle femminili attinsero a un ampio spettro di convenzioni e pratiche culturali condivise che vale la pena di esplorare.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1081602X.2020.1767677

Recent scholarship has exposed the complexity of the position of unwed mothers in early modern society. The traditional focus on their social marginalization is complemented by a growing awareness and scrutiny of their agency in navigating the various social, cultural, economic and political constraints. The various formal and informal institutions that were available to them played significant roles in shaping the extent to which these women were able to exercise control and make meaningful decisions. The aim of this contribution is to assess how different institutional arrangements affected women's options in navigating unwed motherhood across seventeenth-and eighteenth-century cities in Holland, Germany and Italy. Based on an overview of existing literature, we compare the experiences of unwed mothers by focusing on their scope of action before criminal courts, in litigation for marriage or financial compensation , and in abandonment practices. Differences cannot be characterized solely by contrasting Catholic and Protestant regions, nor can a North-South divide capture all variations we found. Rather, we argue, the contours of urban unwed mothers' agency were shaped by a combination of women's socioeconomic status, the problematization of illegitimacy in societies, the availability of institutional arrangements relating to criminal prosecution, civil litigation, and welfare provisions, and the particular entanglements of these institutions in a given society.

Muurling, S. (2020). Women, Violence and the Uses of Justice Before the Criminal Court of Early Modern Bologna. In M. van der Heijden, M. Pluskota & S. Muurling (Eds.), Women's criminality in Europe, 1600-1914 (pp. 49-71). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press

Available in Open Access: https://brill.com/view/title/58987

Female protagonists are commonly overlooked in the history of crime; especially in early modern Italy, where women's scope of action is o en portrayed as heavily restricted. This book redresses the notion of Italian women's passivity, arguing that women's crimes were far too common to be viewed as an anomaly. Based on over two thousand criminal complaints and investigation dossiers, Sanne Muurling charts the multifaceted impact of gender on pa erns of recorded crime in early modern Bologna. While various socioeconomic and legal mechanisms withdrew women from the criminal justice process, the casebooks also reveal that womenas criminal o enders and savvy litigants-had an active hand in keeping the wheels of the court spinning. Sanne Muurling, Ph.D. (), Leiden University, is a postdoctoral researcher at Radboud University. She has published on the social history of daily life, crime and deviance, gender, disease, poverty and welfare arrangements.

The future of the Historical Sample of the Netherlands (HSN) will certainly include the enrichment of the foundational database with additional, new sources of information. In general, the HSN would highly benefit from current mass digitization projects involving citizen science. This essay proposes a pilot in linking 19th- and early 20th-century criminal records to HSN. In spite of the extensive state and parish registration documenting individual and family lives in close systematic detail, life course approaches to historical crime are less common. The large datasets necessary to conduct longitudinal life course research into deviant behaviour will facilitate both the analysis of criminality as an event and the scrutiny of the trajectories of individuals' lives leading up to their involvement in crime.

The 600th anniversary of the inauguration of the Ospedale degli Innocenti in Florence provides an opportunity to reexamine the contexts for foundling care both within and beyond this pioneering institution. This conference will examine the spaces and artworks of the institution itself, literary and legal fashioning of illegitimacy by humanists and magistrates, the care taken with the formation of youths in the broadest sense, and the ways in which other Europeans learned from the example of Florence as they aimed to address the challenge of foundling care in their own urban, national, and imperial settings.