In some hands this could have been a masterful integration of contemporary and historical, but in Ruff's it's just a tenuous lead into his central thesis: 500 years ago european society was vastly more violent than today, thanks partly to violent acts forming one aspect of normal, everyday human discourse. Chapter 1 continues the theme, examining the perceptions of violence in past society. Ruff argues that, just as today, people perceived themselves to be living in a violent society growing ever more violent, a situation which only grew with the spread of print media.
One of the author's talents is structure: the content of each chapter is flagged in the opening few paragraphs, and the same holds true for the book as a whole. Ruff's aims are to examine the nature and extent of violence in europe, as well as the causes and the reasons for its decline, all of which he does. 'Europe' in this instance covers England, Spain, France, Italy, Germany, Scandinavia and the Low Countries, regions where other historians have already carried out extensive work. Although the author has done some documentary study, Violence in Early Modern Europe is mainly a synthesis of other's work, a wholly acceptable and necessary form of book. Consequently, while the content is sometimes fragmentary, skipping from one academic to another, the history of each idea is always well explained.
Only war is discounted from a text which explores the forms and perpetrators of violent acts, be they rapes, murders, gang attacks, sporting events, judicial executions, riots and more. Students of soccer hooliganism will be intrigued by the 'games' that dominated festivals and which resembled organised riots; the 22 highly paid players are the modern anomaly, not the marauding fans. Violence towards animals is discussed in a section sure to cause PETA supporter to explode in anger, while the strongly presented connection between the banning of personal weapons and the decline in the severity of violence will probably attract ire from gun lobbies everywhere.
Anyone who's lived near a military base can take comfort in that it could have been worse, as illustrated by the major problem of unemployed soldiers roaming around between wars. Indeed, the demographic effects of peace could be dire: the population of Pavia was halved in thirty years by homeless troops. In addition, domestic violence was almost pandemic and there has not been the modern explosion in child abuse that certain tabloids would have you believe.
