Honor, Vengeance, and Social Trouble

Legal records are attractive to social historians because they often contain stories about lower status people. They hold out the tantalising prospect of following the deeds, relationships, and even thoughts and motivations of a wide variety of historical actors. But this ‘allure of the archive’, as Arlette Farge calls it, has the potential to convince historians of a fallacy: that the stories people told about crime are a window onto life as it actually happened. They may be, from time to time, but we have no way of knowing which telling of a story is true. Often, if the documentation survives, there are competing accounts of the same events and persons, serving as a reminder that social history must find its truth elsewhere. Medieval and Early Modern historians who work with the records of crime often seem torn between an awareness of the limitations of their sources, and a desire to resurrect the real lives of long-dead people

Criminology · Documentation · Epistemology · Fallacy · Honor · Internet privacy · Political science · Sociology · Variety (cybernetics · Historical Legal Studies and Society · History · Law · Medieval and Early Modern Justice · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity