Corporal Punishment at Work in the Early Middle Ages
The Frankish Kingdoms (Sixth through Tenth Centuries)
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9969653 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Alice Rio (0000-0002-2785-217X, King's College London, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 68 |
| Issue | S31 |
| Pages | 73-92 |
| Publication date | 2023-03-03 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | International Review of Social History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0020-8590 • E-ISSN: 1469-512X |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s0020859023000019 |
| OpenAlex | W4323042219 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 20 |
This article deals with a paradox. Evidence for the punishment of workers during the early Middle Ages is richer in the earlier period (sixth and seventh centuries), when rural workers are generally thought to have been the least oppressed; by contrast, direct discussion of the subject largely drops out of the record in the Carolingian era (eighth to tenth centuries), despite clear evidence for renewed intensification of economic exploitation by both lay and religious lordships over the same period. Whereas the punishment of slaves had once provided a richly productive metaphor for thinking through issues of moral authority and legitimate leadership, Carolingian moralists and commentators no longer took the punishment of workers as a meaningful model for other, more morally or religiously motivated practices of punishment. Despite interest in punishment in other, non-exploitative contexts, lords’ practices of punishment of their workers were no longer taken as productive of meaning, whether positive or negative. The relationship of lords with their lowest-ranking dependents no longer defined or illustrated their power in the way that it had for the earlier Roman and late antique paterfamilias. One reason for this was the increasing tension perceived between profit-seeking and the correct, justified exercise of punishment: the two were kept at arms’ length by Carolingian writers to a surprising extent
Aesthetics · Ancient history · Art · Corporal punishment · Criminology · Kingdom · Middle Ages · Period (music · Political science · Power (physics · Punishment (psychology · Sociology · Historical Economic and Legal Thought · History · Law · Medieval and Early Modern Justice · Medieval Literature and History · Psychology · Social Psychology
Sanctuary and Crime in the Middle Ages, 400-1500
Dark Age Bodies
Sunday Observance and the Sunday Letter in Anglo-Saxon England
English Law Before Magna Carta
Framing the Early Middle Ages
The Great Christian Failure of Mastery
Slavery in the Late Roman World, AD 275–425
Growing up in a Carolingian monastery
Carolingian culture
Monks and children
Slavery After Rome, 500-1100
The Flailing Women of Dijon
Unauthorised miracles in mid-ninth-century Dijon and the Carolingian church reforms
Lordship in Ninth-Century Francia
| Highly cited | No |
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