Authority and Sexuality in Early Modern Burgundy, 1550-1730
Author(s): James R. Farr (Author)
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Publication Date: January 5, 1995
Edition: 1st
Language: English
Print length: 264 pages
ISBN-10: 9780195089073
ISBN-13: 9780195089073
Book Description
A sociocultural analysis of the relationships among law, religion, and sexual morality in Burgundy during the Catholic Reformation, this book is divided into two, interrelated parts: the world of prescription and the world of practice. The first part examines the construction of authority, focusing primarily upon Burgundy’s dominant elite legal community. The second part of the book examines the deployment of authority, and its appropriation by French men and women. The new moral order focused on sexuality and the imposition of this order involved a legal contest over the disposition of bodies, both male and female, be they priests, courting couples, victims of seduction or rape, or prostitutes. James Farr’s book offers an unusually fertile approach to study the link between sexuality and criminality.
Editorial Reviews
Review
“A rich, detailed, and synthetic treatment….A valuable work with its theoretical framework, exhaustive detail, careful documentation, and extensive 42-page bibliography. Recommended for those interested in early modern and family history.”–CHOICE
“Farr’s handling of old regime judicial records is masterful, and his detailed knowledge of Burgundian life allows him to make sense out of even the most fragmentary court case. In general, there is much here for seventeenth-century historians to learn and ponder.”–American Historical Review
“[A] comprehensive and incisive study…[I]t is Farr’s precision and eye for detail that gives these stories their power…This is a solid and thought-provoking book.”–Journal of the History of Sexuality
“An excellent book and a good read.”–Religious Studies Review
“[S]teeped in the judicial archives of Burgundy and richly illustrated with the voices of contemporaries found in religious treatises, legal codes, and litigation.”–Law and History Review
“[This work] shows a great depth of learning and unwillingness to settle for simplistic assessments. It should serve as an interpretive model and research guide to scholars interested in social history, the Counter Reformation, sexuality, and gender.”–Renaissance Quarterly
From the Back Cover
Focusing on a historical time and place rich with implications for the interactions among law, religion, and sexual morality, Authority and Sexuality in Early Modern Burgundy is an incisive analysis of the tension between the prescriptive and the practical aspects of law. As Catholic Reform penetrated and was institutionalized in Early Modern France, legal codes reached further than before into realms of moral behavior. James Farr reveals how Burgundy’s dominant, elite legal community attempted to impose new laws and regulations to recover a social order they believed had been destroyed in the upheavals of the sixteenth century. Among their chief objectives was the imposition of patriarchy to be accomplished by the construction of a more rigorous gender hierarchy and a greater disciplining of sexual passions. As a series of moral codes governing the disposition of human bodies, the new order of morality established authority over the sexual behavior of priests, courting couples, victims of seduction or rape, and prostitutes, among others. In practice, however, the exigencies of criminal procedure transformed the written rules into a resource of strategic power, often used by judges and litigants to achieve ends quite different from those originally intended. Informed by recent theoretical insights from legal anthropology and French social theory, and making use of a variety of original sources, particularly the court records of moral crime, Authority and Sexuality in Early Modern Burgundy draws an important, systematic link between the histories of sexuality and criminality at a time when there was no clear distinction between sin and crime. It will be essential reading for scholars andstudents of French history, social history, legal history, and the history of sexuality.
About the Author
James R. Farr is Associate Professor of History at Purdue University.
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