Early Modern Debates about Violence

The most immediate background of the cultural malaise of the early modern period in the context of which violence first became a problem was provided by the Reformation and Counter-Reformation as they broke in upon and disrupted the Renaissance. This is what makes the so-called ‘crisis of the Renaissance’ (Hauser 1979, 6) so central to any account of this period. But other correlative events, forces and ideas deriving from economic and political developments also offered a challenge to the ability of the already bewildered early moderns to comprehend and assimilate what is new, strange and disconcerting. The dissolution of Italian humanism, for instance, was inaugurated by the invasion of the country by Charles V, the brutal and devastating sack of Rome, and sealed by the outcome of the Council of Trent, particularly the Inquisition under Carafa. Of importance were also the Mediterranean economic crisis induced by pressures emanating from the Arab and especially Turkish presence on the eastern frontiers, the reorientation of the trade routes, and the transformation and globalisation of the economy. These developments in turn entailed the shift of political power northward and westward, and the facilitation of the process of the centralisation of power and the formation of the state. The consequent religious, ideological, political and economic rivalries and conflicts, the surveillance, repression, exile and burning of humanists and scholars, and the ruthless hunting down and extermination of witches, all continued to render conditions exceedingly uncertain throughout the rest of the century and well into the next. Even the Peace of Augsburg (1555), which did make a certain difference, was not able to create a new climate. That this was the case is explained by the fact that ‘[n]o succession of events so disruptive of safe and comfortable suppositions had occurred for hundreds of years’ (Rabb 1975, 37).

The late sixteenth century was a time of ideas, values, dispositions and actions that ran counter to the humanism of the Renaissance.