The first of two volumes centred around the two great courts of eighteenth-century Paris.

Drawing on five years worth of her own writing, the author has produced an original and sometimes irreverent investigation into how modern historiography has developed and why the discipline of history is still highly relevant in today's society.

This important volume provides an up-to-date overview of the main questions currently discussed in the field of EU criminal law. It makes a stimulating addition to literature in the field, while offering its own distinctive features. It takes a four-part approach: firstly, it addresses issues of a constitutional nature, such as the EU competence in the field of criminal law, the importance of the principle of subsidiarity and the role played by the different EU institutions. Secondly, it looks at issues linked to the quest of the right balance between diversity and unity, and focuses in particular on the special relationship between approximation and mutual recognition. Thirdly, it focuses on the balance between security and freedom, or, in other words, between the shield and sword functions of EU criminal law. Special attention is given here to transatlantic cooperation, data protection, terrorism, the European Arrest Warrant and the European Investigation Order. Finally, it examines the importance of balanced relations between criminal justice actors.

Examining the impact of the English and European Reformations on social interaction and community harmony, this volume simultaneously highlights the tension and degree of accommodation amongst ordinary people when faced with religious and social upheaval. Building on previous literature which has characterised the progress of the Reformation as 'slow' and 'piecemeal', this volume furthers our understanding of the process of negotiation at the most fundamental social and political levels - in the family, the household, and the parish. The essays further research in the field of religious toleration and social interaction in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in both Britain and the wider European context. The contributors are amongst the leading researchers in the fields of religious toleration and denominational history, and their essays combine new archival research with current debates in the field. Additionally, the collection seeks to celebrate the career of Professor Bill Sheils, Head of the Department of History at the University of York, for his on-going contributions to historians' understanding of non-conformity (both Catholic and Protestant) in Reformation and post-Reformation England.

The Afterlives of the Terror explores how those who experienced the mass violence of the French Revolution struggled to come to terms with it. Focusing on the Reign of Terror, Ronen Steinberg challenges the presumption that its aftermath was characterized by silence and enforced collective amnesia. Instead, he shows that there were painful, complex, and sometimes surprisingly honest debates about how to deal with its legacies. As The Afterlives of the Terror shows, revolutionary leaders, victims' families, and ordinary citizens argued about accountability, retribution, redress, and commemoration. Drawing on the concept of transitional justice and the scholarship on the major traumas of the twentieth century, Steinberg explores how the French tried, but ultimately failed, to leave this difficult past behind. He argues that it was the same democratizing, radicalizing dynamic that led to the violence of the Terror, which also gave rise to an unprecedented interrogation of how society is affected by events of enormous brutality. In this sense, the modern question of what to do with difficult pasts is one of the unanticipated consequences of the eighteenth century's age of democratic revolutions. Thanks to generous funding from Michigan State University and its participation in TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access (OA) volumes, available on the Cornell University Press website and other Open Access repositories.

"An artful reconstruction of seventeenth-century Paris with riveting storytelling." —The New Yorker In the late 1600s, Louis XIV assigns Nicolas de la Reynie to bring order to Paris after the brutal deaths of two magistrates. Reynie, pragmatic and fearless, discovers a network of witches, poisoners, and priests whose reach extends all the way to the king’s court at Versailles. Based on court transcripts and Reynie’s compulsive note-taking, Holly Tucker’s engrossing true-crime narrative makes the characters breathe on the page as she follows the police chief into the dark labyrinths of crime-ridden Paris, the halls of royal palaces, secret courtrooms, and torture chambers.

We know more about men who sought and had sex with men in eighteenth-century Paris than in any other city at the time. Police records provide information about thousands of sodomites who were arrested and thousands more who were not. Michel Rey explored the sodomitical culture of the capital in five articles, based on one set of sources, published from 1982 to 1994. No one has completed his pioneering work in the archives and challenged his anachronistic conclusions about identity, community, and effeminacy. This book, the first on the subject based on extensive research in all of the relevant series of police records, explores patterns and changes in the lives of men who desired men and in the surveillance and punishment of same-sex relations across the century. Chapters 1 and 2 offer a more systematic, skeptical, and subtle analysis of complex questions about mentalities than Rey did. Chapters 3 and 4 discuss the ways in which sodomites made connections through solicitation in public spaces and networking in private places and the ways in which the police tracked them. Chapters 5 and 6 analyze the operations of agents who entrapped sodomites and the procedures of magistrates who judged them. The book examines what the extant sources do and do not tell us about the heads, hearts, and hands of men detained or mentioned by the police. To that end, it includes a generous selection of documents that allow us to hear voices from the archives, including many that require us to rethink what we thought we knew about the subculture.

For some historians and biographers, Maximilien Robespierre (1758-94) was a great revolutionary martyr who succeeded in leading the French Republic to safety in the face of overwhelming military odds. For many others, he was the first modern dictator, a fanatic who instigated the murderous Reign of Terror in 1793-94. This masterful biography combines new research into Robespierre's dramatic life with a deep understanding of society and the politics of the French Revolution to arrive at a fresh understanding of the man, his passions, and his tragic shortcomings. Peter McPhee gives special attention to Robespierre's formative years and the development of an iron will in a frail boy conceived outside wedlock and on the margins of polite provincial society. Exploring how these experiences formed the young lawyer who arrived in Versailles in 1789, the author discovers not the cold, obsessive Robespierre of legend, but a man of passion with close but platonic friendships with women. Soon immersed in revolutionary conflict, he suffered increasingly lengthy periods of nervous collapse correlating with moments of political crisis, yet Robespierre was tragically unable to step away from the crushing burdens of leadership. Did his ruthless, uncompromising exercise of power reflect a descent into madness in his final year of life? McPhee reevaluates the ideology and reality of "the Terror," what Robespierre intended, and whether it represented an abandonment or a reversal of his early liberalism and sense of justice.

Bruce F. Adams examines how Russia's Main Prison Administration was created, the number of prisoners it managed in what types of prisons, and what it accomplished. While providing a thorough account of prison management at a crucial time in Russia's history, Adams explores broader discussions of reform within Russia's government and society, especially after the Revolution of 1905, when arguments on such topics as parole and probation boiled in the arena of raucous public debate.

In the broadest treatment yet of suicide in Europe during the period 1500–1800, 11 authors combine elements of social, cultural, legal, and intellectual history to trace important changes in the ways Europeans experienced and understood voluntary death. Well into the seventeenth century, Europeans viewed suicide as a terrible crime and an unforgivable sin resulting from demonic temptation. By the late eighteenth century, however, suicide was rarely subject to judicial penalties, and society tended to blame self-inflicted death on insanity rather than on the devil. From Sin to Insanity shows that early modern Europe witnessed nothing less than the birth of modern suicide: increasing in frequency, self-inflicted death became decriminalized, secularized, and medicalized, viewed as a regrettable but not shameful result of reversals in fortune or physical or mental infirmity. The ten chapters focus on suicide cases and attitudes toward self-murder from the fifteenth to the early nineteenth centuries in geographical settings as diverse as Scandinavia and Hungary, France and Germany, England and Switzerland, Spain and the Netherlands.