ABSTRACT
Interest in the history of sexual violence was once confined mostly to legal historians, particularly those who researched the medieval period and the intricacies of the laws on abduction (raptus) and rape.1 Traditional legal history created a narrative of rational improvement in the law and in this view the modern age saw rape and sexual assault appropriately categorized within the criminal law on violence against the individual. Most other historians viewed sexual violence itself as an ahistorical phenomenon and outside their purview. In the post-war era social historians, often of the political left, became motivated to research the histories of societies as a whole, and of the poor as well as the rich, rather than the political and social elites who had hitherto taken more of the attention of academic historians.2 This project opened up new questions and examined different sources and thus developed new methodologies. Sexual violence intersected with social histories of family and community relationships, including courtship, marriage and reproduction. Historians have outlined major shifts in sexual cultures which may have obscured and even have increased the violence in heterosexual practice by the nineteenth century. Furthermore, the developing field of the history of sexuality, directly or indirectly taking inspiration from Foucault, has historicized intimate and bodily matters earlier assumed to be physiological constants.3 If sexuality has become more central in modern subjectivities, then arguably sexual violence has become more of an attack on personal identity. The social history of crime aimed to explore criminality both for what it could reveal
about class relations and as a means of researching the social lives of working people.4 In the history of interpersonal violence in Europe a broad paradigm of the long-term decline of public violence into the modern age has come to be broadly accepted. This change was not least prompted by the stricter policing of violence, including sexual violence, by criminal justice systems since the early nineteenth century.5 Nevertheless, much sexual violence continued to be ignored by criminal justice and it cannot automatically be assumed to mirror the general trend. Historians of crime were initially more interested in property crime and other kinds of violence, but more recently have addressed sexual violence either as an aspect of interpersonal violence or from a gender history perspective.6
