Living Together in the Romanian Society:Domestic Violence between Love and Law, 18th Century
Living Together in the Romanian Society:Domestic Violence between Love and Law, 18th Century

Summary/Abstract: Violence is an important “ingredient” in the ancient regime, so the domestic violence is a part of the couple live. Our paper tries to analyse the roots of this violence and its persistence during the centuries and in the mentalities of people. In the 18th century, the law allows the domestic violence and offers a lot of meanings and interpretations between a fist beating and a stick beating, between a wound done by a knight and a wound done by a poker etc. The same law analyses meticulous the different shapes of verbal violence, the crime and its circumstances, the masculine violence and the feminine aggressiveness, the male domination and the female obeisance. The judicial practice is the mirror of this law “translated” into compromise solutions. Judges and actors talk a lot about violence regarding sometimes as a necessity, sometimes as an ordinary anger, sometimes as an immeasurable brutality. Their “words” are every so often different from law conception. The judicial archives give us a plenty of information to building all these scenes where the violence finds its justifications, its interpretations, its language, its solutions. The ecclesiastical courts judge and investigate many trials in the 18th Romanian society; husbands, wives, neighbours, priests, judges and “experts” (usually the doctors) arrive in front of the courts for telling their testimonies and histories about domestic violence.

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