Thursday Sept. 21, 2023. 4:00pm
Charbonnel Lounge (Click for map)
Elmseley Hall (St. Michael’s College)
81 St Mary St, Toronto
Stuart Carroll, University of York
Welcome at 4:10 by Matt Kavaler and Colin Rose followed by the lecture. Reception is at 5:45 to 6:45pm in the Charbonel Lounge.
In recognition of the importance of the Centre’s Erasmus collection, each year a scholar of international reputation is invited to present a formal fall lecture at the CRRS. The CRRS is happy to feature Dr. Carroll’s Keynote Address for the Worlds of Conflict Conference as the 2023 Erasmus Lecture.
Stuart Carroll will talk about his recently published book, Enmity and Violence in Early Modern Europe, which transforms our understanding of Europe between 1500 and 1800 by exploring how ordinary people felt about their enemies and the violence this engendered. Enmity, a state or feeling of mutual opposition or hostility, became a major social problem during the transition to modernity. He examines how people used the law, and how they characterised their enmities and expressed their sense of justice or injustice. Through the examples of early modern Italy, Germany, France and England, we see when and why everyday animosities escalated and the attempts of the state to control and even exploit the violence that ensued. His book also examines the communal and religious pressures for peace, and how notions of good neighbourliness and civil order finally worked to underpin trust in the state. Ultimately, enmity is not a relic of the past; it remains one of the greatest challenges to contemporary liberal democracy.
Stuart Carroll
Professor of Early Modern History
University of York
Stuart Carroll is Professor of Early Modern History at the York. He is one of the editors of the Cambridge World History of Violence (2020). His other publications include Blood and Violence in Early Modern France (2006) and Martyrs and Murderers: the Guise Family and the Making of Europe, which won the J. Russell Major prize of the American Historical Association in 2011. He has also been awarded the Sixteenth Century Society’s Nancy Lyman Roelker Prize an unprecedented four times.
