Jean
Dunbabin.
Captivity and Imprisonment in Medieval Europe 1000-1300.
Basingstoke: Palgrave,
2002.
Medieval Culture & Society series.
ix,207pp.
Publisher's
recommended price
Hardback ISBN 0333647149, £55.00
Paperback ISBN
0333647157, £18.99
Captivity
and
Imprisonment in Medieval Europe explores the history and
significance
of prisons, both lay and ecclesiastical, in the high middle ages. In so
doing, it charts the origin of the kind of prison that was found across
western Europe until the great reforms of the modern period.
Jean
Dunbabin
adeptly explains what captors hoped to achieve by restricting the
liberty
of others, the means of confinement that were available to them, and
the
conditions of incarceration. She goes on to investigate the
increasingly
close link between captivity and suspected criminal activity. At the
same
time, Dunbabin pinpoints the changes, both judicial and social, that
created
the need for prisons - first as places for detention before trial and
then
(to a lesser extent) for punishment - and assesses the role of the
church
in helping to define their function. The book discusses the means of
release
open to some captives and ends with a glance at medieval prison
literature.
Through
the analysis
of power as manifested in the restraints artificially imposed by one
person
or group of people, on the freedom of another, the author also casts
some
indirect light on the evolution of the state in the medieval period.
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