Professor Stephen Bowd

Event details

Lecture title: "Renaissance mass murder"

Venue: Meadows Lecture Theatre, Doorway 4, Old Medical School, Teviot Place

Lecture abstract

In his lecture Professor Bowd explores the devastating impact of war on the men and women of the Renaissance.

In contrast to the picture of harmony usually associated with the Renaissance he uncovers a world in which sacks of Italian cities and massacres of civilians by soldiers were regular occurrences.

He outlines how massacres happened, how people justified and explained such events, and how they were culturally represented. He also reconstructs the terrifying individual experiences of civilians and rebalances the history of the Italian Wars, and of Renaissance warfare, towards the civilian and away from an emphasis on the din of battle. He places mass murder in a broader historical context and challenges claims that such violence was unusual or in decline in early modern Europe.

Finally, he shows that women often suffered disproportionately from this violence and that immunity for them, as for their children, was often partially developed or poorly respected.