Sara Beam | University of Victoria (original) (raw)
Papers by Sara Beam
Making Stories in Early Modern Italy and Beyond: Essays in Honour of Elizabeth S. Cohen and Thomas V. Cohen, 2024
Analyzes a 1686 criminal trial for infanticide in Geneva.
University of Toronto Press eBooks, Feb 2, 2021
Social Relations, Politics, and Power in Early Modern France. Robert Descimon and the Historian's Craft, Sep 22, 2016
This explores how torture was practice in Bordeaux (France) in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-cen... more This explores how torture was practice in Bordeaux (France) in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuries by the city council and at the Parlement.
A Companion to the Reformation in Geneva, 2021
This chapter demonstrates that the Reformation in Geneva was imposed on Genevan residents by a ti... more This chapter demonstrates that the Reformation in Geneva was imposed on Genevan residents by a tight regulatory system enforced by the Genevan consistory and the executive lay council, the Small Council, working together. Threat of violence encouraged religious conformity to Protestantism during the 1550s and 1560s particularly. The height of the Reformation in Geneva coincided with the heaviest reliance on torture and execution in Genevan history.
Law and History Review, 2020
In August 1677, the Genevan consistory, a church court preoccupied with regulating sexual sin, su... more In August 1677, the Genevan consistory, a church court preoccupied with regulating sexual sin, summoned Louise Bouffa. Louise was a single woman recently hired by the wealthy Sarasin family as a wet nurse, an occupation that signaled to the consistory that she had recently given birth. The pastors and elders wanted to know who the father was and where the child was now. Louise was at first evasive. She claimed not to know the name of the father, although she did admit that the man with whom she had had sex was “very well dressed.” She said that she had given birth not far from Geneva, in the village of Gy, where the baby had been baptized and then had died. These claims turned out to be false. The Genevan consistory contacted the pastor in Gy who denied that her child had been baptized there. Summoned to tell the truth, Louise admitted that she had given the baby away to a man named Bertet to present as his own child for baptism, although she added that she was aware he had not done...
Past & Present, 2012
Examines the practice of judicial torture and its spiritual dimensions in early modern Geneva (16... more Examines the practice of judicial torture and its spiritual dimensions in early modern Geneva (16thC)
Histoire urbaine, 2009
Les historiens continuent de débattre de la nature de la culture populaire enFrance et de sa rela... more Les historiens continuent de débattre de la nature de la culture populaire enFrance et de sa relative marginalisation pendant la période moderne. Laprésente étude place les villes de province et leurs notables au centre de cettetransformation culturelle et révèle la manière dont les changements de croyancesreligieuses, en particulier ceux liés à l’essor de la réforme catholique après 1560,ont contribué à la tentative d’éradication des fêtes populaires. Les festivités aucours desquelles les confréries et les sociétés telles que la Basoche donnaient desspectacles étaient partie intégrante de la culture populaire, et elles ont longtempsété appréciées tant des élites que du peuple. Toutefois, à partir de 1600, denombreuses pratiques festives furent qualifiées de superstitieuses et considéréespar les notables urbains comme indignes du patronage de l’élite ou même de saparticipation. À la différence de leurs collègues huguenots, les notables catholiquesréussirent remarquablement bien à réformer la vie festive de leurs villes.
Histoire, économie & société, 2011
Examines popular representations of assassination and assault in French canard/pamphlets in Franc... more Examines popular representations of assassination and assault in French canard/pamphlets in France between 1550 and 1650 as a means to analyze changing attitudes to violence in early modern France.
Women's Criminality in Europe, 1600-1914, 2020
Explores the prosecution of adultery in Geneva between 1550-1700. Genevan authorities prosecuted... more Explores the prosecution of adultery in Geneva between 1550-1700. Genevan authorities prosecuted adultery aggressively and executed several individuals for that crime between 1550-1570. Both married women and their lovers were executed or banished in large numbers. After 1600, few defendants were executed, though a handful of women did suffer this fate. In the sixteenth century, Geneva may have been the most violent jurisdiction for the punishment of adultery in all of Europe.
Genre et histoire, 2015
L’objet de cet article est de s’interroger sur la facon dont la pratique de la torture judiciaire... more L’objet de cet article est de s’interroger sur la facon dont la pratique de la torture judiciaire etait configuree par le rapport au genre, les attitudes envers le peche, mais aussi par le temoignage des experts medicaux, a Geneve au xviie siecle. En 1645, Nicolarde Bœuf a ete diagnostiquee syphilitique puis accusee d’adultere : a Geneve, ce crime, lorsqu’il etait prouve pouvait deboucher sur la peine capitale. Comme elle niait cette accusation, Nicolarde fut torturee, declaree coupable et pendue. Alors qu’il a ete avance que le recours a l’expertise medicale avait reduit le recours a la torture judiciaire, cette analyse montre que les presupposes au sujet de la gravite de l’adultere feminin et du role des femmes en matiere de transmission des maladies veneriennes ont amene les juges a faire torturer Nicolarde jusqu’a ce qu’elle confesse sa culpabilite. La pratique genevoise de la torture n’a donc pas decline en raison du recours a l’expertise medicale mais parce que les juges ont d...
Durant la crise constitutionnelle de la Fronde en France (1648-52), plus de cinq mille differents... more Durant la crise constitutionnelle de la Fronde en France (1648-52), plus de cinq mille differents pamphlets inonderent les marches parisiens en reponse aux demandes d'un public curieux et avide de lecture. La plupart de ces pamphlets, connus collectivement comme Les Mazarinades, critiquaient la reine et exprimaient leurs griefs sous forme de chansons, de poemes burlesques et de dialogues imaginaires. Dans certains de ces pamphlets, des fantomes, emissaires de Dieu, et d'autres etres surnaturels apparaissaient devant la reine et ses sujets et passaient des commentaires sur la crise politique qui confrontait la France. Lorsque ces apparitions visitaient les roturiers francais, en particulier les bourgeois et les ermites, ces etres surnaturels exhortaient les hommes a s'engager activement a s'opposer a la reine. Empruntant des tropes conventionnels du theatre, et lirant parti de l'interet populaire dans le surnaturel, les auteurs des pamphlets d'apparitions pres...
Les canards criminels demeurent une source historique relativement negligee bien qu’ils four-niss... more Les canards criminels demeurent une source historique relativement negligee bien qu’ils four-nissent des informations importantes sur l’evolution des attitudes envers le crime et la violence masculine dans la France de l’epoque moderne. Cet article compare ces pamphlets avec les recits de pardons et les memoires judiciaires, en les abordant a partir de leur utilisation du mot « assassinat ». A la difference de ces derniers genres, les canards condamnaient le criminel et resituaient ses actes dans un contexte de penitence chretienne qui est generalement minore dans les sources que les historiens utilisent habituellement pour comprendre la violence a cette periode. Les canards definissent l’assassinat dans un sens bien plus large que le legislation de l’epoque moderne, et, ce faisant, ils denoncaient les homicides et les attaques comme des crimes impardonnables. Alors que les recits de pardon tendaient a banaliser la violence masculine, surtout dans les elites, les canards etaient des...
The Journal of Modern History
The Sixteenth Century Journal, 2006
De 1557 a 1590, Jehan de La Fosse, cure de la paroisse Saint-Barthelemy a Paris, a note les evene... more De 1557 a 1590, Jehan de La Fosse, cure de la paroisse Saint-Barthelemy a Paris, a note les evenements grands ou petits qui se produisaient autour de lui ou dont il recueillait le temoignage. "Plus pres des humbles que des notables", le cure est un bon temoin des passions qui agitent le peuple parisien a l’epoque des guerres de religion, de la Saint-Barthelemy et de la Ligue. Mais il est aussi un fidele representant du clerge moyen dans ses rapports souvent tendus avec la monarchie. Sous le titre trompeur Journal d’un cure ligueur, les memoires de Jehan de La Fosse avaient fait l’objet au XIXe siecle d’une edition que les specialistes jugeaient "extremement incorrecte". Les voici entierement revus et completes a partir du manuscrit original par Marc Venard, et abondamment annotes.
French History, 2003
AbstractThis article argues that the way historians currently use the term 'basoche' t... more AbstractThis article argues that the way historians currently use the term 'basoche' to describe a subcategory of the 'bourgeoisie seconde' active in the League rebellion in Paris is misleading and inaccurate. Evidence from the archives of the Paris Parlement demonstrates that ...
Canadian Journal of History, 1994
Durant la crise constitutionnelle de la Fronde en France (1648-52), plus de cinq mille differents... more Durant la crise constitutionnelle de la Fronde en France (1648-52), plus de cinq mille differents pamphlets inonderent les marches parisiens en reponse aux demandes d'un public curieux et avide de lecture. La plupart de ces pamphlets, connus collectivement comme Les Mazarinades, critiquaient la reine et exprimaient leurs griefs sous forme de chansons, de poemes burlesques et de dialogues imaginaires. Dans certains de ces pamphlets, des fantomes, emissaires de Dieu, et d'autres etres surnaturels apparaissaient devant la reine et ses sujets et passaient des commentaires sur la crise politique qui confrontait la France. Lorsque ces apparitions visitaient les roturiers francais, en particulier les bourgeois et les ermites, ces etres surnaturels exhortaient les hommes a s'engager activement a s'opposer a la reine. Empruntant des tropes conventionnels du theatre, et lirant parti de l'interet populaire dans le surnaturel, les auteurs des pamphlets d'apparitions presentaient un nouveau role politique pour le peuple francais dans la France absolutiste. Quoiqu'un domaine politique public n'apparut en France qu'au dix-huitieme siecle, en analysant la psychologie individuelle et la nature de l'autorite politique, les apparitions des Mazarinades furent des precurseurs importants du discours politique francais. Jurgen Habermas et d'autres historiens de la France interesses dans de development du domaine public rejettent habituellement les Mazarinades comme etant des calomnies au lieu de les considerer comme des commentaires poliques serieux; ce faisant ils interpretent la naissance au domaine public au dix-huitieme siecle comme etant une rupture avec l'absolutisme. Au contraire, les pamphlets d'apparitions demontrent que les representations de personnes particulieres comme des sujets politiques etaient deja analysees durant le dix-septienne siecle. APPARITIONS AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE Shakespeare's Macbeth was a man tortured by ghosts and apparitions. Having murdered his chief rival to the throne, Macbeth finds himself almost driven mad by the reappearance of the dead man at his banquet table. Macbeth's haunting by supernatural beings was not unusual in early modern Europe. At that time, apparitions were a useful way for people to work through ethical, social, and political problems. Mystics, witches, saints, and common folk mere aff regularly visited by apparitions. Some of these apparitions were dead family or friends; some were emissaries from God or the devil; others still presented allegorical visions to illustrate a particular event. In all cases, however, apparitions visited early modern people when they were faced with a particularly vexing personal or political problem. Apparitions helped people to understand the crises before them and sometimes, though not always, offered solutions as well. Given the importance of apparitions as a cultural resource in the early modern period, it is not surprising that during the Fronde, French pamphleteers chose to write about apparitions to explore the dangers of France's situation. The Fronde began in 1648 when the Parlement of Paris rebelled against what they considered to be the extortionist and invasive policies of the regent Queen Anne. Within weeks, apparition pamphlets attacking the queen began to be published. In these pamphlets, the queen is usually confronted by an emissary from God, usually the Virgin Mary or an angel who reprimands Anne for her misuse of power, her failure to keep the peace while her son Louis XIV is still a minor, and her alleged lascivious desires for her chief minister Cardinal Mazarin.(1) Like other slanderous pamphlets produced during the Fronde, the apparition pamphlets explore the extent to which power was gendered in the absolutist state and the inherent fragility of a female regent's authority in seventeenth-century France. The queen and her minister Mazarin, who was accused of similar shortcomings in these pamphlets, were not, however, the only people visited by apparitions during the Fronde. …
Social Relations, Politics, and Power in Early Modern France
Making Stories in Early Modern Italy and Beyond: Essays in Honour of Elizabeth S. Cohen and Thomas V. Cohen, 2024
Analyzes a 1686 criminal trial for infanticide in Geneva.
University of Toronto Press eBooks, Feb 2, 2021
Social Relations, Politics, and Power in Early Modern France. Robert Descimon and the Historian's Craft, Sep 22, 2016
This explores how torture was practice in Bordeaux (France) in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-cen... more This explores how torture was practice in Bordeaux (France) in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuries by the city council and at the Parlement.
A Companion to the Reformation in Geneva, 2021
This chapter demonstrates that the Reformation in Geneva was imposed on Genevan residents by a ti... more This chapter demonstrates that the Reformation in Geneva was imposed on Genevan residents by a tight regulatory system enforced by the Genevan consistory and the executive lay council, the Small Council, working together. Threat of violence encouraged religious conformity to Protestantism during the 1550s and 1560s particularly. The height of the Reformation in Geneva coincided with the heaviest reliance on torture and execution in Genevan history.
Law and History Review, 2020
In August 1677, the Genevan consistory, a church court preoccupied with regulating sexual sin, su... more In August 1677, the Genevan consistory, a church court preoccupied with regulating sexual sin, summoned Louise Bouffa. Louise was a single woman recently hired by the wealthy Sarasin family as a wet nurse, an occupation that signaled to the consistory that she had recently given birth. The pastors and elders wanted to know who the father was and where the child was now. Louise was at first evasive. She claimed not to know the name of the father, although she did admit that the man with whom she had had sex was “very well dressed.” She said that she had given birth not far from Geneva, in the village of Gy, where the baby had been baptized and then had died. These claims turned out to be false. The Genevan consistory contacted the pastor in Gy who denied that her child had been baptized there. Summoned to tell the truth, Louise admitted that she had given the baby away to a man named Bertet to present as his own child for baptism, although she added that she was aware he had not done...
Past & Present, 2012
Examines the practice of judicial torture and its spiritual dimensions in early modern Geneva (16... more Examines the practice of judicial torture and its spiritual dimensions in early modern Geneva (16thC)
Histoire urbaine, 2009
Les historiens continuent de débattre de la nature de la culture populaire enFrance et de sa rela... more Les historiens continuent de débattre de la nature de la culture populaire enFrance et de sa relative marginalisation pendant la période moderne. Laprésente étude place les villes de province et leurs notables au centre de cettetransformation culturelle et révèle la manière dont les changements de croyancesreligieuses, en particulier ceux liés à l’essor de la réforme catholique après 1560,ont contribué à la tentative d’éradication des fêtes populaires. Les festivités aucours desquelles les confréries et les sociétés telles que la Basoche donnaient desspectacles étaient partie intégrante de la culture populaire, et elles ont longtempsété appréciées tant des élites que du peuple. Toutefois, à partir de 1600, denombreuses pratiques festives furent qualifiées de superstitieuses et considéréespar les notables urbains comme indignes du patronage de l’élite ou même de saparticipation. À la différence de leurs collègues huguenots, les notables catholiquesréussirent remarquablement bien à réformer la vie festive de leurs villes.
Histoire, économie & société, 2011
Examines popular representations of assassination and assault in French canard/pamphlets in Franc... more Examines popular representations of assassination and assault in French canard/pamphlets in France between 1550 and 1650 as a means to analyze changing attitudes to violence in early modern France.
Women's Criminality in Europe, 1600-1914, 2020
Explores the prosecution of adultery in Geneva between 1550-1700. Genevan authorities prosecuted... more Explores the prosecution of adultery in Geneva between 1550-1700. Genevan authorities prosecuted adultery aggressively and executed several individuals for that crime between 1550-1570. Both married women and their lovers were executed or banished in large numbers. After 1600, few defendants were executed, though a handful of women did suffer this fate. In the sixteenth century, Geneva may have been the most violent jurisdiction for the punishment of adultery in all of Europe.
Genre et histoire, 2015
L’objet de cet article est de s’interroger sur la facon dont la pratique de la torture judiciaire... more L’objet de cet article est de s’interroger sur la facon dont la pratique de la torture judiciaire etait configuree par le rapport au genre, les attitudes envers le peche, mais aussi par le temoignage des experts medicaux, a Geneve au xviie siecle. En 1645, Nicolarde Bœuf a ete diagnostiquee syphilitique puis accusee d’adultere : a Geneve, ce crime, lorsqu’il etait prouve pouvait deboucher sur la peine capitale. Comme elle niait cette accusation, Nicolarde fut torturee, declaree coupable et pendue. Alors qu’il a ete avance que le recours a l’expertise medicale avait reduit le recours a la torture judiciaire, cette analyse montre que les presupposes au sujet de la gravite de l’adultere feminin et du role des femmes en matiere de transmission des maladies veneriennes ont amene les juges a faire torturer Nicolarde jusqu’a ce qu’elle confesse sa culpabilite. La pratique genevoise de la torture n’a donc pas decline en raison du recours a l’expertise medicale mais parce que les juges ont d...
Durant la crise constitutionnelle de la Fronde en France (1648-52), plus de cinq mille differents... more Durant la crise constitutionnelle de la Fronde en France (1648-52), plus de cinq mille differents pamphlets inonderent les marches parisiens en reponse aux demandes d'un public curieux et avide de lecture. La plupart de ces pamphlets, connus collectivement comme Les Mazarinades, critiquaient la reine et exprimaient leurs griefs sous forme de chansons, de poemes burlesques et de dialogues imaginaires. Dans certains de ces pamphlets, des fantomes, emissaires de Dieu, et d'autres etres surnaturels apparaissaient devant la reine et ses sujets et passaient des commentaires sur la crise politique qui confrontait la France. Lorsque ces apparitions visitaient les roturiers francais, en particulier les bourgeois et les ermites, ces etres surnaturels exhortaient les hommes a s'engager activement a s'opposer a la reine. Empruntant des tropes conventionnels du theatre, et lirant parti de l'interet populaire dans le surnaturel, les auteurs des pamphlets d'apparitions pres...
Les canards criminels demeurent une source historique relativement negligee bien qu’ils four-niss... more Les canards criminels demeurent une source historique relativement negligee bien qu’ils four-nissent des informations importantes sur l’evolution des attitudes envers le crime et la violence masculine dans la France de l’epoque moderne. Cet article compare ces pamphlets avec les recits de pardons et les memoires judiciaires, en les abordant a partir de leur utilisation du mot « assassinat ». A la difference de ces derniers genres, les canards condamnaient le criminel et resituaient ses actes dans un contexte de penitence chretienne qui est generalement minore dans les sources que les historiens utilisent habituellement pour comprendre la violence a cette periode. Les canards definissent l’assassinat dans un sens bien plus large que le legislation de l’epoque moderne, et, ce faisant, ils denoncaient les homicides et les attaques comme des crimes impardonnables. Alors que les recits de pardon tendaient a banaliser la violence masculine, surtout dans les elites, les canards etaient des...
The Journal of Modern History
The Sixteenth Century Journal, 2006
De 1557 a 1590, Jehan de La Fosse, cure de la paroisse Saint-Barthelemy a Paris, a note les evene... more De 1557 a 1590, Jehan de La Fosse, cure de la paroisse Saint-Barthelemy a Paris, a note les evenements grands ou petits qui se produisaient autour de lui ou dont il recueillait le temoignage. "Plus pres des humbles que des notables", le cure est un bon temoin des passions qui agitent le peuple parisien a l’epoque des guerres de religion, de la Saint-Barthelemy et de la Ligue. Mais il est aussi un fidele representant du clerge moyen dans ses rapports souvent tendus avec la monarchie. Sous le titre trompeur Journal d’un cure ligueur, les memoires de Jehan de La Fosse avaient fait l’objet au XIXe siecle d’une edition que les specialistes jugeaient "extremement incorrecte". Les voici entierement revus et completes a partir du manuscrit original par Marc Venard, et abondamment annotes.
French History, 2003
AbstractThis article argues that the way historians currently use the term 'basoche' t... more AbstractThis article argues that the way historians currently use the term 'basoche' to describe a subcategory of the 'bourgeoisie seconde' active in the League rebellion in Paris is misleading and inaccurate. Evidence from the archives of the Paris Parlement demonstrates that ...
Canadian Journal of History, 1994
Durant la crise constitutionnelle de la Fronde en France (1648-52), plus de cinq mille differents... more Durant la crise constitutionnelle de la Fronde en France (1648-52), plus de cinq mille differents pamphlets inonderent les marches parisiens en reponse aux demandes d'un public curieux et avide de lecture. La plupart de ces pamphlets, connus collectivement comme Les Mazarinades, critiquaient la reine et exprimaient leurs griefs sous forme de chansons, de poemes burlesques et de dialogues imaginaires. Dans certains de ces pamphlets, des fantomes, emissaires de Dieu, et d'autres etres surnaturels apparaissaient devant la reine et ses sujets et passaient des commentaires sur la crise politique qui confrontait la France. Lorsque ces apparitions visitaient les roturiers francais, en particulier les bourgeois et les ermites, ces etres surnaturels exhortaient les hommes a s'engager activement a s'opposer a la reine. Empruntant des tropes conventionnels du theatre, et lirant parti de l'interet populaire dans le surnaturel, les auteurs des pamphlets d'apparitions presentaient un nouveau role politique pour le peuple francais dans la France absolutiste. Quoiqu'un domaine politique public n'apparut en France qu'au dix-huitieme siecle, en analysant la psychologie individuelle et la nature de l'autorite politique, les apparitions des Mazarinades furent des precurseurs importants du discours politique francais. Jurgen Habermas et d'autres historiens de la France interesses dans de development du domaine public rejettent habituellement les Mazarinades comme etant des calomnies au lieu de les considerer comme des commentaires poliques serieux; ce faisant ils interpretent la naissance au domaine public au dix-huitieme siecle comme etant une rupture avec l'absolutisme. Au contraire, les pamphlets d'apparitions demontrent que les representations de personnes particulieres comme des sujets politiques etaient deja analysees durant le dix-septienne siecle. APPARITIONS AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE Shakespeare's Macbeth was a man tortured by ghosts and apparitions. Having murdered his chief rival to the throne, Macbeth finds himself almost driven mad by the reappearance of the dead man at his banquet table. Macbeth's haunting by supernatural beings was not unusual in early modern Europe. At that time, apparitions were a useful way for people to work through ethical, social, and political problems. Mystics, witches, saints, and common folk mere aff regularly visited by apparitions. Some of these apparitions were dead family or friends; some were emissaries from God or the devil; others still presented allegorical visions to illustrate a particular event. In all cases, however, apparitions visited early modern people when they were faced with a particularly vexing personal or political problem. Apparitions helped people to understand the crises before them and sometimes, though not always, offered solutions as well. Given the importance of apparitions as a cultural resource in the early modern period, it is not surprising that during the Fronde, French pamphleteers chose to write about apparitions to explore the dangers of France's situation. The Fronde began in 1648 when the Parlement of Paris rebelled against what they considered to be the extortionist and invasive policies of the regent Queen Anne. Within weeks, apparition pamphlets attacking the queen began to be published. In these pamphlets, the queen is usually confronted by an emissary from God, usually the Virgin Mary or an angel who reprimands Anne for her misuse of power, her failure to keep the peace while her son Louis XIV is still a minor, and her alleged lascivious desires for her chief minister Cardinal Mazarin.(1) Like other slanderous pamphlets produced during the Fronde, the apparition pamphlets explore the extent to which power was gendered in the absolutist state and the inherent fragility of a female regent's authority in seventeenth-century France. The queen and her minister Mazarin, who was accused of similar shortcomings in these pamphlets, were not, however, the only people visited by apparitions during the Fronde. …
Social Relations, Politics, and Power in Early Modern France
University of Toronto Press, 2021
In 1686 in Geneva, a single mother named Jeanne Catherine Thomasset is charged with poisoning two... more In 1686 in Geneva, a single mother named Jeanne Catherine Thomasset is charged with poisoning two young children: her own illegitimate daughter and the son of a rural wet nurse. So begins a harrowing criminal trial during which authorities interrogate Jeanne Catherine several times, sometimes with torture, to determine the truth.
The Trial of Jeanne Catherine is a suspenseful historical mystery that offers students the opportunity to learn about motherhood, child rearing, gender, religion, local politics, and the practice of criminal justice in early modern Europe. This edition provides the complete trial transcript as well as the deliberations of the Genevan authorities and relevant correspondence.