Marianna Muravyeva is a Professor and Marie Curie senior research fellow at Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK. Her research focuses on the history of crime, legal history, gender history, and the history of sexuality in early modern Europe.

Bringing together case studies from across Europe, this book offers an in-depth analysis of family violence between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. It raises important questions regarding absolute power, sovereignty and its familial manifestation, and the role of gender in domestic violence, reconsidered in the context of modern state formation as a public sphere and family building as a private sphere. The case studies serve as the basis for an analysis of forms, models, and patterns of violence within the family in the context of debates on political power, absolutism, and violence. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of the History of the Family.

Introduction - 'A king in his own household': domestic discipline and family violence in early modern Europe reconsidered 1. Violence or justice? Gender-specific structures and strategies in early modern Europe 2. Judicial archives and the history of the Romanian family: domestic conflict and the Orthodox Church in the eighteenth century 3. Vigilante violence vs. freedom of choice in marriage: the Foray/Zajazd in the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth of the 18th century 4. Marital cruelty: reconsidering lay attitudes in England, c. 1580 to 1850 5. 'Till Death Us Do Part': spousal homicide in early modern Russia 6. Violence between parents and children: courts of law in early modern Finland 7. Female serial killers in the early modern age? Recurrent infanticide in Finland 1750 - 1896