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SECTION I
CRIME AND SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION
ANALYZING THE HISTORY OF RELIGIOUS CRIME. MODELS OF "PASSIVE" AND "ACTIVE" BLASPHEMY SINCE THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD
| By David Nash |
Oxford Brookes University |
| This article provides a critical survey of the history and historiography of blasphemy placing this neglected subject within the wider history of sin, crime and criminality. In doing so it suggests a model of analysis which shows historical transitions between 'passive' and 'active' blasphemy. These two categories demonstrate the location of blasphemy and its offensiveness within the medieval community and the modern individual respectively. But these categories are ultimately not chronologically specific, and a significant conclusion suggests that the medieval 'passive' blasphemy model of harm to the community is undergoing something of a contemporary revival. The comparative neglect of blasphemy as an important element in the history of crime and interpersonal relations is also highlighted through its uneasy relationship with the main socio-historical models of change within deviant behaviour, namely those offered by Foucault and Elias. This discussion appears after the chronological and historiographical outline. Taken together both sections suggest the importance of blasphemy as an enduring example of the history of social conflict. As such it sheds light on the history of manners, the history of providential belief, the history of public behaviour and violence. Such studies also usefully illuminate the history of state involvement in theorising and regulating all these phenomena. |
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The article thus contains five sections. The first produces a working definition of blasphemy, whilst the second elaborates a chronology of its history in theWest and its wider impact upon social history. The third investigates blasphemy's relationship to important theoretical paradigms of the history of crime. The fourth and fifth illuminate blasphemy's relationship with the aforementioned theories of Norbert Elias and Michel Foucault. |
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Wider studies of popular culture have simply categorised blasphemy with other objectionable behaviours.1 More nuanced and detailed studies of blasphemy are a recent phenomenon and are still appearing.2 For early modern historians, blasphemy offers important answers aboutWestern society's quest for obedient conformity amongst its populations. Historians of later epochs, however, consider how blasphemy informs the evolution of legal history, of rights, and the identity of the modern self. |
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Definitions
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Attempts to define blasphemy regularly encounter major theoretical problems. Modern empirical definitions seek authoritative pronouncements on how the law protected and punished. Sometimes this resembles a Whig modernist project in which the continuing 'persistence' of blasphemy into the modern period must somehow be 'explained'.3 These histories eventually appeared anachronistic amongst many who questioned the supremacy of western modernism and empiricism. David Lawton's analysis, produced in the wake of the Rushdie affair, denied this historiography to see blasphemy as a postmodern exploration of transgression. Empirical definitions of the blasphemous limited this wider purpose, and thus either downplayed them or avoided them altogether.4 This highlighted the dangers of over-prescriptive definitions, but problems remained around the failure to define terms. Historians reminded literary scholars that blasphemy functioned as a conflict model, with jurisdictions obliged to censure, prosecute and punish in a world without the confidence in either modernist progress or the fear of post-modern uncertainty. |
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