Theft and Gender in Late Medieval Bologna

This article aims to challenge the prevalent presentation and analysis of gender in studies of theft in the Middle Ages. Female thieving is usually differentiated from men's – by motivation and mode, by venue and value – and these differences are related either to women's physical inferiority or to their nurturing roles (thieving to support the domestic economy) or to inequalities of access to such elements as weapons (for robbery) or tools (for burglary). When studying theft, historians have focused on male thieving as the norm, and they have tended to differentiate thieving according to gender: women mainly commit petty theft, often for immediate consumption, and do not steal on the highways, in gangs or with weapons and violence. Men, on the other hand, operate in groups: their motivation is more diverse and they use a more varied repertoire of modus operandi, which includes highway robbery. To re‐examine these characterisations, I have taken data from three twenty‐year periods from the criminal court of the city of Bologna in northern Italy (one of the most complete series of judicial records for the period). These yield a total of over 700 prosecutions and over 1,300 accused. The focus of the analysis is on elements of differentiation, such as the numbers of individual and gang thefts, the nature of goods stolen, the use of violence, et cetera. These show that, while there was some differentiation between male and female thieving, this was mainly quantitative, and that qualitatively there were more shared features of behaviour. What are often seen to be the distinguishing features of male thieving – robbery, violence, gangs, professionals – turn out to be a small, untypical group. What is often seen to be the distinguishing features of female thieving – petty theft for immediate consumption – turns out to be equally or more true of male theft.     

Queer history

Book reviewed in this article:
Queer Fictions of the Past: History, Culture, and Difference . By Scott Bravmann     

Environmental Justice Meets Risk‐Class: The Relational Distribution of Environmental Bads

Recent treatments of environmental justice have highlighted the need to move beyond focusing upon inequalities in the distribution of environmental risks to address other aspects of environmental injustice, including unequal participation and recognition. While acknowledging the importance of extending environmental justice to include these other dimensions of justice, this paper argues that more, not less, analytical attention needs to be devoted to the diverse logics of distribution of environmental risks. In light of continuing dilemmas associated with whether environmental inequalities can be just or, alternatively, that environmental inequality and injustice are co‐extensive, this paper proposes to untangle some key connections between environmental inequalities and injustice through a critical confrontation of environmental justice with risk‐class analysis. Focusing on the positional or relational distribution of environmental bads as analysed in risk‐class analysis, this paper argues that bringing these two bodies of knowledge together can illuminate how relational inequalities have characteristics that make them particularly illegitimate from a justice perspective, thus making an advance in identifying key connections between environmental inequality and injustice.     

Book Reviews

The Cinema of Eisenstein. By David Bordwell (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993) xvii + 316 pp. $65.00 doth $29.95 paper.

On the Edge of Anarchy: Locke, Consent and the Limits of Society. By A. John Simmons (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993) ix + 293 pp. n.p.g.

Defining Science: William Whewell, Natural Knowledge, and Public Debate in Early Victorian Britain. By Richard Yeo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) xii + 280 pp. $54.95 cloth.

Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Philosophy of Meaning. By D. T. Goldberg (Oxford and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1993) 313 pp. n.p.g.

The Roots of Liberty: Magna Carta, Ancient Constitution, and the Anglo‐American Tradition of Rule of Law. Edited and with an introduction by Ellis Sandoz (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1993) 335 pp. £35.00

Refaire la République: André Tardieu, une dérive réactionaire (1876–1945). By François Monnet (Paris: Fayard, 1993) 638 pp. FF190 paper.

Ethics With Aristotle. By Sarah Broadie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) xiii + 462 pp. £17.95 paper.

Wittgenstein: Rethinking the Inner. By Paul Johnston (London: Routledge, 1993) x + 253 pp. n.p.g.

History after Lacan. By Teresa Brennan (London and New York: Routledge, 1993) xvi + 239 pp. £10.99 paper.

Gendered Community: Rousseau, Sex, and Politics. By Penny A. Weiss (New York: New York University Press, 1993) 250 pps. $40.00 cloth.

Subverting Scotland's Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of an Anglo‐British Identity, 1689‐c. 1830. By Colin Kidd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) 322 + xiii pp. £35.00 $64.95 cloth.

The American Research University. In Daedalus, Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 122:4 (Fall 1993) 252 pp. $7.95.

Hebrew and the Bible in America: The First Two Centuries. Edited by Shalom Goldman (Brandeis University Press and Dartmouth College: University Press of New England, 1993) xxx + 259 pp. n.p.g.

The Shaping of the Elizabethan Regime: Elizabethan Politics, 1558–1572. By Wallace T. MacCaffrey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968, reprinted 1993) xiv + 501 pp. paper, n.p.g.

Reality, Representation and Projection. Edited by John Haldane and Crispin Wright (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) xii + 404 pp. cloth, n.p.g.

Von der Theologie der Befreiung zur Philosophie der Freiheit: Hegel und die Religion. By Wolfgang Bialas (Freiburg: Universitätsverlag, 1993 168 pp.

A Normative Approach to War: Peace, War and Justice in Hugo Grotius. Edited by Yasuaki Onuma (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993) xvii + 421 pp. £45.00.

Heidegger im Kontext. Gesamtüberblick zum NS‐Engagement der Universitätsphilosophen. By George Leaman (Hamburg: Argument, 1993) 160 pp. DM 15.50 paper.

Two Texts on Human Nature. By Francis Hutcheson, edited by Thomas Mautner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) pp., 194 + xiv £30.00 cloth.

From Freud's Consulting Room: The Unconscious in a Scientific Age. By Judith M. Hughes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994) 235 pp. $27.95 cloth.

Marketing Modernism in Fin‐de‐Siècle Europe. By Robert Jensen (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994) vii + 367 pp. $29.95/£19.95 cloth.

Social Bodies: Science, Reproduction, and Italian Modernity. By David G. Horn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994) 189 pp. £37.50/ $14.95 cloth £11.95/paper.

Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium. By Patrick J. Geary (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994) xiv + 248 pp. $29.95 cloth.

History Continues. By Georges Duby, trans, by Arthur Goldhammer, with a forward by John W. Boldwin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994) £19.95/$28.75 H.B.

Imagination and Depth in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason . By Bernard D. Freydberg (New York: Peter Lang, 1994) 123 pp. $37.95 cloth.

Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy. By Robert Bonfil, trans, by Anthony Oldcorn (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994) xiii + 230 pp. $30.00 cloth.

Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy. By Richard S. Wortman, vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994) xiii + 469 pp. $49.50, £35.00 cloth.

Essays on Architecture, 1796–1799. By Friedrich Gilly, introduction by Neumeyer, trans. by David Britt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994) 228 pp. $39.95 cloth $24.95 paper.

Désordres du jeu. Poétiques ludiques, Recherches et rencontres. By Publications de la Faculté des lettres de Genève, vol. 6. Edited by Jacques Berchtold, Christopher Lucken, and Stefan Schoettke (Geneva: Droz, 1994) 260 pp.

The Elect Nation: The Savonarolan Movement in Florence 1494–1545. By Lorenzo Polizzotto (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994) 488 pp. £50.00 cloth.

Ramon Llull ou . . . les premiers jalons d'une Europe tolérante. By Gabriel Fragnière (Brussels: Presses Interuniversitaires Européennes, 1994) 92 pp. n.p.g.

Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais. By Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1993 & 1994) 229 pp. $37.50 cloth $18.95 paper.

Invisible Leviathan: The Marxist Critique of Market Despotism beyond Postmodernism. By Murray E. G. Smith (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1994) 272 pp. $55.00/£36.00 cloth $24.95/ £16.00 paper.

An Economic History of Medieval Europe. By Norman J. G. Pounds, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Longman House, 1994) xvi + 536 pp. $29.95/£16.99 paper.

Locke's Philosophy: Content and Context. Edited by G. A. J. Rogers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994) 257 pp. £30.00 cloth.

The Culture of the English People, Iron Age to the Industrial Revolution. By N. J. G. Pounds (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) xviii + 477 pp. $69.95/£50.00 cloth $22.95/£17.95 paper.

Romance and Revolution: Shelley and the Politics of a Genre. By David Duff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) xii + 276 pp. £35.00/$54.95 cloth.

Empire of Words: The Reign of the OED. By John Willinsky (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994) ix + 258 pp. $22.95 cloth.

Self‐Motion: From Aristotle to Newton. By Mary Louise Gill and James G. Lennox (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994) xxi + 367 pp. $45.00/£36.50 cloth.

Honor. By Frank Henderson Stewart (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994) xiii + 175 pp. £9.50/$ 13.75 cloth.

Conflict and Cohesion in Western European Social Democratic Parties. Edited by David S. Bell and Eric Shaw (London: Pinter Publishers, 1994) 202 pp. $49.00 cloth.

Communism: The Vanished Specter. By Richard Pipes (Oslo: Scandinavian University Press; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994) 84 pp. £14.50.

The Promise of Pragmatism: Modernism and the Crisis of Knowledge and Authority. By John Patrick Diggins (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994) 515 pp. £23.95/$29.95 cloth.

Through a Speculum That Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism. By Elliot R. Wolfson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995) 452 pp. $49.50.

Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa. By Saul Dubow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) xxi + 320 pp. £40.00/$64.95 cloth £15.95/$21.95 paper.

The Barbed‐Wire College: Reeducating German POWs in the United States During World War II. By Ron Robin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995) x + 217 pp. $29.95

Soldier Heroes, British Adventure, Empire, and the Imagining of Masculinity. By Graham Dawson (London: Routledge, 1995) 290 pp. £14.95 paper.

Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority, 1780–1930. By Carolyn Steedman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995) xi + 254 pp. $29.95.

Translating the Enlightenment: Scottish Civic Discourse in Eighteenth‐Century Germany. By Fania Oz‐Salzberger (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995) ix + 356 pp. £35.00.

The Diffident Naturalist: Robert Boyle and the Philosophy of Experiment. By Rose‐Mary Sargent (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) 335 pp. $65.00/£51.95 cloth $26.00/£20.75 paper.

La Modernité By Alexis Nouss, (Paris: PUF, 1995) 128 pp. paper, n.p.g.     

Reviews

Dean Jaensch, An Introduction to Australian Politics, Melbourne, Longman Cheshire, 1981, pp. 320. $8.95

James Jupp, Party Politics: Australia 1966–81, Sydney, George Allen and Unwin, 1982, pp. 232. $19.95, $9.95 (paper)

Patrick Weller and Michelle Grattan, Can Ministers Cope? Australian Federal Ministers at Work, Melbourne, Hutchinson Group, 1981, pp. 231. $17.95

Marian Sawer (ed), Australia and the New Right Sydney, George Allen & Unwin, 1982, pp. 181. $19.95, $9.95 (paper)

1. John Arthur and William H. Shaw (eds) Justice and Economic Distribution, Prentice‐Hall, New Jersey, 1978.

2. For example, Peter Steinfels The Neoconservatives, Touchstone, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1979; Lewis A. Coser and Irving Howe (eds) The New Conservatives, Meridian, New York, 1977; Philip Green The Pursuit of Inequality, pantheon, New York, 1981; Robert LeKach‐man Greed is not Enough: Reagonomics. pantheon, New York, 1981.

J.A. Pettifer (ed), House of Representatives Practice, Canberra, Australian Government Publishing Service, 1981, pp. 966. $56.40, $44 (paper)

The Australian Constitution Annotated, with Cumulative Supplement, Compiled and Annotated by the Attorney‐General's Dept., Canberra, Australian Government Publishing Service, main text 544 pages (including four Appendices and Index to the Constitution); Supplement 94 pages. Main text $24.50; Supplement $3.20.

Don Dunstan, Felicia: the Political Memoirs of Don Dun‐stan, Macmillan, South Melbourne, 1981, pp. 328. $19.95

Kathryn Cole (ed), Power, Conflict and Control in Australian Trade Unions, Melbourne, Penguin, 1982, pp. 309. $9.95

Leon Glezer, Tariff Politics: Australian Policy‐making 1960—1980, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 1982, pp 360. $23.00

N.G. Butlin, A. Barnard and J.J. Pincus, Government and Capitalism: Public and Private Choice in Twentieth Century Australia. Sydney, George Allen & Unwin, 1982, pp. 369. $25.00, $12.95 (paper)

Len Fox, Multinationals Take Over Australia, with contributions by E.L. Wheelwright and Greg Crough, Sydney, Alternative Publishing Co‐operative Limited, 1981, pp. 226. $21.95, $9.95 (paper)

Tom O'Brien, Job Generation, Melbourne, Hill of Content, 1981, pp. 209. $12.95

Peter Thompson, Power in Tasmania. Melbourne, Australian Conservation Foundation, 1981, pp. 192. $19.95, $13.95 (paper)

Geoffrey Bolton, Spoils and Spoilers: Australians Make Their Environment 1788–1980, Sydney, George Allen & Unwin, 1981, pp. 200. $17.50, $9.95 (paper)

Ross Fitzgerald, From the Dreaming to 1915: A History of Queensland, St Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 1982, pp. 354. $19.95

John Lechte, Politics and the Writing of Australian History: An Introduction to a Structural Study, Melbourne Politics Monograph, 1979, pp. 240. $6.00

Russell Rollason, The new International Economic Order and Implications for Australia, Chippendale NSW, Alternative Publishing Co‐operative Limited, 1981, pp. 208. $24.95, $12.95 (paper)

Henry S. Albinski, The Australian‐American Security Relationship: A Regional and International Perspective, St Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 1982, pp. 257. $29.95

Philippa Smith, Living on the Edge, ACOSS, Sydney, 1982, pp. 168. $9.50.

J.R. Frears, France in the Giscard Presidency, London, Allen and Unwin, 1981, pp. 224. $32.50, $13.95 (paper)

David Childs and Jeffrey Johnson, West Germany: Politics and Society, London, Croom Helm, 1981, pp. 231. 10.95,5.95 (paper)

W.J. Mommsen (ed), The Emergence of the Welfare State in Britain and Germany, London, Croom Helm, pp. 423. 12.95

Vernon Bogdanor, The People and the Party System: The referendum and electoral reform in British politics, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981, pp. 285, 20, 6.95 (paper)

Julian Le Grand, The Strategy of Equality: Redistribution and the Social Services, London, Allen & Unwin, 1982, pp. 192. $35, $12.50 (paper)

Nick Bosanquet and Peter Townsend (eds), Labour and Equality: A Fabian Study of Labour in Power, 1974–79, heinemann Educational Books, 1980, pp. 312.5.50 (paper)

R.K. Carty, Party and Parish Pump: Electoral Politics in Ireland, Waterloo, Ontario, Wilfrid Laurier Univesity Press, 1981,pp.259.Can$9.00

Allen M. Potter, Peter Fotheringham and James G. Kel‐las, American Government and Politics, 3rd edn, London, Faber and Faber, 1981, pp. 340. $10.95 (paper)

Gary Wills, Explaining America: The Federalist, Double‐day, 1982, pp. 270. $14.95

Michael Vale (ed), Poland: The State of the Republic, London, Pluto Press, pp. 231. $14.95 Neal Ascherson, The Polish August, London, Allen Lane, pp. 316. $12.50

Beverley Male, Revolutionary Afghanistan: A Reappraisal, London and Canberra, Croom Helm, 1982, pp. 229. 13.95

Benjamin Amonoo, Ghana 1957—1966: Politics of Institutional Dualism, London, George Allen & Unwin 1981, pp. 242. SA42.50, $A11.95 (paper)

Arthur Gavshon, Crisis in Africa: Battleground of East and West, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, Penguin, 1981, pp. 320. $9.95

Isaiah Berlin, Against the Current. Essays in the History of Ideas, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1981, pp. 394. $A12.95

C.L. Ten, Mill on Liberty, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1980, pp. 195. 4.95 (paper)

Jean Blondel, The Discipline of Politics, London, Butter‐worths, 1981, pp. 222. $17.00

John Charvet, A Critique of Freedom and Equality, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981, pp. 200. 17.50

Alan Gilbert, Marx's Politics—Communists and Citizens, Oxford, Martin Robertson, 1981, pp. 271. 16.50

W.J. Stankiewicz, Approaches to Democracy: Philosophy of Government at the Close of the Twentieth Century, London, Edward Arnold, 1980, pp. 276. 11.50

Michael Laver, The Politics of Private Desires: The Guide to the Politics of Rational Choice, Ringwood, Penguin, 1981, pp. 186. $4.95 (paper)

Ralph Pettman, Biopolitics and International Values: Investigating Liberal Norms, New York, Pergamon, 1981, pp. 183. $13.40 (paper)

Bernard Schaffer and Geoff Lamb, Can Equity be Organized? Equity, Development Analysis and Planning, Farn‐borough, Gowerand Paris, UNESCO, 1981, pp. 166. $24

Ann Oakley, Subject Women, Oxford, Martin Robertson, 1981, pp. 406. 9.50

Olive Banks, Faces of Feminism, Oxford, Martin Robertson, 1981, pp. 285. 15.00, 5.00 (paper)

Mukherjee S.K. and Scutt, Jocelynne A, Women and Crime, Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 1981 $8.95 (paper)

Margherita Rendel (ed), Women, Power and Political Systems, London, Croom Helm, 1981, pp. 262. 12.95

David Owen, Face the Future, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1981, pp. 279. $9.95 (paper)

Australia on the Rack: amalgamated Metal Workers and Shipwrights Union, Sydney; pp. 341, 1982. $1.00

Colin Mellors, The British MP, Farnborough, Saxon House, 1978, pp. 146. $A27.00

D. Home, E. Thompson, D. Iaensch and K. Turner, Changing the System, APSA Monograph 25, Bedford Park, South Australia, 1981, pp. 44. $1.50