Prisons on the Edge: Perspectives on the Late Medieval and Early Modern History of Confinement in the Francosphere

Abstract

It is high time we took stock of the field of carceral history—something particularly true for the French-speaking world. In the last twenty years, the Francosphere has seen a frenzy of research activity centred on the prison, and more broadly around multiple forms of confinement. The field is being radically transformed under the watchful eye of a whole new generation of researchers who have produced numerous monographs, articles and colloquia on the subject. The research and thinking about the prison model that the current generation is developing diverges so completely from the classical revisionist historiography as to be unrecognisable, transfigured from previous iterations. The purpose of this article is to explore those recent transformations of the field following three parameters. The first is linguistic (reviewing only the work emerging from the Francosphere); the second is one of academic discipline (History); and the third is temporal (the emphasis is on research touching on the long pre-Revolution period). These three parameters provide a focused view, while remaining sufficiently widely relevant to identify the dominant trends in French-language research. This is set in the context of past research, of work that has been done elsewhere, and of what sets Francophone research apart from corresponding English-language scholarship.