Citation

Loetz F. Gesch. Ges. 2009; 35(4): 561-602.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2009, Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Sexual violence created an utterly asymmetric constellation between the offender and the violated person, as well as between the accuser and the court. This paper differentiates and criticises this simple and static view. With a comparative perspective on European examples and based on court records of the communal state of Zurich, the paper discusses how to deal with the conceptual and empirical problems arising in a historical analysis: How can we make pre-modern and modern sources relate to each other? How can we approach what "rape" and "abuse" meant for the contemporaries? What can we find out about the constellations between the accusers, the defendants and the court? How can we understand the sentences which seem extremely unjust to us today as being fair at that time?