ABSTRACT
The nature of violence Unlike festivals and communal affirmations of faith and identity that, regardless of their hegemonic intent, sought to bind the social orders into a harmonious whole, violence and its counterpart, resistance, led diverse social groups and individuals to fierce and often fatal antagonisms. Of course, not all violen ce pitted one group against another. Nor did resistance always mean the resistance of subalterns to their superiors. In late medieval and early modern Europe different categories of violence and resistance brushed against each other, ranging from individual acts of psychological and physical violence (what today we call street crime or domestic violence) to intra-group violence (factions of nobles and their retinues fighting other nobles; rural communities attacking nearby villages) to the victimization of those below by those on top and the resistance of the former against the excesses of their oppressors.
