Along with most of the rest
        of Western culture, has crime itself become more "civilized"?
        This book exposes as myths the beliefs that society has become more violent
        than it has been in the past and that violence is more likely to occur
        in cities than in rural areas.
      The product of years of study
        by scholars from North America and Europe, The Civilization of Crime
        shows that, however violent some large cities may be now, both rural and
        urban communities in Sweden, Holland, England, and other countries were
        far more violent during the late Middle Ages than any cities are today.
      Contributors show that the
        dramatic change is due, in part, to the fact that violence was often tolerated
        or even accepted as a form of dispute settlement in village-dominated
        premodern society. Interpersonal violence declined in the seventeenth
        and eighteenth centuries, as dispute resolution was taken over by courts
        and other state institutions and the church became increasingly intolerant
        of it.
      The book also challenges a
        number of other historical-sociological theories, among them that contemporary
        organized crime is new, and addresses continuing debate about the meaning
        and usefulness of crime statistics.
      CONTRIBUTORS: Esther Cohen,
        Herman Diederiks, Florike Egmond, Eric A. Johnson, Michele Mancino, Eric
        H. Monkkonen, Eva Österberg, James A. Sharpe, Pieter Spierenburg,
        Jan Sundin, Barbara Weinberger
 

Image-transforming techniques such as close-up, time lapse, and layering are generally associated with the age of photography, but as Florike Egmond shows in this book, they were already being used half a millennium ago. Exploring the world of natural history drawings from the Renaissance, Eye for Detail shows how the function of identification led to image manipulation techniques that will look uncannily familiar to the modern viewer.
            Egmond shows how the format of images in nature studies changed dramatically during the Renaissance period, as high-definition naturalistic representation became the rule during a robust output of plant and animal drawings. She examines what visual techniques like magnification can tell us about how early modern Europeans studied and ordered living nature, and she focuses on how attention to visual detail was motivated by an overriding question: the secret of the origins of life. Beautifully and precisely illustrated throughout, this volume serves as an arresting guide to the massive European collections of nature drawings and an absorbing study of natural history art of the sixteenth century.