The Past as a Foreign Country? Some Methodological Implications of Doing Historical Criminology

This article describes methodological issues that arose from the author’s research on early modern women’s imprisonment in order to reflect on broader questions about how crime and punishment are studied. She demonstrates that the ways in which a criminologist interprets his or her data, what evidence exists, and the emotional repercussions of writing on crime and punishment reveal the researcher’s ethical stance towards his or her subjects and the allegiances he or she creates with them. These problems of interpretation, evidence and emotion transcend time and culture and are built into the research goals of the discipline of criminology itself. Eighteenth-century France incarcerated its citizens on an unprecedented scale, locking them up in a variety of institutions that together made up the Hopital General. The poor, the mentally ill and the criminal were most at risk of confinement. This article will describe just one section of an institution in the Paris Hopital General—the women’s prison in the Hopital de la Salpetriere—in order to reflect on some of the methodological ramifications of doing historical research as a criminologist. 1 In particular, I will consider how historical research into the prison contributes to an understanding of imprisonment today. Thus, through a description of aspects of the regime and population of Salpetriere I shall reveal that neither the chronology nor the purpose of the prison is fixed. As the US engages more vociferously in its own form of mass incarceration, it seems we have entered another period of ‘grand renfermement’ (Foucault 1980). However, the legitimacy of such an extensive and institutionalized form of state violence is no clearer now than it was in the seventeenth or eighteenth century. Today, more than ever, a glance to the past is timely. By examining the imprisonment of women from a historical perspective, I seek to uncover continuities with the present, not just in the causes and experiences of punishment, but also in the research process itself. In this paper I shall concentrate on three methodological problems raised by historical inquiry. In doing so, I rely on Peter Linbaugh’s (1992) The London Hanged, in which he describes the responses of the working poor in London to crime and capital punishment. First, and for him most importantly, Linbaugh makes clear that any account of punishment needs to explore the perspective of those subject to it, in order to appreciate the variety of ways it is interpreted (Linbaugh 1992: Introduction). Second, he points out that although certain voices— specifically those of women and children—will necessarily be harder to hear than others, this does mean that we should ignore them (Linbaugh 1992: 437–8). And third, as he