Monastic Prisons and Torture Chambers

Following the Council of Trent (1545-1563), Catholic religious orders underwent substantial reform. Nevertheless, on occasion monks and nuns had to be disciplined and--if they had committed a crime--punished. Consequently, many religious orders relied on sophisticated criminal law traditions that included torture, physical punishment, and prison sentences. Ulrich L. Lehner provides for the first time an overview of how monasteries in central Europe prosecuted crime and punished their members, and thus introduces a host of new questions for anyone interested in state-church relations, gender questions, the history of violence, or the development of modern monasticism.

Ulrich L. Lehner is Professor of Historical Theology and Religious History at Marquette University. He is the author or editor of more than a dozen books on early modern religion, including Catholic Enlightenment (2016), and the main organizer of The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theology (2016).