BCDSS-Fellow Workshop: Labour that Heals the Soul.

In the early modern period, forced labour went hand in hand with imprisonment and had an inherent punitive logic: the publicly performed labour of prisoners was supposed to have a deterrent effect and act preventively, similar to rituals of corporal punishment. The discursive change in the concept of labour is closely linked with the change in the logic of punishment: it is no longer about punishment, but about educating, improving and re-integrating of the offenders.

The planned workshop brings together case studies from different cultural contexts: Austrian Lombardy, Prussia, the Russian Empire, Denmark, the center part of the Habsburg Empire (Vienna), England and France. It will ask about the genealogy of the discourse of labour and the possible transfers and retransfers of the concept of penal labour as a means of correction. How much humanism and how much rationalism underlay this change?

You can find the workshop's programme in the link underneath.