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. In the context of the centralisation of absolutist power for the "state of common good", a complementary view of the work of imprisoned delinquents emerged: it had to be increasingly conveyed as a means of human improvement. The police objectives were combined with the reformatory purposes. Work became the antithesis of idleness, and in the penitentiaries of Europe the convicts not only had to be made to work for fiscal purposes, but the poor also had to be (re)educated to work.

The planned workshop brings together case studies from different cultural contexts and 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.