Work as Penance, Idleness as Sin: Exploring the Religious Character of Punitive Labour in Early Modern Austria (17th and 18th century)

Description

In the European monarchies of the early modern period, notions of crime and sin were highly intertwined. Accordingly, punishment was not only aimed at the retribution and prevention of acts that were categorised as criminal, but was also understood as a way of cleansing delinquents’ souls from their sinful behaviour. This interweaving of religious belief systems and punitive practices is particularly apparent in the case of punitive labour, a central cornerstone of the punitive regime of the early modern Habsburg monarchy. In the prison workhouses, or Zuchthäuser, of the 17th and 18th century, forced labour was combined with corporal punishment and religious education – an assemblage of punitive practices that authorities conceptualised as a means of cleansing convicts’ souls and making them atone for their sins. These prison workhouses were a means of labour coercion. Authorities conceptualised them as a countermeasure to the sin of idleness represented – among others – by vagrants, beggars and unruly servants, which they believed to be a danger to the social order. Idleness, crime, as well as any kind of immoral lifestyle were considered something that one had to free oneself from by doing penance. While inmates of prison workhouses regularly had to partake in religious rituals such as prayer, mass, or confession, manual labour and chastisement were equally considered part of this prisoners’ atonement. For example, a decree from 1723 discussing the reform of the Viennese prison workhouse states that “the idlers [have] to work for this small wage as part of their punishment, to atone for their idleness.” The importance of this specific understanding of punishment becomes particularly evident by the fact that in the sources, the inhabitants of prison workhouses were referred to not only as delinquents (Delinquenten), arrestees (Arrestanten) or workers (Arbeitende), but also as penitents, i.e. as those doing penance (Bußende or Bußleute). In line with contemporary conceptualisations of corporal punishment, it was not only the usefulness, but even more so the hardship of the performed work which was seen as directly correlating with its atoning qualities. Authorities were therefore convinced that prison workhouses should provide “hard labour that serves the atonement of the people condemned ad labores.”
The aim of this contribution is to reconstruct the way that religious understandings of punishment, pain and atonement shaped authorities’ conceptualisations of workhouses and other sites of convict labour in the Habsburg monarchy of the 17th and 18th century, as well as prisoners’ experiences within these sites. Thereby, the contribution questions a prevalent narrative in the historiography of European prison workhouses, which interprets them merely as an articulation of the notorious protestant work ethic once proclaimed by Max Weber and has therefore neglected the manifold ways in which religious belief systems – and in this case, catholic norms – were embedded in the practices of punishment found within and beyond such institutions of forced labour. I argue that highlighting the importance attributed to religious practices in the context of punitive labour by contemporary authorities as well as the difficulties and contradictions they faced in effectively implementing them can help us understand labour coercion in the early modern period without simply reproducing the master narratives that have hitherto shaped the history of work.

Period	11 Apr 2025
Event title	Workshop: „ Hallowed Efforts? Work and Religion in Europe and beyond, c. 1450–c. 1850“
Event type	Conference
Location	Mainz, GermanyShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International