The history of imprisonment remains dominated by Foucault, who conceived of the prison as a modern phenomenon that achieved disciplinary control through individuated knowledge and regulation of the body and behaviour, replacing pre-modern spectacles of punishment. This paper examines earlier forms of incarceration, asking what purposes imprisonment could serve during the period of “spectacle”, with particular reference to debtors’ prison and political prisoners.
Building on recent work on credit and social order, I consider a formative era in English carceral history characterised by increasing imprisonment for debt. Imprisonment publicised financial failure, seizing upon bodies as symbols of reputation and estate, rather than objects of corporal punishment or individuated discipline. Thus, I argue that the confinement of debtors was a punitive spectacle of its own kind, producing shared knowledge that located an individual’s transgressions within a community of credit.
I also consider the purpose of political imprisonment, with particular reference to the case of the puritan martyrs Burton, Bastwick and Prynne during the 1630s. I argue that increasing levels of concealment of these prisoners (moved increasingly further out of London until they ended up imprisoned on three different islands) formed part of the propaganda conflict around the puritan martyrs, simultaneously silencing them and conspicuously removing them from the nation’s political centre. Thus, I argue that imprisonment was a means of articulating social knowledge and political messages in order to reinforce social and political control through spectacles of confinement and concealment.
Prison/Exile: Controlled Spaces in Early Modern Europe 