An Epidemic of Shame

 consistory in Nîmes in 1589 and was told that he must publicly repent for his adultery before the whole church the following Sunday, he protested that the consistory was being ‘too severe with him’ and that he would ‘prefer to suffer death immediately than make the said public reparation’. It may be that we shouldn’t take what Mingaud said at face value, but Benjamin Rush, one of America’s founding fathers, expressed an uncannily similar sentiment in 1787 when he wrote that shaming ‘is universally acknowledged to be a worse punishment than death’. 

It is no wonder that secular justice also punished fornicators by making them perform the amande honorable – the public apology made by an offender in a church dressed in only a shift, on his or (usually) her knees, holding a torch in one hand. You might have once put your head and legs into some replica stocks and made a funny face for the camera, but the horror of being shamed was no laughing matter.

Shame culture feels primitive and premodern, but the sign below the flat reminds us that it is pervasive, lingering under the cultural surface, waiting to be mobilised. Dr Brené Brown diagnoses shame as ‘an epidemic in our culture’ and she prescribes the antidote: empathy. 

Empathy is what history is all about: this is what we should, at this historic time, learn from the past. 

Suzannah Lipscomb is Professor of History at the University of Roehampton and author of The Voices of Nîmes: Women, Sex and Marriage in Early Modern Languedoc (Oxford, 2019).