Non-native English speaker here. I don't know where else to post this so I am posting it here. Feel free to delete the thread and direct me to a suitable subreddit if it is inappropriate. This is not a homework question or anything like that. I am simply curious. History is not my study area, so maybe that's why I can't seem to find information on this particular topic even after searching the internet for weeks.
From what I understand it seems that, verbal abuse/insults was considered worthy of criminal punishments in certain societies. Verbal abuse/insults lead to duelling in some cases and verbal abuse against the aristocracy or the monarch often lead to criminal punishments. I don't know how much this is true, although this trope seems highly common in movies.
Nonetheless, I am looking for a brief, yet comprehensive article on the internet, which discusses historical attitudes towards verbal abuse/insults and their punishments. I have searched the internet on this for a while, however I still can't find such an article. It might be because I am using the wrong keywords or something. Can anyone link me to such a free article?
PS: I am particularly interested about the criminality of verbal abuse towards people other than monarchs and religious figures.
You can read the introduction to Sandy Bardsley's Venomous Tongues for free online. Peccata linguae or sins of the tongue were a major concern for canon and civil law in late medieval into early modern England. The book takes a gender studies approach, and consequently focuses mainly on one such crime: scolding, which was sharply feminized (80-95% of accused scolds were female). The intro is nice, though, because it offers a good grounding in both the late medieval scold tradition and notes on other medievalist scholarship on scolding and the related crime of slander.