Another work which has exerted some influence on current sociological approaches to penality is Spierenburg's historical analysis of the decline of public executions, The spectacle of Suffering (1984). Spierenburg's work integrates Durkheim's concern with the symbolic meaning of punishment and its function for social solidarity, with Weber's insights on rationality, and attempts to explain the changes that have come about in penality in Europe from the twelfth to the nineteenth centuries. He considers changes such as the movement of suffering from a public to a private space, the reduction in torments associated with execution, and the decline of execu-tion itself. Unlike other theorists, he does not present readers with depic¬tions of two distinct forms of society, but shows gradual changes in social formations, which he provides as the context for understanding changes in penality. He gives us a history of the longue duree of punishment, so that what emerges are evolutionary developments rather than sudden ruptures.