Attitudes to crime, criminality, and the law in print in England, c.1580--c.1700.
详细信息
文摘
This dissertation is a study of the print literature related to crime in England in the period c.1580--c.1700. The research base comprises a varied collection of ballad, broadside, and pamphlet accounts of the perpetration and prosecution of crime, as well as the serialized Old Bailey Proceedings , and Ordinary of Newgate's Accounts. Together, this body of literature provides important insight into attitudes to criminal behavior and notions of criminality as well as insight into the relationship people had with the law. In total, this body of evidence constitutes an important and changing public discourse on crime and the law and provides a useful complement to the existing scholarship on crime in early modern England, most of which is based on quantitative assessment of surviving court records. The extended chronology makes possible a study of attitudes over the long term; this study documents changing (as well as, in certain cases, largely consistent) phenomena such as providential revelation with respect to notions of justice, the social and moral function of the printed execution narrative and gallows confession, the romanticization and heroization of (male) criminality in the picaresque, and the particular and often darkly sexualized treatment of women criminals. The chronological breadth also brings to light an important development in representations of crime generally: over the course of the period c.158--c.1700 "crime reporting" shifted from stories of wonder and heavy moralism to genres more directly representative of the burgeoning news culture of the second half of the seventeenth century. In all, this study contributes to scholars' understanding of the early modern relationship with the press, notions of state, justice, and gender, and sheds light on a collection of extra-legal tropes that were employed by contemporaries to explain guilt and punitive authority.