The killing of new-born children is an intensely emotional and emotive subject. The hidden nature of this crime has made it an area incredibly difficult subject area for historians to approach up until now. This work provides the first detailed history of infanticide in mainland Britain from 1600 to the modern era.
- The first book to examine medical expert evidence in infanticide cases focusing in particular on the shifting notion of ‘certainty’ in medical testimony. - Explores the changing relationship between medical experts and the courts. - Explores the changing perception of infanticidal women by the courts.
This book is a comparative quantitative analysis of the administration of justice across four English and three Welsh counties between 1760 and 1830. Drawing on a dataset of over 22,000 indictments, the book explores the similarities and differences between how the so-called Bloody Code was administered between, on the one hand, England and Wales, and, on the other, individual English and Welsh counties. The book is structured in two sections that trace the criminal justice process in England and Wales respectively. The first chapter in each section examines the pattern of indictments in the respective counties, and explores the crimes for which men and women were indicted, the verdicts handed down, and the sentences passed. The second chapter then explores patterns of sentences of death, executions and pardons for those capitally convicted of serious crimes against the person and forms of property offences.
This book provides the first comprehensive and detailed analysis of the Infanticide Act and its impact in England and Wales and around the world. It is 100 years since an Infanticide Act was first passed in England and Wales. The statute, re-enacted in 1938, allows for leniency to be given to women who kill their infants within the first year of life. This legislation is unique and controversial: it creates a specific offence and defence that is available only to women who kill their biological infants. Men and other carers are not able to avail of the special mitigation provided by the Act, nor are women who kill older children. The collection brings together leading experts in the field to offer important insights into the history of the law, how it works today, the impact and legacy of the statute and potential futures of infanticide laws around the world. Contributors consider the Act in practice in England and Wales, the ways it has been portrayed in the British media and justifications for and criticisms of the provision of special treatment for women who kill their infants within a year of birth. It also looks at the criminal justice responses to infanticide in other jurisdictions, such as Australia, Ireland, Sweden and the United States of America.
Revealing the cross utility potential of multiple disciplines to advance knowledge in crime studies, History & Crime showcases new research into crime from across the interdisciplinary perspectives of early modern and modern history, criminology, forensic psychology, and legal studies.
This book draws on original material and approaches from the developing fields of the history of emotions and childhood studies and brings together scholars from history, literature and cultural studies, to reappraise how the early modern world reacted to the deaths of children. Child death was the great equaliser of the early modern period, affecting people of all ages and conditions. It is well recognised that the deaths of children struck at the heart of early modern families, yet less known is the variety of ways that not only parents, but siblings, communities and even nations, responded to childhood death. The contributors to this volume ask what emotional responses to child death tell us about childhood and the place of children in society. Placing children and their voices at the heart of this investigation, they track how emotional norms, values, and practices shifted across the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries through different religious, legal and national traditions. This collection demonstrates that child death was not just a family matter, but integral to how communities and societies defined themselves. Chapter 5 of this book is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com.
Discover the history of family roles and relationships—and how to learn more about your own ancestors. A blend of social history and family history, Family First looks at relationships and our attitudes and experiences surrounding them—fathers, mothers, babies, children, aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents and the elderly, friends and neighbors. This book examines how readers might learn more about how their own ancestors functioned in these relationships, and what records might tell us more. Each chapter starts with a guide on how to interpret the most common and direct of family history sources, then goes on to examine each relationship in its changing historical contexts—how, for example, did the role of a father differ in the Victorian period from earlier periods? What similarities and differences were there in behavior and roles between fathers of different social classes? How did fatherhood change in the context of the two world wars? How has family size changed? How have opinions shifted about marriage between cousins? Explore these questions and more in this intriguing book.
This book attempts to cover all the important aspects of a woman’s life in Scotland, examining how and why it changed over the last 300 years. It walks us through the day-to-day existence of Scottish women and in doing so covers areas such as family and household, education, work and politics, religion and sexuality, crime and punishment. While sensitive to the differences among women, regarding colour, class and sexuality, the book seeks to establish a close and reciprocal relationship between women’s history and gender history; the first delineating the struggles of women for parity with men in economic, legal and political spheres; the second, as means of unravelling the continuing ways in which power is unequally distributed within the home, the workplace and in institutions, and in contesting the male-centred narratives of the past.
This monograph makes a major new contribution to the historiography of criminal justice in England and Wales by focusing on the intersection of the history of law and crime with medical history. It does this through the lens provided by one group of historical actors, medical professionals who gave evidence in criminal proceedings. They are the means of illuminating the developing methods and personnel associated with investigating and prosecuting crime in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when two linchpins of modern society, centralised policing and the adversarial criminal trial, emerged and matured. The book is devoted to two central questions: what did medical practitioners contribute to the investigation of serious violent crime in the period 1700 to 1914, and what impact did this have on the process of criminal justice? Drawing on the details of 2,600 cases of infanticide, murder and rape which occurred in central England, Wales and London, the book offers a comparative long-term perspective on medico-legal practice – that is, what doctors actually did when they were faced with a body that had become the object of a criminal investigation. It argues that medico-legal work developed in tandem with and was shaped by the needs of two evolving processes: pre-trial investigative procedures dominated successively by coroners, magistrates and the police; and criminal trials in which lawyers moved from the periphery to the centre of courtroom proceedings. In bringing together for the first time four groups of specialists – doctors, coroners, lawyers and police officers – this study offers a new interpretation of the processes that shaped the modern criminal justice system.
Spaces for Feeling explores how English and Scottish people experienced sociabilities and socialities from 1650 to 1850, and investigates their operation through emotional practices and particular spaces. The collection highlights the forms, practices, and memberships of these varied spaces for feeling in this two hundred year period and charts the shifting conceptualisations of emotions that underpinned them. The authors employ historical, literary, and visual history approaches to analyse a series of literary and art works, emerging forms of print media such as pamphlet propaganda, newspapers, and periodicals, and familial and personal sources such as letters, in order to tease out how particular communities were shaped and cohered through distinct emotional practices in specific spaces of feeling. This collection studies the function of emotions in group formations in Britain during a period that has attracted widespread scholarly interest in the creation and meaning of sociabilities in particular. From clubs and societies to families and households, essays here examine how emotional practices could sustain particular associations, create new social communities and disrupt the capacity of a specific cohort to operate successfully. This timely collection will be essential reading for students and scholars of the history of emotions.