Criminal Women in early seventeenth century Hertfordshire

Criminal Women in early seventeenth century Hertfordshire
Author: Joanne Thornton
Publisher: Lulu.com
Total Pages: 115
Release: 2014-08-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 1291627960

This book details criminal accounts from the seventeenth century involving women. Crimes range from murder and witchcraft to more common crimes of theft and owning an alehouse without a licence.

Women, Murder, and Equity in Early Modern England

Women, Murder, and Equity in Early Modern England
Author: Randall Martin
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2007-12-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1135899444

This book presents the first comprehensive study of over 120 printed news reports of murders and infanticides committed by early modern women. It offers an interdisciplinary analysis of female homicide in post-Reformation news formats ranging from ballads to newspapers. Individual cases are illuminated in relation to changing legal, religious, and political contexts, as well as the dynamic growth of commercial crime-news and readership.

Wicked Ladies

Wicked Ladies
Author: Gregory J. Durston
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2014-08-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 1443865990

In recent years, much has been published on women, crime and justice in English history. However, for a variety of reasons, particularly the ready availability of source material for the capital, such research has tended to have an overwhelmingly Metropolitan focus. This book aims to redress the balance for the ‘long’ eighteenth century by concentrating on women from outside the London area. Although vitally important to the wider country, the Metropolis always contained a small minority of the country’s female offenders and defendants, albeit a significantly higher percentage of the latter than its share of the national population. The capital also had a rather different criminal justice and policing system to that found in the rest of the country at this time. The book focuses on women’s experiences in provincial England as both the perpetrators of various crimes and as suspects or defendants in the country’s criminal justice system. The areas considered range from the West Country to the Scottish Border, and the offences examined include all of the major crimes, such as murder and theft, as well as some more arcane forms of deviance, including arson and coining. The factors that prompted women to offend, their likelihood of exposure when they did so, and their treatment before the courts and in the penal system are all considered in detail. In particular, the book examines the gendered differences found in female crime when compared to that of their male counterparts, and how women’s experiences of the era’s justice system differed from those of men. It also compares provincial women to those found in the Metropolis in these respects. Extensive use is made of primary sources in portraying the lives of female criminals from Kent to Cumberland, while comparison is also made with women from other parts of the British Isles and beyond, so that the respective roles of structural determinants and national ‘culture’ in crime and justice can be considered.

On the Parish?

On the Parish?
Author: Steve Hindle
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 536
Release: 2004-08-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 0191533858

On the Parish? is a study of the negotiations which took place over the allocation of poor relief in the rural communities of sixteenth, seventeenth and early eighteenth century England. It analyses the relationships between the enduring systems of informal support through which the labouring poor made attempts to survive for themselves; the expanding range of endowed charity encouraged by the late sixteenth century statutes for charitable uses; and the developing system of parish relief co-ordinated under the Elizabethan poor laws. Based on exhaustive research in the archives of the trustees who administered endowments, of the overseers of the poor who assessed rates and distributed pensions, of the magistrates who audited and co-ordinated relief and of the royal judges who played such an important role in interpreting the Elizabethan statutes, the book reconstructs the hierarchy of provision of relief as it was experienced among the poor themselves. It argues that receipt of a parish pension was only the final (and by no means the inevitable) stage in a protracted process of negotiation between prospective pensioners (or 'collectioners', as they came to be called) and parish officers. This running theme is itself reflected in a series of chapters whose sequence seeks to mirror the experience of indigence, moving gradually (and by stages) from the networks of care provided by kin and neighbours into the bureaucracy of the parish relief system, emphasising in particular the importance of labour discipline in the thinking of parish officers. By illuminating the workings of a relief system in which notions of entitlement were both under-developed and contested, On the Parish? provides historical perspective for contemporary debates about the rights and obligations of the poor in a society where the dismantling of the welfare state implies that there is, once again, no right to relief from cradle to grave.

Crime, Gender and Social Order in Early Modern England

Crime, Gender and Social Order in Early Modern England
Author: Garthine Walker
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 334
Release: 2003-06-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 1139435116

An extended study of gender and crime in early modern England. It considers the ways in which criminal behaviour and perceptions of criminality were informed by ideas about gender and order, and explores their practical consequences for the men and women who were brought before the criminal courts. Dr Walker's innovative approach demonstrates that, contrary to received opinion, the law was often structured so as to make the treatment of women and men before the courts incommensurable. For the first time, early modern criminality is explored in terms of masculinity as well as femininity. Illuminating the interactions between gender and other categories such as class and civil war have implications not merely for the historiography of crime but for the social history of early modern England as a whole. This study therefore goes beyond conventional studies, and challenges hitherto accepted views of social interaction in the period.

British Women's History

British Women's History
Author:
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 178
Release: 1996
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780719046520

This is one of a series of bibliographical guides designed to meet the needs of undergraduates, postgraduates and their teachers in universities and colleges of further education. All volumes in the series share a number of common characteristics. They are selective, manageable in size, and include those books and articles which are considered most important and useful. All are editied by practising teachers of the subject in question and are based on their experience of the needs of students. The arrangement combines chronological with thematic divisions. Most of the items listed receive some descriptive comment.

Women and Crime in the Street Literature of Early Modern England

Women and Crime in the Street Literature of Early Modern England
Author: S. Clark
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2003-10-24
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0230000622

Clark explores how real-life women's crimes were handled in the news media of an age before the invention of the newspaper, in ballads, pamphlets, and plays. It discusses those features of contemporary society which particularly influenced early modern crime reporting, such as attitudes to news, the law and women's rights, and ideas about the responsibility of the community for keeping order. It considers the problems of writing about transgressive women for audiences whose ideal woman was chaste, silent, and obedient.

Women and Crime in Early Modern Holland

Women and Crime in Early Modern Holland
Author: Manon van der Heijden
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2016-08-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9004314121

Crime is men’s business, isn’t it? Women are responsible for 10 percent of crime in Europe. Yet, if we look at the Dutch Republic in the early modern period, we find that in the towns of Holland women played a much larger role in crime. In a number of early modern towns about half of the criminals convicted in court were women. These women were in vulnerable positions and thus more likely to become involved in crime. They also had a relatively independent status and led remarkably public lives. Manon van der Heijden convincingly shows that it is the very combination of women’s vulnerability and independence that accounts for the high female crime rates in Holland between 1600 and 1800.

Lying in Early Modern English Culture

Lying in Early Modern English Culture
Author: Andrew Hadfield
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 372
Release: 2017-09-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0192506595

Lying in Early Modern English Culture is a major study of ideas of truth and falsehood in early modern England from the advent of the Reformation to the aftermath of the failed Gunpowder Plot. The period is characterised by panic and chaos when few had any idea how religious, cultural, and social life would develop after the traumatic division of Christendom. While many saw the need for a secular power to define the truth others declared that their allegiances belonged elsewhere. Accordingly there was a constant battle between competing authorities for the right to declare what was the truth and so label opponents as liars. Issues of truth and lying were, therefore, a constant feature of everyday life and determined ideas of individual identity, politics, speech, sex, marriage, and social behaviour, as well as philosophy and religion. This book is a cultural history of truth and lying from the 1530s to the 1610s, showing how lying needs to be understood in action as well as in theory. Unlike most histories of lying, it concentrates on a series of particular events reading them in terms of academic theories and more popular notions of lying. The book covers a wide range of material such as the trials of Ann Boleyn and Thomas More, the divorce of Frances Howard, and the murder of Anthony James by Annis and George Dell; works of literature such as Othello, The Faerie Queene, A Mirror for Magistrates, and The Unfortunate Traveller; works of popular culture such as the herring pamphlet of 1597; and major writings by Castiglione, Montaigne, Erasmus, Luther, and Tyndale.