1st Edition
Crime, Law and Popular Culture in Europe, 1500-1900
This book explores the relationship between crime, law and popular culture in Europe from the sixteenth century onwards. How was crime understood and dealt with by ordinary people and to what degree did they resort to or reject the official law and criminal justice system as a means of dealing with different forms of criminal activity?
Overall, the volume will serve to illuminate how experiences of and attitudes to crime and the law may have corresponded or differed in different locations and contexts as well as contributing to a wider understanding of popular culture and consciousness in early modern and modern Europe.
Introduction, Richard Mc Mahon 1. Popular Violence and its prosecution in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, Julius R. Ruff 2. The containment of violence in Central European cities, 1500-1800, Joachim Eibach 3. Royal Justice, popular culture and violence: homicide in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Castile, Rudy Chaulet 4. Prosecution and public participation - the case of early modern Sweden, Maria Kaspersson 5. Towards a legal anthropology of the early modern Isle of Man, J.A. Sharpe 6. 'For fear of the vengeance': the prosecution of homicide in pre-Famine and Famine Ireland, Richard Mc Mahon 7. Violent crime and the public weal in England, 1700-1900, Greg T. Smith 8. Atonement and domestic homicide in late Victorian Scotland, Carolyn A. Conley 9. 'A second Ireland'? Crime and popular culture in nineteenth-century Wales, Richard W. Ireland Index
Biography
Richard Mc Mahon is a Research Fellow in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol, UK.
Most...essays in this volume are valuable contributions to the historiography of crime, in particular violent crime, and its relationship to the law.
-Pieter Spierenburg, Erasmus Universiteit, in Crime, History & Societies vol 14 no 1
