1st Edition
Cultural Histories of Law, Media and Emotion Public Justice
Cultural Histories of Law, Media and Emotion: Public Justice explores how the legal history of long-eighteenth-century Britain has been transformed by the cultural turn, and especially the associated history of emotion.
Seeking to reflect on the state of the field, 13 essays by leading and emerging scholars bring cutting-edge research to bear on the intersections between law, print culture and emotion in Britain across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Divided into three sections, this collection explores the ‘public’ as a site of legal sensibility; it demonstrates how the rhetoric of emotion constructed the law in legal practice and in society and culture; and it highlights how approaches from cultural and emotions history have recentred the individual, the biography and the group to explain long-running legal-historical problems. Across this volume, authors evidence how engagements between cultural and legal history have revitalised our understanding of law’s role in eighteenth-century culture and society, not least deepening our understanding of justice as produced with and through the public.
This volume is the ideal resource for upper-level undergraduates, postgraduates and scholars interested in the history of emotions as well as the legal history of Britain from the late seventeenth to the nineteenth century.
1. Public Justice: Legal History and the Cultural Turn
Katie Barclay and Amy Milka
Part 1: Sensible Medias
2. Fire, Fake News and the Standing Army: Arson and Moral Panics during the Popish Plot, 1678–81
Andrea McKenzie
3. Moral Panic and the Policing of the Mad in Georgian Britain
Mark Neuendorf
4. The Press, the Public and Elizabeth Canning in Mid-Eighteenth-Century London
Joanne McEwan
5. Character and Custody: The Legal Battle of Dr. Barnardo and Mrs McHugh
Michael Lobban
Part 2: Emotional Rhetorics and the Law
6. The Emotional Rhetoric of the Scottish Criminal Indictment, 1660–1780
Katie Barclay
7. Conventional and Unconventional Emotions in the Eighteenth-Century English Court of Chancery: The Story of ‘Unhappy’ Mary Bangs
Emily Ireland
8. Bentham’s Hyaena: Humour as Formal Critique in Jeremy Bentham’s Responses to William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England
Kathryn D. Temple
9. ‘An Attraction of an Intellectual Kind’: Amelia Opie’s Passion for the Law
Amy Milka
Part 3: Legal Selves
10. Legality, Liberty, and Oppression in Post-Revolutionary England, 1689–1760
Wilfrid Prest
11. Garrow for the Prosecution
Allyson N. May
12. Patrick Madan: Avatar of the English Penal Crisis
Simon Devereaux
13. Sparing the Noose: Death Sentences and the Pardoning of Old Bailey Convicts, 1763–1868
Robert Shoemaker
Biography
Katie Barclay is Deputy Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence in the History of Emotions and Associate Professor in History, University of Adelaide. She writes widely on the history of emotions, law, gender and family life.
Amy Milka is a researcher in eighteenth-century history, literature and culture at the University of Adelaide.
