Critical Article Review Essay Assignment | Online Homework Help

You shall write a critical review essay of the following two articles: I am attaching those articles Kaspersson, Maria. “Prosecution and public participation — the case of early modern Sweden.” In Crime, Law and Popular Culture in Europe, 1500–1900. 2008. Reprint. Ed. Richard McMahon, 96–117. Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2013. (e-book) Kesselring, K. J. “Bodies of Evidence: Sex and Murder (or Gender and Homicide) in Early Modern England, c. 1500–1680.” Gender & History 27, no. 2 (August 2015): 245– 62. A Critical Article Review Essay should offer some insight into the content of the articles under review, but especially highlight the main ideas or themes addressed in the material in question. Among the items to consider are the historians’ approach (methodology), the time frame, geographical focus, questions of distinctions between social ranks and other socially constructed variables, and the foundation of source materials used by the author. What are the most notable strengths and weaknesses of the work under examination? Did the authors have a clearly-stated thesis and were their arguments convincing? Why or why not? It helps to have a focus question to guide the narrative. Students are encouraged to develop their own focus question, but are free to use the following in their essay: How did authorities in pre-modern Sweden differ from those in pre-modern England in their dealings with crime and conflict, and what does this tell us about social norms in pre-modern Europe? The length of the Critical Article Review Essay is 1500 words (double spaced, including endnotes), plus title page. Do not exceed the number of required pages. Follow the Chicago Manual of Style format for the essay, including the endnotes, margins, title page, line spacing, paper size, font type/size, and pagination. The Critical Article Review Essay is worth 25 percent of the final course grade, and the points are allocated as follows: 5 points for structure of the essay (title page, pagination, endnotes); 5 points for the mechanics of writing (spelling, grammar, syntax, punctuation, transition sentences, paragraph structure); 15 points for the coherence and depth of the arguments presented (clear evidence of thorough reading and understanding of the material under discussion; ability to analyse and conceptualize the main ideas of the articles under review; and clarity of presentation that includes a well-articulated introduction and conclusion). PLEASE MAKE IT PLAGIARISM FREE AND DO NOT USE VERY HARD WORDING, AND PLEASE FOLLOW ALL OF THE INSTRUCTIONS. I am attaching those two articles that you have to work on for this essay

Bodies of Evidence: Sex and Murder
(or Gender and Homicide) in Early Modern
England, c.1500–1680
K. J. Kesselring
In 1564, Agnes and Edward Baynton lost their only son in what they thought suspicious
circumstances. In their grief and anger, they turned to Jane Marsh, a widow said to
be of such ‘skill and knowledge that she could detect and accuse such persons as
did use that devilish art of witchcraft’. Marsh blamed two women: she said that
Dorothy Baynton, the wife and mother of the people to whom Edward’s estate would
pass should he die without a son, had procured one Agnes Milles to use ‘sorcerers’
charms and witchcraft’ to kill the young boy. Dorothy Baynton denied the charge,
evaded punishment and responded with lawsuits of her own, making Marsh pay for
her temerity. Agnes Milles, however, confessed and was hanged as a murderer.1
Accused witches, we know, tended to be women. Killers tended to be men.
We might simply count Milles amongst the former and not the latter, confident that
she did not kill anyone at all. To do so too quickly, though, risks misunderstanding the
beliefs and practices that shaped the very records upon which we rely, and missing
an opportunity to rethink our treatments of sex and murder, or gender and homicide,
in the era in which legal definitions that persist to the present first took shape. To
understand the history of homicide in early modern England requires recognition that
people accused of doing so by means of witchcraft were executed right alongside those
thought to have killed in more conventional ways. In her own day, contemporaries of
Agnes Milles would have seen her not just as a killer, but as the very worst sort of
killer: a murderer, and one made susceptible to such actions by her very sex.
Lest opening a discussion of homicide with a story in which the woman identified
as a killer in fact killed no one start us off in the wrong direction, though, let us
add a second. In 1645, Susan Adams beat Hester Pride to death. Pride was Adams’s
servant, however, and a jury endorsed Adams’s story that she had only beaten her ‘with
a small stick, by way of correction . . . for some fault which she had committed’.
As such, the jurors deemed Adams guilty simply of manslaughter. Over the sixteenth
century, murder and manslaughter had come to be legally distinct species of the broader
class of criminal homicide; while both remained capital offences, men found guilty
of manslaughter, the lesser kind of killing, could have their sentences mitigated by
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
246 Gender & History
claiming a legal device known as ‘benefit of clergy’.2 The jurors were alarmed then to
find that they had mistaken the law: they had thought that Susan Adams would be able
to evade sentence of death with a manslaughter verdict by claiming benefit of clergy,
‘as men in such case use to have’. Unlike the many men who did so, however, women
could not escape a death sentence for manslaughter in this way. In the end, members
of parliament saved Adams with a special ordinance that pardoned her for the killing.3
Both incidents involved types of slayings for which women came before the
courts in higher numbers than did men: killing by means of witchcraft and of servants.
Overall, however, men far outnumbered women amongst those accused of homicide
in early modern England. Indeed, they do so in studies of homicide in every time and
place done to date: while their participation in crime in general is highly variable,
women have typically constituted fewer than a fifth of all those charged with killing
another person.4 Such persistent differences in homicidal behaviour seem to demand
explanations drawn, in part, from ‘nature’. Yet, clearly, the ways in which people
defined, committed and punished crimes depended in part on sociocultural factors,
too. How, then, ought we to explain the disparities between men’s and women’s
histories of homicide? How do we understand the relationship between ‘sex’ and
‘gender’, the biological and the sociocultural, in these histories? Answers given to
such questions tend to emphasise one aspect or the other, either nature or nurture; even
if acknowledging both, they often insist that one or the other be given priority.5 Yet we
may well find that they cannot be separated so far as to allow such prioritisation.
Much recent work has sought to move beyond discussions of why men’s criminality
so often exceeded women’s, preferring to study the latter ‘in its own right’ – and
valuably so.6 But a recent resurgence of interest in biological explanations of human
behaviour, whether derived from evolutionary psychology or from feminist biologists’
work that emphasises ‘diversity against dichotomy’, suggests that we might return to
such questions.7 My aim here is much more modest, though: I want to look at how
early modern understandings of the body mapped onto differences between men’s
and women’s homicidal behaviour. In a classic article, Susan Amussen urged us to
examine the often contested place and meanings of violence in early modern society,
noting the historically specific, mutually reinforcing and power-laden ways in which
understandings of legal, illegal and extralegal violence took shape.8 Accordingly, this
paper disaggregates the data from a sizeable sample of early modern English homicide
records to see who men and women were accused of killing, and how, and places
that information within the context of early modern medical and legal works. In her
important study of Cheshire’s court records, Garthine Walker observed that homicide
law itself encoded male standards of behaviour.9 This paper builds upon that insight,
showing that early modern responses to homicide, and thus both the long-lived laws
that emerged from them and the bodies of evidence upon which we rely, had embedded
within them understandings of male and female difference rather different than our
own, ones grounded in climatic rather than chromosomal models. When humours and
heat distinguished male from female, talk of killings in hot blood and in cold counted
as something more than metaphor. While women in early modern England killed far
fewer people than did men, their very nature was thought to make them more susceptible
to committing the kinds of killings deemed egregious acts of murder rather than
the less serious crime of manslaughter.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
Sex and Murder (or Gender and Homicide) in Early Modern England, c.1500–1680 247
First we turn to the data, to see what cases people brought before early modern
English courts as suspected homicides and who they identified as the killers in their
midst. A dataset compiled from coroners’ inquests and court indictments produced
between c.1500–1680 includes information on 3,601 people identified as victims of
homicide and 4,374 people implicated in their killings.10 This is not a complete set
of records for a given area of the sort that might allow the generation of homicide
rates expressed as x:100,000, but should serve as a reasonably representative sample
of the larger whole. One must take care in using these records, of course. Not least to
be borne in mind is that they document accusations, not ‘actual’ killings. Trial juries
later decided that some of these supposed victims died of natural or accidental causes,
and they deemed a good number of the people charged with killings not guilty. Some
other homicides presumably went undetected. Reasons for caution in how one reads
these records certainly exist, but as an indication of the claims that came before the
courts, they can be revealing. The sample lets us look at how homicides attributed to
women differed from those attributed to men, in a much larger set of records than has
previously been compiled for early modern England.
Table 1: Killer’s Gender
Frequency Percent
Unknown 27 .6
Female 825 18.9
Male 3522 80.5
Total 4374 100.0
Of all the supposed killers in these records, 825 – roughly 20 per cent – were
women, said to have killed 907 people, or 25 per cent of the total number of victims
(see Table 1). The numbers of victims and killers do not match because, of course,
some incidents involved multiple killers and some killers were charged with the deaths
of multiple victims. Already differences emerge: men were more often implicated in
killings said to have been done by groups, but women figured far more heavily among
killers thought responsible for sets of victims.
Table 2: Victim’s Age (All Victims)
Frequency Percent
Unspecified/Adult 3036 84.3
Infant 336 9.3
Child between 1 and 14 229 6.4
Total 3601 100.0
Looking at the victims, we see differences in the ages and genders of people identified
as falling prey to men and to women. Overall, 84 per cent of victims were adults.
For the subset of victims with female killers, that percentage drops nearer to 50, with
about 35 per cent of women’s victims being infants and the rest identified as children
(see Tables 2 and 3).When we turn to gender, overall the vast majority of victims were
male. Men overwhelmingly killed men. Female killers were much more even-handed,
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
248 Gender & History
Table 3: Victim’s Age (Female Killers)
Frequency Percent
Unspecified/adult 441 48.5
Infant 316 34.9
Child between 1 and 14 150 16.6
Total 907 100.0
Table 4: Victim’s Gender (All Killers)
Frequency Percent
Unknown 46 1.3
Female 696 19.3
Male 2859 79.4
Total 3601 100.0
Table 5: Victim’s Gender (Female Killers)
Frequency Percent
Unknown 37 4.1
Female 407 44.9
Male 463 51.0
Total 907 100.0
only slightly more likely to kill male than female victims (see Tables 4 and 5).
(This remains so even when we set aside infants and children and look only at adult
victims of women). So, while men far outnumbered women as accused killers in this
set of records, and while a slight majority of women’s victims were adult men, women
were disproportionately represented amongst those charged with killing the young
and defenseless.
Indeed,women were disproportionately chargedwith domestic killings. Some 563
purported victims in this set of records were identified as sharing familial or household
bonds with their supposed killers. If we can assume that the indictments and inquests
note familial and master-servant relationships when they existed, this would suggest
that only 16 per cent of these homicides might be counted as ‘domestic’, happening
between people linked by bonds of blood, marriage or service. This contrasts quite
markedly with the proportion of domestic homicides today – a proportion that typically
goes up as the overall rates of homicide in a society decline and is in England now
closer to 30–50 per cent of the total number of homicides, depending on who one
includes. It contrasts, too, with what one might expect from a reading of the lurid
murder pamphlets of the early modern era with their focus on domestic dangers.11 As
Frances Dolan has observed, these pamphlets often located the threat to social order ‘in
the least powerful and privileged, in those most likely to be the victims rather than the
perpetrators of violence’.12 Indeed, domestic killings more often involved superiors
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
Sex and Murder (or Gender and Homicide) in Early Modern England, c.1500–1680 249
killing inferiors than the reverse: husbands killed wives, masters killed servants and
parents killed children far, far more frequently than the other way around.
In one subset of these domestic killings, then, those between husbands and wives,
men did dominate: whereas sixty-sixmen in this sample were charged with killing their
wives, only thirty-twowomen were accused of killing their husbands (a crime thatmight
well be construed not just as murder, but as petty treason, and thus be punished more
severely, with burning at the stake rather than hanging). In other domestic killings,
however, women more often figured as the killers. Only fifty-eight killings were
noted as being between masters and their servants or apprentices, with eight servants
accused of killing masters (frequently, in self-defence during a beating) and fifty
servants identified as the victims of their masters or mistresses, most often in killings
construed as over-zealous corrections. Here, women were said to have killed twentyeight
servants, whereas men were charged as the killers of twenty-two. Children were
very rarely charged with killing their parents, with only two daughters and three sons
noted as having done so in this set of records. Many more parents killed their offspring:
at least 351 victims (of whatever age) in these records died at the hands of a mother or
father, with some others dying at the hands of a step-parent. Of the 304 infants killed
by a parent, fathers were named as the principals in only four deaths.
The killing of newborns by their mothers is a fraught subject, its understanding
complicated not least by moralising and anachronistic tendencies to separate it from
the broader class of homicides. Habits of seeing women as victims or, conversely, as
heroic agents rather than simply as perpetrators interfere.13 So, too, does terminology:
distinguishing it with its own label, some historians treat ‘infanticide’ separately from
the larger category of criminal homicide and exclude infanticidal women from their
counts of killers.14 For some research questions, such a separation makes sense, but not
if we want to understand contemporary perceptions and responses to lethal violence.
Indictments did not give the killing of an infant a special name; they called it
murder. The indictment of Anne Gowsworthe, for example, identified her victim as
an ‘infantem feminam’ [female infant] but described the offence in the same terms
as other homicides, accusing Gowsworthe of having ‘felonice interfecit et murdravit’
[feloniously killed and murdered] the unnamed baby.15 Similarly for Margaret Gybson:
her indictment read that ‘ex malicia sua precogitata’ [of her malice aforethought]
she had ‘felonice submersit, interfecit et murdravit’ [feloniously drowned, killed and
murdered] an unbaptised child.16 The infamous 1624 statute that made a special crime
of concealing the death of an infant born to an unmarried mother did not use the word
‘infanticide’, either.17 As Mark Jackson notes, the term only came to be commonly
used over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as the crime became medicalised
with talk of ‘puerperal insanity’. Acts of 1922 and 1939 categorised infanticide as
manslaughter rather than murder, with the latter Act defining it as any ‘wilful act or
omission’ by the mother within a year of her child’s birth ‘while the balance of her
mind was disturbed by reason of her not having fully recovered from the effect of
giving birth to the child’.18 We might well continue to use the term as a convenience,
but must be wary of bringing along with it anachronistic assumptions that it was an
offence categorically separate from other homicides. While some few women charged
with the crime of murdering their newborns in early modern England were acquitted
or reprieved on grounds of insanity, the majority were treated as murderers, pure and
simple.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
250 Gender & History
Moreover, despite some historians’ assertions to the contrary, courts had long
treated the killing of infants as a felony.19 Confusion seems to come in part from
misunderstandings of the 1624 Act, which dealt only with attempts to keep secret the
births and deaths of ‘bastard’ babies. Common law courts tried the killing of infants
as murder well before and long after this statute. Sara Butler has found a sizable set of
such cases scattered throughout medieval court records; my own sample includes over
160 indictments for the murder of infants previous to the passage of the 1624 Act.20
In total, the sample includes 336 infant victims, 9 per cent of the whole. Of
that number, 94 per cent (316) were said to have been killed by women, 89 per cent
(300) by their mothers.21 While descriptions of women’s marital status in indictments
are not always reliable (one thinks of those that describe the accused as ‘spinster,
wife of . . . ’), the indictments do overwhelmingly identify these people as unmarried,
either as spinsters or widows.22 If married women were killing newborns in an attempt
at family planning, their actions did not result in criminal prosecutions.23 We are
left, then, with the inquests and indictments, which deal primarily with unmarried
women, likely impelled to the deed by some combination of desperation, poverty and
pragmatic calculations of the very tangible costs of a ruined reputation. A good many
contemporaries would have recognised this, while also seeing the crime as the product
of sin’s inevitable downward spiral; Antonia Strong, a ‘Southwark spinster’ also known
as ‘Timy Strange’ – quite possibly someone who earned her living through sex work
– was convicted for the murder of her infant, and may well have been an exemplar
of the sort of person contemporaries sought to punish for this crime.24 According
to the indictments, most of these infants died by smothering, strangling, exposure
or drowning in privies or ditches. Some suffered more violent deaths: Alice Bankes
was accused of throwing her infant out a window; Margaret Fothergell with using an
embroidery needle to stab her baby repeatedly; and Joan Bassett supposedly pulled
out her newborn’s tongue before leaving her to freeze to death.25 Of a subset of 272
cases for which verdicts are known, juries found 60 per cent of the women accused
of killing their infants guilty of murder, and 40 per cent not guilty. Juries deemed
some dead infants stillbirths; some the victims of accidents; and a few the victims
of fictitious killers, presumably signs of discomfort with the evidence or pity for the
killer. (Both Catherine Gray andAvid Read escaped guilty verdicts when juries decided
that ‘John Death’ had killed their infants, for example).26 There is no point now in
either excoriating or excusing these women, but they should surely be included in a
discussion of homicide as understood and tried in early modern courts.
While the profiles of people identified as the victims of male and female killers
differed, so too did the means of killing (see Tables 6 and 7). Those individuals killed
by men most often died of injuries inflicted by knives, daggers, swords and rapiers,
with cudgels and staffs accounting for another good number of deaths. Women who
killed, in contrast, killed more often with their bare hands. Female killers pummelled
or kicked to death a sizable number of people. They strangled, suffocated and drowned
more victims than did male killers, as these were the most common ways of killing
an infant. One other way in which women’s purported means of killing differed from
men’s, and one that applied more so to the shared range of adult victims, was in respect
to poison. Poison was blamed in only a tiny number of these fatalities: only fifty-six
people, just under 2 per cent of the victims in this sample, were identified as being
killed by such means, which seems surprising given the intensity of the fear of poison
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
Sex and Murder (or Gender and Homicide) in Early Modern England, c.1500–1680 251
Table 6: Weapons or Means (Victims of Female Killers)
# %
Unknown 40 4.4
Knife, dagger 57 6.3
Sword, rapier 8 .9
Agricultural or work tool 17 1.9
Staff or cudgel 43 4.7
Firearm 4 .4
Unarmed beating, kicking 99 10.9
Strangling, suffocating 151 16.6
Drowning 46 5.1
Poison 34 3.7
Burning 9 1.0
Witchcraft 342 37.7
Other 57 6.3
Total 907 100.0
Table 7: Weapons or Means (All Victims)
# %
Unknown 162 4.5
Knife, dagger 693 19.2
Sword, rapier 494 13.7
Agricultural or work tool 313 8.7
Staff, cudgel 556 15.4
Firearm 121 3.4
Unarmed beating, kicking 286 7.9
Strangling, suffocating 182 5.1
Drowning 61 1.7
Poison 56 1.6
Burning 19 .5
Vehicle 5 .1
Witchcraft 373 10.4
Other 280 7.8
Total 3601 100.0
expressed in popular texts. But this, too,was an area inwhich the victims ofwomen outnumbered
those of men, with women charged in thirty-three of these deaths and men in
twenty-three. According to these indictments and inquests, though, women were more
likely to use witchcraft than any other method to kill their victims and turned to it in
far greater numbers than did men. Witchcraft was identified as the cause of death for
373, roughly 10 per cent, of the total number of victims in this set of records. Fully
93 per cent of these victims supposedly died because of women’s malice. Witchcraft,
then, accounted for almost 38 per cent of the fatalities attributed to women.
The bulk of these indictments appeared after the passage of the 1563 witchcraft
statute, with only an earlier outlier or two.27 While we might well be tempted to treat
these supposed homicides differently than the rest and to remove them from our counts
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
252 Gender & History
for certain purposes, they were treated as homicides at the time. Even more so than with
the killing of infants, with witchcraft we run up against differences between modern
and early modern notions of what constituted homicide. Fewif any historians of murder
are likely to include supposed victims of witchcraft amongst their body counts, and
understandably so; and yet, in setting these ‘victims’ and the people charged with
their deaths aside, we miss an extraordinary amount of women’s supposedly homicidal
behaviour. While indictments mentioned magic as the means, they identified murder
as the charge. Alice Chaundler, for example, was found guilty of four counts of
murder on an indictment that charged her with, ‘ex malicia sua precogitata’ [of her
malice aforethought], having ‘felonice interfecit et murdravit’ [feloniously killed and
murdered] her victims using ‘witchcraft, enchantments, charms et sorceries’.28 She
was indicted for murder, not for witchcraft. Chaundler and many others charged with
such killings hanged alongside those who killed with fists and knives, punished no
differently than other murderers.
Some women charged with the crime confessed. The belief that people might kill
in this manner was widely held, though not blindly so: juries acquitted slightly more
than half of those charged with such killings. Of the 255 people accused of killing by
witchcraft in this set of records, verdicts are known for 240: 47 per cent were deemed
guilty but 53 per cent were not. Of the seventeen men charged with such killings,
verdicts are known for sixteen: five guilty, eleven not. Of the 238 women, verdicts are
known for 224: 107 guilty, 117 not. Some of thesewomen did find themselves acquitted
of the murder – and thus freed from facing death – but convicted on a lesser charge
of using witchcraft to maim livestock or some other such thing and thus sentenced to
lesser punishments.
A few things, then, can be concluded from this survey of how women killed and
were thought to have killed. Significantly fewer women than men killed other people.
True, some killings presumably were not detected, but we have no reason to think that
killings by women were less likely to be discovered than men’s, at least not in numbers
sufficient to account for such a significant difference in indictment levels. True, too,
that for some offences, women might be treated in ways that led to lower levels
of accusations reaching the courts: for some minor offences, married women were
assumed to be acting at their husbands’ direction and not treated as legally responsible
individuals, but not in cases of homicide. For many offences, victims or bystanders had
some choice in how, whether and where to lay charges against a suspected offender and
may have used that freedom in ways that favoured female criminals; again, though, it
is difficult to imagine that this sort of informal discretion accounted for any significant
difference in indictment levels for a crime such as homicide.29 As a group, women
simply engaged in less lethal violence than did men.
That more men than women killed other people is rooted in some ill-definable
mix of social roles, cultural conditioning and biology. Statements that ‘women were
less violent than men’ must be treated carefully, though. Individually, of course, some
women could be every bit as vicious or physically aggressive as any man.30 The family
and friends of Thomas Blackbone and Richard Carver (two adults) might not have
thought women any less brutal than men: Mary Crowche strangled the first with her
bare hands, and Mary Hartnopp hacked the second to death with an axe.31 It is worth
emphasising that women were by no means missing from the ranks of those charged
with impulsive, brutal beatings and bloody stabbings and, indeed, that they were more
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
Sex and Murder (or Gender and Homicide) in Early Modern England, c.1500–1680 253
likely to engage in these sorts of killings than the supposedly distinctively ‘feminine’
sorts of killings.Witchcraft killings were the largest single category of deaths attributed
to female killers, but looking at Table 6, and setting aside the supposed victims of
witchcraft, poison and methods unknown, one is left with many more victims of
women killed with cudgels, knifes, and bare-handed beatings.
Yet one notes that women were not just brought up on homicide charges in
smaller numbers than men, but also that they were thought to dominate in particular
types. While the records often make it difficult to distinguish planned from unplanned
killings, for those that clearly did involve forethought – the deaths by witchcraft and
poison – women outnumbered men. Women were thought to dominate amongst those
charged with fatalities that involved insidious, pre-planned methods against which
defence was difficult. To summarise, then, women were charged more often than men
with multiple victim homicides; they killed more infants and dependants than did men;
they dominated amongst those charged with planned, forethought killings. That is to
say, women were vastly over-represented amongst cold-blooded killers. Given their
implication in only about a fifth of all homicides, women were disproportionately
represented amongst those deemed to have committed murder rather than the less
serious crime of manslaughter.
Definitions of what counted as murder changed subtly but significantly in England
over the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Early in the sixteenth century,
statutes and other legal documents formally recognisedwhat lay jurors had already seen
as a difference between more and less abhorrent forms of homicide by identifying the
first as murder and the second as manslaughter.Malice and premeditation supplemented
an earlier emphasis on secrecy as the defining elements of ‘murder’.32 As manslaughter
became formalised, the distinguishing feature between it and murder seemed initially
to be suddenness or evidence of prior planning, and then between killings in ‘hot’
or in ‘cold blood’. Both suddenness and ‘hotness’ of the blood served to mark some
killings as less heinous than others.33 Sir Francis Bacon described this ‘privilege of
passion’ by noting that ‘Our law hath made a more subtle distinction between the
will inflamed and the will advised, between manslaughter in heat and murder upon
prepensed malice or cold blood’.34 Sir Edward Coke defined manslaughter as those
killings done when ‘the heat of the blood, kindled by ire, was never cooled’.35 Both
murder and manslaughter remained capital crimes, but punishment for the unplanned,
hot-blooded act of manslaughter could more easily be avoided, at least for those men
who could read sufficiently to claim benefit of clergy. That this legal fiction, which
allowed themitigation of death sentences for the form of homicide deemed less serious,
was not available to women until the 1690s is one obvious factor working against
them.36 Another perhaps not yet adequately noted factor is the very physiological
notion on which the distinctions between hot-blooded manslaughter and cold-blooded
murder rested and how it mapped onto notions of male and female difference.
‘Cold-blooded’ and ‘hot-blooded’ persist as metaphors today, but meant rather
more in the pre-modern era with its climatic model of the human body. It was precisely
their cold-bloodedness that madewomenwomen, according to the medical understandings
of the day. Humoural theory inherited from Aristotle and Galen explained human
nature and human health with reference to the balance of the four fluids of phlegm,
blood, choler and melancholy, and deemed heat the vital differentiating factor between
men and women. As one medical tract of the era explained, ‘the natural beginning of
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
254 Gender & History
all growing and living things is heat’. Male and female were shaped by the ‘perfection
of heat’, with men the hotter of the two.37 As another explained, ‘we know that the
male and the female are both of one kind’, though the hotter variants are male and the
females the colder, a difference necessary for generation.38 Whether any given writer
treated men and women as members of ‘one sex’, at different points on a spectrum that
allowed many exceptions to the norms, or as fundamentally dimorphic, they saw heat
as the key.
Moreover, as everyone knew, ‘it be plentifully proved by Galen that themanners of
themind do follow the temperature of the body’.39 The climatic model allowed variety:
some men manifested the attributes of a colder body than others, and some women
might well be like Maude Rye, ‘of a manly disposition and hot spirit far unfitting her
sex’.40 Alongside the broad general truth that men were defined by heat and women by
its relative lack, the complexions and temperaments of individuals varied depending
on age, food, drink, exercise, music, climate and more. Bodies were incredibly porous,
susceptible to environment. Given this porosity, maintaining the ‘temperate ideal’ took
great effort.41 And yet, it was ‘of distemperature of the body, whether natural from the
womb or accidental [that] evil passions spring’.42
That cold-blooded females were more likely to commit cold-blooded killings
only made sense, in this view. That men would be responsible for more deaths than
women, overall, in the heat of their inflamed passions also made sense. Helkiah
Crooke, physician to King James VI/I, addressed the confusion over women’s seeming
abundance of anger but relative coldness of blood. He posited a difference between
anger and wrath. What women exhibited was a fretful, petty, petulant kind of anger.
‘Anger’, he wrote, ‘is a disease of a weak mind which cannot moderate itself but is
easily inflamed, such are women, children and weak and cowardly men’. Hot-blooded
men were more likely to exhibit wrath, which could have positive manifestations but
could also be a problem if not reined in by reason. Young men, whose heat remained
undimmed by age, had particular difficulties moderating their wrath.43 As legal writer
William Lambarde explained, the more merciful treatment of manslaughter took into
account ‘the infirmity of man’s nature’, specifically the quick temper and ready violence
associated with ‘manhood’.44 Early modern writers understood the passions to have
both corporeal and cognitive aspects, insisting that the humoural, hydraulic pressures
could be controlled.45 Mastering those passions marked an ideal man, but jurists and
jurors saw the great difficulty in doing so as reason to mitigate charges of murder.
Over the early seventeenth century, provocation began to supplement hotbloodedness
as a marker of manslaughter. After a key case in 1600, as J. H. Baker has
noted, the nature of the provocation came to matter more so than simply the heat of
the blood, for judges at least.46 John Downame’s Treatise of Anger (1609) sought to
distinguish between just and moderate anger and the unjust and immoderate. Anger
was ‘an affection, whereby the blood about the heart [was] heated, by the apprehension
of some injury offered to a man’s self or his friends’; when directed at proper ends
and used rationally, it made a man more ‘constant and resolute’. Too often, though,
it resulted in ‘a wrongful and an unreasonable desire of revenge, stirred up in us by
unjust causes’.47 Judges, too, tried to clarify this line. As Jeremy Horder has explained,
they set out grounds for what they considered sufficiently, legitimately provocative
to justify moderating a charge of murder to manslaughter; words alone should not
count, but insulting assaults on one’s person would, for example.48 All this talk of
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
Sex and Murder (or Gender and Homicide) in Early Modern England, c.1500–1680 255
moderation – whether of the law or of the passions – focused on men.49 The very
heat that made them men made them more likely to be violently angry than their coldblooded
counterparts.Women in early modern England killed far fewer people than did
men, and contemporaries knew it. Contemporaries would have been less confident that
women murdered fewer people, however. While women killed less often than did men,
their very nature made them likelier to commit particular kinds of killings that came to
be deemed the most egregious, according to contemporary views. As GarthineWalker
has observed, manslaughter developed as a ‘distinctly masculine form of homicide’
as ‘societal concepts of honour and violence had become conflated with legal ones
to make manslaughter a gendered category’.50 Medical concepts mattered, too. When
jurists such as Coke used ‘the heat of the blood’ to distinguish some kinds of killings
from others, understandings of ‘natural’ differences between men and women worked
their way into the law and its application.
People in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries included killings by witchcraft
and of infants in their understandings of homicide; should we? Whether we ought to
include such accusations when examining the history of lethal violence depends on the
questions we ask and what we want to know. If we want to understand the meanings
and subjective experiences of violence in the past – subjective experiences that shaped
laws and trials and executions – then yes.Whether discussing homicide as sin, sickness,
or as crime – whether in tracts theological, medical or legal – the early modern English
included killings by means of witchcraft and of infants. They executed people for such
crimes, and in great numbers.
Of 713 accused female killers for whom we can be fairly confident of the trial jury
verdict, 49 per cent were found not guilty; 51 per cent were found guilty.51 Of the group
of 1,348 men for whom we can determine a jury verdict, in contrast, only 33 per cent
were found not guilty or convicted of a non-culpable form of homicide, such as killing
in self-defence. Juries found 67 per cent of these men guilty of culpable homicide, a
conviction rate that seems significantly higher than that for women, until we realise
that only about 30 per cent of the men in this set of records were found guilty of murder.
Slightly more than half of them were found guilty only of manslaughter, and thus most
likely able to evade the punishment of death. Understandings of the bodies of men and
of women meant that evading death through the charge of hot-blooded manslaughter
was not an option for female killers. As Garthine Walker noted in her study of court
records in early modern Cheshire, a much greater proportion of the women charged
with homicide faced sentences of death than did men – a fact that accords with the
notion that they committed the kinds of killing deemed most heinous, crimes to which
their very nature was thought to make them more susceptible.52 A greater percentage
of women than men received pardons, but not in numbers sufficient to make up for the
difference.53
If we were to exclude indictments for killings of infants and by means of
witchcraft, moreover, we would miss one of the more significant changes in indictment
levels over these years. While women constituted about 20 per cent of all people implicated
as killers over the period as a whole, responsible for about 25 per cent of all the
killings, the proportion of homicides attributed to them increased dramatically after the
middle of the sixteenth-century. Amongst those named as killers in this set of records,
women went from single digit percentages early in the century to a high of 37 per cent
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
256 Gender & History
Figure 1: Percentage of victims with women identified as killers
in the 1570s and 1580s. If we turn to victim counts, female killers were identified as
responsible for as many as 45–6 per cent of all bodies in the peak decades of the 1570s
and 1580s. These increases were driven very largely (though not entirely) by charges
that women had murdered their infants or by means of witchcraft (see Figure 1).
The timing of the increases makes one wonder if source issues are partly responsible:
the early sixteenth-century data derives mainly from coroners’ inquests and
indictments in the gaol delivery files returned to King’s Bench from all areas of the
country, whereas from mid-century, the data comes largely from the inquests and indictments
preserved in the assize files of the five ‘Home Counties’. It is possible that
some crimes, and criminals, were more likely to appear in one of these legal fora than
the other. These are changes in proportions, too, not in absolute numbers: thus, differences
in men’s homicidal behaviour may well play a part, with men over time less often
killing in groups with multiple principals. But given the correspondence between the
timing of the increases and the passage of the 1563Witchcraft Act, in particular, as well
as what we know of generally rising concerns about the financial and spiritual perils
of bastard bearers, the increases manage to be at once both shocking and not all that
surprising. We have known for some time that the overall rates of felony indictments
increased late in the sixteenth-century; it seems that the proportion of women amongst
those charged with the most serious offences increased, too.54 Concerns about what
women were doing – about the deeds to which their natures were thought to make them
particularly susceptible – manifested themselves in much higher rates of indictment
for murder in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. For certain purposes,
we may well want to focus on the percentage of victims attributed to women once
witchcraft killings are removed (16 per cent), or even on the percentage of victims
attributed to women once both witchcraft and infant killings are deducted (7 per cent).
But to understand the experiences and perceptions of homicidal violence and women’s
place within them in an era that developed highly gendered and long-lasting definitions
of homicide, we should not too quickly impose our own standards of ‘real’ homicides.
When we look at who women and men were accused of killing, and how jurists
and jurors defined and responded to those killings,we see clear evidence of cultural and
social factors at work. If we want to understand change over time – in shifting rates of
homicidal violence, for instance – these cultural and social factors will be a necessary
focus. Differences as stark and persistent as those between men’s and women’s lethal
violence, though, seem to demand explanations drawn at least partly from ‘nature’.
Concerns about the sometimes crassly ideological examples of biological determinism
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
Sex and Murder (or Gender and Homicide) in Early Modern England, c.1500–1680 257
that appear in the popular press, and in some ostensibly scholarly publications, should
not scare us away from talk of the natural, or of the body and its place in history. Yet
engaging with the early modern history of homicide offers a salutarywarning that a turn
to biology will not release uswholly from history, from change or from culture. Biology
may seem the relatively stable substrate, but the biological explanations on offer are
themselves historical.Whether natural differences are understood in terms of humours
and heat or hormones and evolutionary psychology, cultural norms remain embedded
in those understandings, sometimes with wholly unnatural implications. Recent works
by feminist philosophers of science question the very notion that nature and culture
can be separated.55 While they have rather grander ontological and epistemological
projects in hand, we might well take heed from them and move beyond attempts to
prioritise the sociocultural or the biological when studying propensities to violence.
At the very least, the nature of the records we use should prompts us to think carefully
about the relationships between sex and homicide and gender and murder. Murder is
clearly, brutally about bodies and brute material facts. But it is also partly discursive,
a matter of construction. What we define as murder in the abstract varies across time.
How we apply those abstractions to individual cases depends on interpretations of
intentionality, provocation, circumstance – and sex.
Notes
The author wishes to thank participants at the 2014 European Social Sciences History Conference and the
Berkshire Conference on the History of Women for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper,
Anne Cummings and Hilary Doda for their invaluable assistance with data entry, and the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada for funding the research from which this paper derives.
1. The National Archives, Public Record Office, C 3/8/113. All manuscript references are to the National
Archives unless otherwise noted.
2. Over the sixteenth century, clerics’ long-standing immunity from trial in secular courts became a device by
which men who committed one of a shrinking list of offences for the first time could escape capital punishment.
A statutory change in 1575 regularised the practice, meaning that men convicted of a ‘clergyable’
offence – which included manslaughter – could claim the ‘benefit of clergy’, reading a passage of Scripture
to prove their supposed clerical status, and then face at most a branding, forfeiture of property and a year’s
incarceration instead of execution.Women, in contrast, could try to claim ‘benefit of the belly’, submitting
to a physical examination to determine whether they were pregnant, but this secured only a temporary
reprieve, not necessarily an escape from execution. See K. J. Kesselring, Mercy and Authority in the Tudor
State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2003), pp. 212–14.
3. Lords’ Journal, vol. IX, p. 4 (11 February 1646).
4. Malcolm Feeley and Deborah L. Little provide the classic overview of changing rates of women’s involvement
in criminal processes in the English context: Feely and Little, ‘The Vanishing Female: The Decline
ofWomen in the Criminal Process, 1687–1912’, Law and Society Review 25 (1991), pp. 719–57. European
data is brought up to date in Manon van der Heijden and V. Koningsberger, ‘Continuity or Change? The
Prosecution of Female Crime in the 18th and 19th Centuries’, Crime, Histoire et Soci´et´es 17 (2013), pp.
101–27; and Greg T. Smith, ‘Long-Term Trends in Female and Male Involvement in Crime’, in Rosemary
Gartner and Bill McCarthy (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Gender, Sex and Crime (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2014), pp. 139–57. Manuel Eisner, ‘Long-term Historical Trends in Violent Crime’, Crime and
Justice: A Review of Research 30 (2003), pp. 109–12 provides a succinct overview of the data on homicide
throughout Europe, noting that women typically account for no more than 15 per cent of killers, when
infanticide is excluded. Pieter Spierenburg’s work is also required reading: see especially: Spierenburg,
‘How ViolentWereWomen? Court Cases in Amsterdam, 1650–1810’, Crime, Histoire et Soci´et´es 1 (1997),
pp. 9–28; his introduction to Spierenburg (ed.), Men and Violence: Gender, Honour and Rituals in Modern
Europe and America (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 1998), pp. 1–20; and Spierenburg, A
History of Murder: Personal Violence in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Present (Cambridge: Polity,
2008), pp. 117–22. For works on the English homicide data that distinguish male from female killers, see,
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
258 Gender & History
for example, Barbara Hanawalt, ‘The Female Felon in Fourteenth-Century England’, Viator 5 (1974), pp.
253–68; Peter Lawson, ‘Patriarchy, Crime and the Courts: The Criminality of Women in Late Tudor and
Early Stuart England’, in Greg T. Smith, Allyson May and Simon Devereux (eds), Criminal Justice in the
Old World and the New (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), pp. 16–57; Garthine Walker, Crime,
Gender and Social Order in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2003), pp.
113–58; J. M. Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England, 1660–1800 (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1986), p. 82 and Beattie, ‘The Criminality of Women in Eighteenth-Century England’, Journal of
Social History 8 (1975), pp. 80–116; Gwenda Morgan and Peter Rushton, Rogues, Thieves and the Rule of
Law: The Problem of Law Enforcement in North-East England, 1718–1800 (London: UCL Press, 1988),
pp. 97–9, 112–23; and Martin Wiener, Men of Blood: Violence, Manliness, and Criminal Justice in Victorian
England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). For contemporary surveys of homicide
that speak to the sex differences today, see the reports issued by the United Nations Office on Drugs and
Crime [UNODC], e.g., UNODC Global Study on Homicide 2013 (United Nations Publication, Sales No.
14.IV.1), p. 13, which indicates that, worldwide, only 5 per cent of those people convicted of the intentional
homicides it includes in its surveys were women.
5. See theworks cited in note 4 andAnne-Marie Kilday’s overviewof the debates inKilday, ‘“ThatWomen Are
But Men’s Shadow”: Examining Gender, Violence and Criminality in Early Modern Britain’, in Marianna
Muravyeva and Raisa Maria Toivo (eds), Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (New York:
Routledge, 2012), pp. 53–68. For a more focused treatment of explanations rooted in sociobiology and
evolutionary psychology, see especially the classicwork byMartin Daly andMargoWilson, Homicide (New
York: A. de Gruyter, 1988). For overviews of more recent literature in the field, see John Carter Wood, ‘A
Change of Perspective: Integrating Evolutionary Psychology into the Historiography of Violence’, British
Journal of Criminology 51 (2011), pp. 479–98; and Gregory Hanlon, ‘The Decline of Violence in theWest:
From Cultural to Post-Cultural History’, English Historical Review 128 (2013), pp. 367–400. There was,
for a time, a third set of explanations which denied the differences as more apparent than real, suggesting
that women’s crimes were either hidden from or overlooked by contemporaries. The view that stealth
or ‘chivalry’ can account for much of the differential has long since been discarded, but for its classic
statement, see Otto Pollak, The Criminality of Women (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1950).
6. A move that often harkens to Jenny Kermode and Garthine Walker (eds), Women, Crime and the Courts
in Early Modern England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1994). See, too, Jennine Hurl-
Eamon, Gender and Petty Violence in London, 1680–1720 (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press,
2005) and Marisha Caswell, ‘Married Women, Crime and Questions of Liability in England, 1640–1760’
(PhD, Queen’s University, 2012).
7. For examples of the former, see Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has
Declined (New York: Penguin, 2011); the recent special issue of the British Journal of Criminology,
51 (2011) devoted to ‘Human Evolution, History and Violence’; and the section devoted to ‘Psychoand
Sociobiological Perspectives’ in Gartner and McCarthy (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Gender,
Sex and Crime, pp. 245–318. For a helpful introduction to the latter, see Riki Lane, ‘Trans as Bodily
Becoming: Rethinking the Biological as Diversity, Not Dichotomy’, Hypatia 24 (2009), pp. 136–57. For
historians seeking to combine cultural and biological elements, see Lyndal Roper’s Oedipus and the Devil:
Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge, 1994) and more recently,
Dror Wahrman, ‘Change and the Corporeal in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Gender History: Or,
Can Cultural History Be Rigorous?’, Gender & History 20 (2008), pp. 584–602, which calls cogently
for a ‘corporeal critique’ of cultural history that engages with extra-cultural elements. He writes: ‘Unlike
unreflective essentialism that presupposes that certain aspects of the human condition necessarily lie outside
history and culture, and unlike unreflective constructivism that presupposes that no aspect of the human
condition lies outside history and culture, the self-reflexive preoccupation of the “corporealist” (or the
“neo-essentialist”) is the un-predetermined boundary between the two’ (p. 599).
8. Susan Amussen, ‘Punishment, Discipline and Power: The Social Meanings of Violence in Early Modern
England’, Journal of British Studies 34 (1995), pp. 1–34, which builds upon J. A. Sharpe’s urging that
quantification of homicide rates be contextualised with studies of the ‘social meanings of violence’: Sharpe,
‘The History of Violence in England: Some Observations’, Past and Present 108 (1985), p. 214.
9. Walker, Crime, Gender and Social Order, p. 157. For recent efforts to reform gender-biased homicide laws,
see, for example, Danielle Tyson, Sex, Culpability and the Defense of Provocation (New York: Routledge,
2013); Jeremy Horder, Homicide and the Politics of Law Reform (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012),
esp. pp. 205–11; and Carolyn B. Ramsay, ‘Provoking Change: Comparative Insights on Feminist Homicide
Law Reform’, Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 100 (2010), pp. 33–108.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
Sex and Murder (or Gender and Homicide) in Early Modern England, c.1500–1680 259
10. The database is based largely on already calendared records, but as they only become numerous from
about 1559, supplements them with roughly 1,000 manuscript inquests from the early 1500s. It was
compiled from records calendared in the following: R. F. Hunnisett (ed.), Calendar of Nottinghamshire
Coroners’ Inquests, 1485–1558 (Nottingham, 1969); Hunnisett (ed.), East Sussex Coroners’ Records,
1688–1838 (Lewes: Sussex Record Society, 2005); Hunnisett (ed.), Sussex Coroners’ Inquests 1485–
1558 (Lewes: Sussex Record Society, 1985); Hunnisett (ed.), Sussex Coroners’ Inquests, 1558–1603
(London: PRO Publications, 1996); Hunnisett (ed.), Sussex Coroners’ Inquests, 1603–1688 (London: PRO
Publications, 1998); John Cordy Jeaffreson (ed.), Middlesex County Records, vols. 1–3 (London: The
Middlesex County Records Society, 1886–92); J. S. Cockburn (ed.), Calendar of Assize Records: Home
Circuit Indictments, Elizabeth I and James I, 10 vols (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1975–82);
Cockburn (ed.), Kent Indictments, 1625–1688, 4 vols (London andWoodbridge, 1989–1997); data compiled
by James Sharpe and R. Dickinson for Cheshire, in Violence in Early Modern England: A Regional Survey,
1600–1800: Cheshire [computer file], Colchester, Essex: UK Data Archive [distributor], July 2002, SN:
4429, <http://dx.doi.org/10.5255/UKDA-SN-4429–1>; Calendars of the Essex assize records in the Essex
Record Office, T/A 418; Manuscript coroners’ inquests in KB 9, taken at five-year intervals. Both because
of the nature of the surviving records and the choices made when entering data into the database, this dataset
vastly underrepresents excusable homicides (misadventure and self-defence), and does not include suicides
(though early modern contemporaries treated self-slaying as homicide, too). Otherwise, it should serve as a
reasonably representative sample of the events identified by contemporaries as felonious homicides. Anne
Cumming’s assistance in entering the data was invaluable.
11. See especially Frances Dolan, Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England,
1550–1700 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994); Vanessa McMahon, Murder in Shakespeare’s England
(London: Routledge, 2004); and Randall Martin, Women, Murder and Equity in Early Modern England
(New York: Routledge, 2007). See also J. A. Sharpe, ‘Domestic Homicide in Early Modern England’,
Historical Journal 24 (1981), pp. 29–48; and Susan Amussen, ‘“Being Stirred to Much Unquietness”:
Violence and Domestic Violence in Early Modern England’, Journal of Women’s History 6 (1994), pp.
70–89.
12. Dolan, Dangerous Familiars, p. 15.
13. See, for example, Brigitte H. Bechtold and Donna Cooper Graves, ‘The Ties that Bind: Infanticide, Gender,
and Society’, History Compass 8 (2010), pp. 704–17.
14. See, for example, Pieter Spierenburg, ‘Long-Term Trends in Homicide: Theoretical Reflections and Dutch
Evidence, Fifteenth to Twentieth Centuries’, in E. A. Johnson and E. H. Monkkonen (eds), The Civilization
of Crime (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), pp. 63–106, here pp. 72–3. The literature on
early modern infanticide is sizeable; for a recent overview, see Anne-Marie Kilday, A History of Infanticide
in Britain, c.1600 to the Present (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Other key works include
Mark Jackson, New-Born Child Murder: Women, Illegitimacy and the Courts in Eighteenth-Century England
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996); Laura Gowing, ‘Secret Births and Infanticide in
Seventeenth-Century England’, Past and Present 156 (1997), pp. 87–115; Mark Jackson (ed.), Infanticide:
Historical Perspectives on Child Murder and Concealment, 1550–2000 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002); and
Walker, Crime, Gender and Social Order, pp. 148–56.
15. ASSI 35/5/3, m. 25.
16. ASSI 35/8/4, m. 5.
17. ‘An Act to Prevent the Destroying and Murthering of Bastard Children’, 21 Jac. 1, c. 27.
18. Mark Jackson, ‘The Trial of Harriet Vooght: Continuity and Change in the History of Infanticide’, in
Jackson (ed.), Infanticide, pp. 10–11, quoting the Infanticide Act (1939), 1&2 Geo. VI, c. 36.
19. In a few publications Barbara Hanawalt has maintained that infanticide only became a felony in the
sixteenth century, a claim subsequently picked up by others. See: Hanawalt, ‘Medievalists and the Study of
Childhood’, Speculum 77 (2002), pp. 440–60, here p. 452, which cites her Ties that Bound: Peasant Families
in Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 103, which in turn refers the reader to
her Crime and Conflict in English Communities, 1300–1348 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979),
pp. 154–7, but nothing can be found there to support the claim. See, too, the classic and influential essay
by Barbara Kellum, ‘Infanticide in England in the Later Middle Ages’, History of Childhood Quarterly
1 (1974), pp. 367–88, here p. 372. Claims that the killing of an infant was not a felony before the midsixteenth
or early seventeenth centuries reappear more recently in, for example, Karen Jones, Gender and
Petty Crime in Late Medieval England: The Local Courts in Kent (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2006),
p. 88, and Keith M. Botelho, ‘MaternalMemory and Murder in Early-Seventeenth Century England’, SEL:
Studies in English Literature 48 (2008), pp. 111–30.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
260 Gender & History
20. Sara Butler, ‘A Case of Indifference? Child Murder in Later Medieval England’, Journal of Women’s
History 19 (2007), pp. 59–82.
21. This would seem to counter recent assertions that infanticide was ‘rare’, though ‘rare’ is, of course, a
relative notion. Eleanor Hubbard, for example, suggests that prosecutions for infanticide were rare and
exaggerated, but seems to overlook a number of cases in the Middlesex records she examines, noting only
four whereas there are at least ten. See Hubbard, City Women: Money, Sex and the Social Order in Early
Modern London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 104. Anne-Marie Kilday says that her study
has ‘dispelled the notion that new-born child murder was a frequently indicted offence during the early
modern period’ (Kilday, A History of Infanticide, p. 32). True, it is worth emphasising that women more
often killed adults than infants, but with 35 per cent of their victims being newborns, this seems frequent
enough. The difficulty may derive from the dating of Kilday’s sample, taken from Old Bailey records that
begin only in the late 1600s.
22. And interestingly, the victims of these mostly single mothers show a sex ratio of 138:100, with the sex of
170 identified as male, 123 as female, and the rest not noted.
23. Work done by Greg Hanlon and his students suggests that marital infanticide may well have been ‘routine’
in parts of continental Europe in these years, not tried in criminal courts at the time but detectable by the
historian when sex ratios in baptismal records differ from the universal sex ratio at birth. See: Gregory
Hanlon, ‘L’Infanticidio di coppie sposate in Toscana nella prima et`a moderna’, Quaderni Storici 38 (2003),
pp. 453–98; Laura Hynes, ‘Routine Infanticide byMarried Couples? An Assessment of Baptismal Records
from Seventeenth-Century Parma’, Journal of Early Modern History 15 (2011), pp. 507–30. A preliminary
test suggests that English couples were not doing the same, however, or at least not in any statistically
significant or sex-selective way. A survey of the baptismal registers of thirteen Yorkshire parishes from the
1530s through to 1660 reveals a ratio amongst the nearly 40,000 recorded baptisms of 105 boys to every
100 girls, a ratio that fits within the expected sex ratio at birth of 104–107:100. (My thanks to Hilary Doda
for doing this rather laborious count forme).While more and bigger samples might bewanted before turning
away from the possibility of widespread, covert infanticide by married couples in early modern England,
in a sense, those studies have already been done centuries ago, by the very first English statisticians. John
Graunt in 1662 published Natural and Political Observations Made Upon Bills of Mortality. From 1629,
the London Bills of Mortality broke down baptisms by the sex of the child; Graunt tallied these and was the
first to observe the slight preponderance of male births over female. Graunt observed that the sex ratio in
London baptisms for the years from 1629–61 was 106.8:100; using parish records for the town of Romsey
from 1569–1658 as a comparison, he found a ratio of 105.6:100. In 1710, John Arbuthnott followed up
on Graunt’s observations in An Argument for Divine Providence, Taken from the Constant Regularity
Observed in the Births of Both Sexes. (For Arbuthnott, the regularity of that ratio proved that polygamy
defied nature, for example). These are, in fact, the earliest recorded investigations of the human sex ratio.
They show nothing to suggest that English couples were engaging in routine sex-selective infanticide. See
R. B. Campbell, ‘John Graunt, John Arbuthnott, and the Human Sex Ratio’, Human Biology 73 (2001),
pp. 605–10.
24. ASSI 35/11/5, m. 7.
25. ASSI 35/4/3, m. 9 ASSI 35/21/1, m. 8 (‘a brode stick sharped’); ASSI 35/23/5, m. 28.
26. ASSI 35/32/4, m. 9 and ASSI 35/27/6, m. 10. Interestingly, even the fictitious killers were generally given
men’s names; for one exception, in which ‘Joan Atstile’, the female equivalent of the ubiquitous ‘John
Atstyle’, was blamed for the murder of Frances Gargrave’s infant, see ASSI 35/31/1, m. 60.
27. See, e.g., KB 9/414, m. 88 (1529).
28. ASSI 35/16/2, no. 10 (see also nos. 7, 8, 9). This pushes a bit further a point raised recently by Garthine
Walker in ‘The Strangeness of the Familiar: Witchcraft and the Law in Early Modern England’, in Angela
McShane and Garthine Walker (eds), The Extraordinary and the Everyday in Early Modern England
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 105–24. Walker demonstrates that in England, witchcraft
was not a ‘crimen exceptum’ but indeed a rather ‘unexceptional’ crime, tried like other felonies, whatever
our own difficulties in understanding how to deal with a crime that just could not have happened. In
these homicide indictments, it is worth emphasising, the witchcraft is secondary to the killing being tried,
mentioned much as other homicide indictments might mention a staff, club, knife or other weapon.
29. See Kilday’s survey of the debates on women’s criminality, ‘“Women are but Men’s Shadow’”, for the
general consensus that indictment levels for serious crimes are at least a rough reflection of differences
in actual behaviour. That prosecution levels for some types of violent crimes could vary from one court
to another is explored in Manon van der Heijden, ‘Women, Violence and Urban Justice in Holland,
c.1600–1838, Crime, Histoire et Soci´et´es 17 (2013), pp. 71–100.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
Sex and Murder (or Gender and Homicide) in Early Modern England, c.1500–1680 261
30. A point also made by Jennine Hurl-Eamon in Gender and Petty Violence and Anne-Marie Kilday in
‘“Women are But Men’s Shadow”’, p. 65. See, too, Trevor Dean’s ‘Theft and Gender in Late Medieval
Bologna’, Gender & History 20 (2008), pp. 399–415; though focusing on a non-violent form of criminal
behaviour, Dean helpfully notes that historians have been too quick to emphasise not just the quantitative
but also qualitative differences in behaviour, suggesting the value of focusing instead (or as well) on the
similarities.
31. ASSI 35/34/2, m. 32; ASSI 35/27/6, m. 11 (‘securi’, possibly a cleaver).
32. For changes to homicide law in this period, see in particular T. A. Green, ‘The Jury and the English Law of
Homicide, 1200–1600’, Michigan Law Review 74 (1976), pp. 462–87; J. H. Baker, Introduction to English
Legal History, 4th edn (London: Butterworths, 2002,), pp. 529–31; J. G. Bellamy, The Criminal Trial
in Later Medieval England: Felony Before the Courts from Edward I to the Sixteenth Century (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1998), pp. 57–69; W. D. Sellar, ‘Forethocht Felony, Malice Aforethought and
the Classification of Homicide’, in W. M. Gordon and T. D. Fergus (eds), Legal History in the Making
(London: Hambledon, 1991), pp. 43–60; Kesselring, Mercy and Authority, pp. 102–7.
33. On early modern understandings of manslaughter, and its relationship to both ‘chaude melle’ and ‘chaunce
melle’ killings, see especially Baker, Introduction to English Legal History. See, too, Edward Coke, Third
Part of the Institutes (London, 1669), pp. 54–6; Matthew Hale, Historia Placitorum Coronae, ed. Sollom
Emlyn (Philadelphia, 1847), pp. 471–5; William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England
(Oxford, 1765–69), Book IV, ch. 13.
34. Francis Bacon, The Charge of Sir Francis Bacon . . . Touching Duels (London, 1614), pp. 21, 20.
35. Coke, Third Part, p. 55.
36. A discrepancy explored nicely in Walker, Crime, Gender and Social Order, pp. 113ff. From 1624, women
could claim benefit of clergy for minor thefts (21 Jas 1, c. 6); only from 1692 could they claim clergy on
par with men; with the reading test abolished in 1706, thereafter all men and women had equal access to
the benefit, for a first instance of one of a shrunken list of offences. See Beattie, Crime and the Courts,
p. 452.
37. John Jones, A Brief, Excellent and Profitable Discourse of the Natural Beginning of all Growing and Living
Things (London, 1574), sigs. A3v, D4r.
38. Helkiah Crooke, Mikrokosmographia (London, 1616), p. 270. For premodern medical views of male and
female difference, see the now classic work by Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the
Greeks to Freud (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992) and a number of the works that seek to refine
and nuance his view of a shift from a ‘one-sex model’ to a ‘two-sex model’ while further clarifying the
climatic model of the body that underlay various notions of sexual differentiation, including Joan Cadden,
Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993), esp. pp. 169–88; Laura Gowing, Common Bodies: Women, Touch and Power in
Seventeenth Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003); Alexandra Shepard, Meanings
of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), esp. pp. 48–69; Lynda
L. Coon, ‘Somatic Styles of the Early Middle Ages’, Gender & History 20 (2008), pp. 463–86 and Dror
Wahrman, ‘Change and the Corporeal’, pp. 584–602. On the concept of vital or innate heat (which was
generally differentiated from elemental heat), and the iatrochemical challenges to this ancient theory that
began to take shape over the seventeenth-century, see EverettMendelsohn, Heat and Life: The Development
of the Theory of Animal Heat (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964), esp. pp. 8–66.
39. Jones, Natural Beginning, sig. E1v.
40. STAC 5/G2/5.
41. On the environmental challenges to men’s maintenance of the ‘temperate ideal’, see Shepard, Manhood,
pp. 64–8.
42. While these quotations come from Jones, Natural Beginning, sigs. E1r-v, the sentiments are repeated with
only minor variation in other works of the era; see, for example, Thomas Wright, The Passions of theMinde
in General (London, 1630), p. 38.
43. Crooke, Mikrokosmographia, pp. 272–6. See, too, Gwynne Kennedy, Just Anger: Representing Women’s
Anger in Early Modern England (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000). The scholarship
on early modern emotions is now sizable; for an introduction, see also, Fay Alberti, Matters of the Heart:
History, Medicine, and Emotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Penelope Gouk and Helen Hills
(eds), Representing Emotions: New Connections in the Histories of Art, Music and Medicine (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2005); Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological
Category (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body. Emotions
and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Gail Kern Paster, et al. (eds),
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
262 Gender & History
Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
44. William Lambarde, Eirenarcha (London, 1599), p. 244.
45. See Linda Pollock’s ‘Affective Life in Shakespeare’s England’, forthcoming in Malcolm Smuts (ed.), The
Oxford Handbook of the Age of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
46. Watts v. Brains (1600), 78 Eng Rep 1009; Baker, Introduction, 530.
47. John Downame, Treatise of Anger (London, 1609), p. 205.
48. Jeremy Horder, Provocation and Responsibility (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 23–42. See also
Horder, ‘The Duel and the English Law of Homicide’, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 12 (1992),
pp. 419–30.
49. On the broader significance of discourses of ‘moderation’ in early modern England, see Ethan Shagan, The
Rule of Moderation: Violence, Religion and the Politics of Restraint in EarlyModern England (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2011).
50. Walker, Gender and Social Order, p. 124.
51. Not all of the guilty would have hanged; some would have received pardons, for example. The numbers
given here should be read exactly as written: numbers of guilty verdicts, not numbers of executions.
52. Walker, Crime, Gender and Social Order, pp. 113ff.
53. Kesselring, Mercy and Authority, pp. 77–9.
54. See J. A. Sharpe, Crime in Early Modern England, 1550–1750, 2nd edn (London: Longman, 1999),
pp. 82–6 and J. S. Cockburn, ‘Patterns of Violence in English Society: Homicide in Kent, 1560–1985’,
Past and Present 130 (1991), pp. 70–106.
55. See, for example, Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement
of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007) and Evelyn Fox Keller, The Mirage of a
Space Between Nature and Nurture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd