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Great and Horrible News: Murder and Mayhem in Early Modern Britain

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We untangle the mystery of a suspected staged suicide through the newly emerging science of forensic pathology. Ebooks fulfilled through Glose cannot be printed, downloaded as PDF, or read in other digital readers (like Kindle or Nook). In some parts, more time is given to explaining background than the actual story, and in others assumptions appear to be made without historical context being considered. We see a mother trying to clear her dead daughter’s name while other women faced the accusations – sometimes true and sometimes not – of murdering their own children. The stories go into detail the law that was broken- at times by both the victim and the perpetrator- and raised the question of whether the actual law had, in part, helped cause the crime itself.

It sometimes annoys me in non-fiction when an author makes a lot of assumptions or embellishes too much, but it sounds as if she gets the balance right between sticking to the facts and telling a good story. I will enjoy reading about the historical and social contexts of these (real life) stories, and welcome that the author has used contemporaneous records as the source of her information. I found every story interesting and felt Adams got a really great balance between facts and the human traumas behind them. Adams shows that suicide then, as today, often arose out of depression and mental illness, but she also gives an example of what was thought of as “honourable suicide”, a hangover from the days of chivalry, when a man who had failed in some way, especially in public life, would take his own life. I’m really interested in the period, mainly the theatre, but knowing about the wider society helps me understand the plays 😀 Definitely on the wishlist!

This sounds really fascinating – though I think I would have to read it in small doses, for the reasons other commenters have said. In thrilling narrative, we follow a fugitive killer through the streets of London, citizen detectives clamouring to help officials close the net. The most prominent theme is that of suicide (or 'felo de se') - the early moderns had different ideas about suicide which carried its own sentence and had very negative social consequences for the remaining family (e. One I heartily recommend both to true crime fans, and to people more generally interested in the social and cultural aspects of the early modern period. A couple of the stories involve suicide, and Adams shows the inhumanity of the laws surrounding this subject.

The case highlighting the treatment of unwed mothers who miscarried or delivered stillborn children was also heartbreaking, and feels sadly relevant to our current situation. If the women should miscarry or their baby not survive for long, they then ran the risk of being prosecuted for murder, even if there was little evidence. It’s informative and interesting, and it’s also a little appalling to see perspectives from the 1600s coming back into fashion today.It’s deficient in any meaningful analysis and the book feels more like a retelling of cases directly from the newspapers rather than presenting it from any specific point of view. But because they are nine quite distinct stories I was able to read one a day and then move on to something not quite so grim! Elizabeth was a young girl sent as a maid to a man who repeatedly raped her then threw her out when she became pregnant. While some involved wealthy or well known figures, others were ordinary citizens who might have been otherwise lost to memory if they hadn't met a grisly end. Instead I’ve picked a few examples to try to give a flavour of how Adams tells each story and uses it to take us deep into the culture of the period.

As she takes us through his eventual confession, guilt and remorse, and his execution by public hanging, Adams shows how the public, again very similar to today, soon lost interest in John, the victim, and became fixated on Nathaniel, the murderer, even feeling sympathy for him as his remorse was reported in the news sheets. explores the strange history of death and murder in early modern England, yet the stories within may appear shockingly familiar. And certainly her storytelling skills made this a fascinating read, humanising the history in a way that makes it more effective than a dry recounting of facts and statistics ever could. I think that’s why I sometimes get annoyed at people obsessing about bad things that happened in the past – it’s almost like a way of avoiding facing the bad things that are still happening right under our noses. As someone who is a bit obsessive about true crime it was kind of reassuring that far from being a new phenomenon it is, in fact, a very old one.To access your ebook(s) after purchasing, you can download the free Glose app or read instantly on your browser by logging into Glose. I’m interested in that period too from a historical perspective, but so often history only deals with the monarchs and the aristocrats so it’s always great to get a bit of insight into the social history, and this book really does that very well, I felt. She argues that this period, 1500-1700, saw the beginnings of a secular, scientific approach to investigation, with increasing reliance on physical evidence, influenced by the cultural changes that accompanied the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment.

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