Identity, Crime and Legal Responsibility in Eighteenth-Century England

During the eighteenth century English defendants, victims, witnesses, judges, and jurors spoke a language of the mind. With their reputations or lives at stake, men and women presented their complex emotions and passions as grounds for acquittal or mitigation of punishment. Inside the courtroom the language of excuse reshaped crimes and punishments, signalling a shift in the age-old negotiation of mitigation. Outside the courtroom the language of the mind reflected society's preoccupation with questions of sensibility, responsibility, and the self.

• '[Rabin] give[s] weight to abstractions like 'sensibility' as actual forces in the courtroom and in the reform movement.'

Paul Baines, Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol.42, no.1, 2008

Autorentext
DANA RABIN is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She specializes in the history of early modern Britain with an emphasis on law, gender, emotion, and identity and is the author of "Searching for the Self in Eighteenth-Century English Criminal Trials, 1730-1800".

Inhalt
Crime, Culture, and the Self 'Of Persons Capable of Committing Crimes': Pleas of Mental Distress in the Eighteenth-Century Courtroom Old Excuses, New Meanings: "Temporary Frenzy," Necessity, Passion, and Compulsion Bodies of Evidence, States of Mind: Infanticide, Emotion, and Sensibility 'An indulgence given to great crimes'? Sensibility, Compassion, and Law Reform The End of Excuse? James Hadfield and the Insanity Plea From Self to Subject Bibliography