ABSTRACT
Murder by poison provided early modern English readers with some of the most gruesome news of deadly crimes. Although reported more intermittently than other forms of homicide, accounts of the effect of arsenic or mercury on victims’ agonized bodies aggravated popular assumptions about female cruelty in passionate conflicts. While some writers could be partially sympathetic to women’s motives, as Henry Goodcole’s story of the unnamed wife in The Adultresses Funerall Day (1635) demonstrated,1 juries and judges were less equivocal: indictments for homicide by poisoning were rarely turned back, and convictions almost never mitigated or reprieved because the felony by definition was premeditated.2 From the viewpoint of the criminal law, poisoning was a form of murder least amenable to equitable discretion or flexibility.
