ABSTRACT
Early modern news seemed to present readers with the same story of women who killed their newborn infants or young children, over and over:
The Bloudy Mother r (1610) A pittilesse Mother r (1616) No naturall mother, but a monster r (1634) Natures Cruell Step-Dames r (1637) The Unnatural Grand Mother r (1659) The Cruel Mother r (1670) The Unnatural Mother r (1697)
Yet beyond these repeated titles-normally supplied by publishers rather than writers-lie a wide range of rhetorical styles, narrative plots, and individual experiences of troubled motherhood. Then as now, it was not just sensational headlines and Medea stereotypes that stirred readers to buy news of the latest female child killer, but interest in the lives of individual women who were partially reconstructed as recurring figures of violent mothers. When analyzing modern media representations of female killers, Kathleen Daly and Lisa Maher observe that the “real woman” cannot be understood outside historical discourses that represent her. Conversely, news reports can never fully capture the depth and complexity of individual subjects, who in certain ways remain beyond representation.1 Similar epistemological challenges characterized early modern news of infanticide, which framed the private actions of obscure local women in terms of both mythical images of monstrous mothers and shifting public ideas about the crime’s meaning and appropriate punishment. Religious associations transformed some accused women into powerful symbols of political and sectarian ideology, especially during times of heightened conflict such as the Civil War and the Popish Plot.2 News readers and auditors routinely compared and debated these multiple layers of actuality and representation.3 As with other categories of female homicide news, they included neighbors, local authorities, and assize officials whose fluctuating attitudes of legal rigor and equitable leniency resulted in variable levels of prosecution and conviction.4
