ABSTRACT
The growth of early modern printed news opened the realities of female homicide and child murder to forensic and ethical scrutiny by a diverse readership outside the courtroom. In this book I have tried to show that, even though the higher volume of news stories about women murderers than men misrepresented lower proportional rates of female prosecutions and convictions, these trends were related at a deeper level. The publication of accused women’s lives and circumstances disseminated knowledge of social differences and human vicissitudes that explained their motives and justified legal officials in mitigating charges and sentences selectively. Popular news and its reception created the imaginative liberty and temporal re-orientation from closed interpretation to innovative reasoning that could accommodate equitable flexibility. Culturally, this dialogue also gradually redefined public images of female criminality as complex constructions of socially heterogenous discourses.
