ABSTRACT
Sixteenth-and seventeenth-century readers were just as fascinated by murder and its involving passions as modern TV viewers and film goers. Their basic questions were the same: Why did she kill? How did she do it? What will her sentence be? Does she deserve it? Yet early modern news about female homicides also had specific cultural origins in Reformation theology, traditional concepts of natural law and divinely devolved human justice, and nascent commercial journalism. Forensic perspectives became predominant as crime reporting expanded into serialized print formats after the Restoration. Before then, news writers sought to give meaning to shocking crimes primarily by considering their ontological and metaphysical implications: How is the murder to be understood in terms of human nature, sin, and divine law? How does it reveal God’s will communicating through a shocking event and the criminal’s punishment? What signs of providential judgment is it giving the wider community? These contexts distinguish the period’s murder narratives from the pop psychological and hyperadversarial frameworks of today’s mass-media crime news.
