ABSTRACT
Ballads and pamphlets tend to focus on those petty traitors who burn spectacularly and might lead to overlook the fact that some women who killed their husbands received a different sentence, one that downplayed the association of their crime with high treason and treated it like other murders. Patricia Fumerton suggests that the decisive punishment of murderous wives might function as a "wish fulfillment" fantasy at least for embattled husbands. Perhaps the burnings of petty traitors functioned as an outlet for concerns about female authority—or as a focus for the brewing interest in patriarchs' failures and vulnerabilities and their subjects' murderous dissatisfactions that would erupt in civil war and regicide. Instead of mining for sources or lining up different accounts in different genres of the same crime author assembled a wide range of representations across genres and across the late sixteenth and full seventeenth century.
