ABSTRACT
This article focuses on the history of violent crime, gender and power relations, that is, on the issues related to the interconnections among gender, agency, equality and participation in violent crime in early modern European society, using Russia as a case study. I also analyse the gendered ways of criminalising violent behaviour in private and public spaces, arguing that intra-family killings stood at the crossroads of the two. They were assigned to various jurisdictions, which prosecuted and decided cases on the bases of the genders of the perpetrator and the victim and the relationship between them. In early modern countries such as Russia in which ecclesiastical jurisdiction covered family offences and the state jurisdiction covered the prosecution of homicides, including those committed within the family, the negotiations between the jurisdictions were especially important in deciding whether the death penalty would be applied. In order to see how this process developed it is necessary to analyse the period of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a whole so that continuities and discontinuities in state penal policies, ideological changes and transformations of gender order can be identified.3
