ABSTRACT
Indictments are the documents prepared by the Scottish prosecutor that lay out the criminal charges made against an accused. They are a key step in the legal process, detailing to the individual what they are being charged with, authorising legal agents to issue warrants against witnesses and to call together the community for the trial, and generally situating the boundaries of the legal trial. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while they followed certain formulas, criminal charges were in narrative form. Emotional language was a central rhetorical tool within such documents, designed to emphasise the significance of the charge and the seriousness of the crime. This chapter explores the role of emotional language in the production of these legal documents, tracking how this language changed over the century, and how these shifts in emotional tone might be used to help us interpret public engagements with criminality across the century.
