ABSTRACT
Popular early modern opinions about what constituted culpable female violence and appropriate punishment often differed from the formulations of written statutes, court decisions, and proverbial wisdom. Alternative perspectives emerged from humane local responses to individual accused women, whom neighbors and friends defended by singling out extenuating circumstances or ethical ambiguities that challenged standard legal reasoning. When such counterarguments were reported by commercial printed news, whose viewpoint normally coincided with the Crown’s, they tended to be veiled by fictionalizing maneuvres and moralizing rhetoric. This screening process was never absolute, however. Overall, early modern murder news was characterized by legible tensions between generic conventions and official ideologies on the one hand, and semantic openness to rational judgement by individual readers on the other. The historical effects of these negotiations were contingent rather than systematic. With the partial exception of infanticide, they did not lead to any short-term revision of national laws or gender stereotypes. But popular knowledge of personal and/or mitigative aspects of female homicide cases had demonstrable effects on literate parish and court officers who administered the criminal law, as evidenced by the significant number of arraignments and trials that ended in dismissal or acquittal at county assizes.
