DANGEROUS FAMILIARS Representations of Domestic Crime in England, 1550-1700

Hardback. In early modern England, the home could function as a locus of conflict, an arena in which the most fundamental ideas about social order, identity, and intimacy were contested. Although the contests took many forms, they emerged into public scrutiny and intervention most dramatically when they erupted into violence. The author focuses here on the most extreme, violent instances of domestic conflict. Early modern English culture recognised non-murderous domestic violence, for example, wife- and child-beating, sexual abuse, and verbal abuse, as a problem that local communities might address in ecclesiastical courts or through informal interventions, including shaming rituals. Common law, however, did not define these kinds of violence as criminal, and popular culture rarely represented actual instances of domestic violence that had no clear legal status, that is, those that did not lead to death. The author looks at those forms of domestic violence that occurred least often, but attracted most attention, and that the culture defined as felonies : acts of murder (petty treason, wife murder, infanticide) and of witchcraft. Chapter headings include : "Home-rebels and House-traitors": Petty Treason and the Murderous Wife; The Subordinate('s) Plot: Petty Treason and the Forms of Domestic Rebellion; Revolutions, Petty Tyranny, and the Murderous Husband; Finding What Has Been "Lost": Representations of Infanticide and 'The Winter's Tale'; Witchcraft and the Threat of the Familiar. Illus., Epilogue and Index. 253pp. 8vo. h/back. F.