Making Murder Public

‘Homicide has a history’, says Krista Kesselring (p. 120). Focusing on homicide in England between 1480 and 1680, Kesselring’s book argues for a number of important developments in understanding both killing and reactions to it. In bringing together legal, social and political history in a masterful synthesis, the book’s main argument centres on the increasingly ‘public’ nature of homicide in early modern England, with killings perceived as more than an offence against the victim’s family. Instead, homicide came to be seen as an offence against the king and, even more broadly, against the community, or ‘public peace’. In this, Kesselring’s study speaks beyond the history of homicide, and prompts us to think about understandings of the public and the private, as well as the slow evolution of the king’s peace to the ‘public peace’, a change that highlights concepts of a body politic ‘separate or separable from the person on the throne’ (p. 9)

Argument (complex analysis · Body politic · Criminology · Homicide · Poison control · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Suicide prevention · Throne · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · Homicide, Infanticide, and Child Abuse · Law · Medicine