Crime and Consequence in Early Modern Literature and Law

Traces the ways in which changing ideas about criminal sanction were reflected in and engaged with in early modern English society.

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In a period in which some three hundred crimes were designated as felonies and punishable by death, a consideration of crime must inevitably lead to a preoccupation with consequences. Crime and Consequence in Early Modern Literature and Law analyses contemporary literary and legal texts, including drama, poetry and commentaries on the law, and considers how 'proportionable' punishment was imagined in the early modern period and how the possibility of justice miscarried might influence that imagining.