HIST 354: Law, Crime, and Police in Early Modern Europe (HC): Britain

The first systematic study of the concept of shame from 1600-1900, showing good and bad behaviour, morality and perceptions of crime in British society at large. Single episodes in the history of shame are contextualized by discussing the historiography and theory of shame and their implications for the history of crime and social relations.

Erin Mackie explores the shared histories of the modern polite English gentleman and other less respectable but no less celebrated eighteenth-century masculine types: the rake, the highwayman, and the pirate.

Mackie traces the emergence of these character types to the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when traditional aristocratic authority was increasingly challenged. She argues that the development of the modern polite gentleman as a male archetype can only be fully comprehended when considered alongside figures of fallen nobility, which, although criminal, were also glamorous enough to reinforce the same ideological order.

In Evelina's Lord Orville, Clarissa's Lovelace, Rookwood's Dick Turpin, and Caleb Williams's Falkland, Mackie reads the story of the ideal gentleman alongside that of the outlaw, revealing the parallel lives of these seemingly contradictory characters. Synthesizing the histories of masculinity, manners, and radicalism, Rakes, Highwaymen, and Pirates offers a fresh perspective on the eighteenth-century aristocratic male.

Shani D’Cruze and Louise Jackson introduce students to key debates and trends in the study of women and crime in Britain over the last three hundred years. While focusing specifically on women and crime, they reflect recent developments in gender studies and argue that men and women cannot be studied in isolation.