Suchergebnisse

Intro -- Acknowledgements -- Contents -- List of Figures -- Part I The Criminal Corpse in History -- Chapter 1 Introduction -- The Criminal Corpse -- The World of the Murder Act -- Body and Power -- Chapter 2 The Power of the Criminal Corpse in the Medieval World -- Getting Medieval on Your Ass -- Early Medieval Death and the Context of Punitive Death -- Late Medieval Death and the Changing Context of Punishment -- Medieval Bodies: Living, Lived, Dead and Damned -- Death and the Dead Body in the Medieval World -- Scary Monsters -- Magic and Mummia -- Crime Is to Sin as Punishment Is to Penance -- Pain: The Aim of Punishment or Its By-Product? -- Medieval Criminal Law and Sanctions on the Body -- Powerful Punishments and Traitors' Bodies -- Into Modernity -- Chapter 3 How Was the Power of the Criminal Corpse Harnessed in Early Modern England? -- The Context -- Changes in Criminal Justice During the Age of Spectacular Punishment -- The Uses of the Dead in Early Modernity -- Changing Meanings of the Dead Body -- Building a New Medicine -- The Dissected Body as Cultural Symbol -- Medicine and Folklore -- The Social Consequences of Deviancy -- The Reformation and the End of Purgatory -- Good and Bad Deaths -- Uses of the Criminal Body -- The Power of the State -- Subverting the Theatre of Pain -- Early Modern Criminal Bodies -- The Criminal Body in Different Belief Discourses -- Part II The World of the Murder Act -- Chapter 4 Murder and the Law, 1752-1832 -- Making the Murder Act -- Making Criminal Corpses -- Impacts, Intended and Otherwise, of the Murder Act -- Unmaking the Murder Act -- Chapter 5 Anatomisation and Dissection -- Duty, Death, and Discretion -- 'I'm Not Dead Yet!' Medical Men and the Uncertainty of Death -- Between Science, Spectacle and the State -- Access and Ambition -- 'Good Bodies': Damage, Decay and Timing.

This open access book is the culmination of many years of research on what happened to the bodies of executed criminals in the past. Focusing on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it looks at the consequences of the 1752 Murder Act. These criminal bodies had a crucial role in the history of medicine, and the history of crime, and great symbolic resonance in literature and popular culture. Starting with a consideration of the criminal corpse in the medieval and early modern periods, chapters go on to review the histories of criminal justice, of medical history and of gibbeting under the Murder Act, and ends with some discussion of the afterlives of the corpse, in literature, folklore and in contemporary medical ethics. Using sophisticated insights from cultural history, archaeology, literature, philosophy and ethics as well as medical and crime history, this book is a uniquely interdisciplinary take on a fascinating historical phenomenon.