This collection addresses women’s criminality from the perspectives of history and historical criminology, recognizing that gendered expectations have long affected the prosecution, understanding, and study of crime and criminals. The authors are confident that contextualisation is “the key to understanding female crime, its representation and its variation in time and space,” and that historians of crime must therefore pay more attention to socioeconomic factors, such as social mobility, employment, and migration patterns, than has generally been the case (4). To do so effectively requires first that female criminals be identified. Hence, the research concentrates on the lower courts, where women appeared in much larger numbers than in the superior courts. The additional records on which the authors rely give the volume a mainly urban focus, but comparisons to the male experience make the findings particularly insightful and persuasive.
The chapters are organized around three main themes—violence and women, prosecution and...