Indeed, it often felt like while trying to provide “both sides”, Addams excused the killers due to lack of historical evidence, rather than using this as a time to discuss treatment of women or the mentally ill at the time and make meaningful points about miscarriages of justice.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this and feel like I've gained a greater understanding of what drove the early moderns, and how they lived (and died).This in itself would have been fine as rewriting for a modern audience can make the cases more approachable due to changes in language, but it feels that the author was torn between this and trying to insert a vague analytical moral note, which led to a muddied and less impactful storytelling style. It sometimes annoys me in non-fiction when an author makes a lot of assumptions or embellishes too much, but it sounds as if she gets the balance right between sticking to the facts and telling a good story. In this book, Adams uses examples culled from court and coroner records, news sheets and from letters and journals to examine how crimes were dealt with investigatively and through the criminal justice system, and how victims and criminals were perceived by the public. There’s so much packed into each of the nine cases that I’m not even going to try to cover it all here.

Adams shows that while in general the public strongly disapproved of suicide, honourable suicide often met with a more sympathetic reaction. There are definitely bits that are gruesome and bits that made me angry, but the way she puts it all into the context of the time is really well done.

If I have a criticism, it’s that sometimes I felt she perhaps embellished the bare bones a little to improve the storytelling aspects – I wondered more than once how she could have known what someone’s motivation was or how she could be so sure what had happened when she didn’t cite a specific source.

This sounds really fascinating – though I think I would have to read it in small doses, for the reasons other commenters have said. Adams dissects nine cases of varying degrees of murder and their profound impact on the public, using each case as a signpost for shifting attitudes towards moralism throughout the time period. She explains the need for him to be “converted” to satisfy the prevailing religious agenda, and how this was achieved.

She argues that this period, 1500-1700, saw the beginnings of a secular, scientific approach to investigation, with increasing reliance on physical evidence, influenced by the cultural changes that accompanied the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. Adams shows the importance of midwives as expert witnesses at this time in deciding on how the death of a newborn occurred. The author has done well to elicit such strong emotions from you considering the starting point for each of the cases was probably quite sensational. Adams tells us about Cheapside and the traders who worked there, specialising in luxury goods like gold and silk. I thought she got the balance just right between the personal stories and the social and historical context.

I think in some cases Adams goes a bit too far in filling in the blanks (eg the chapter on posthumous mutilation). And certainly her storytelling skills made this a fascinating read, humanising the history in a way that makes it more effective than a dry recounting of facts and statistics ever could. And because each story is in its own self-contained chapter I was able to read one a day, and then move on to something lighter for the rest of my daily reading! Baby farms, political crimes, religious mania – these and many more aspects of crime and justice are also covered in this fascinating book. This is a readable account of nine true crimes in early modern England in the Tudor period and walks us through all the ins and outs of how murders were committed, solved, punished and commemorated in the period, as well as what we can learn when we look at these crimes today: the way that we treat single mothers, or view suicide- a crime until the 1960s- although we've moved on in lots of ways, there are still things that our early modern ancestors would recognise, I think.

Of course I was aware that suicide was taboo and viewed as a sin by the church, but it also had very strong legal ramifications -- a person who took their life could actually be posthumously convicted of a felony, and their lands and fortunes seized. For all ebook purchases, you will be prompted to create an account or login with your existing HarperCollins username and password. Each individual crime is used as a jumping off point to discuss a wider topic, be it suicide, infanticide, or the abuses of the Church, and smaller stories are woven into the narrative to further illustrate the point.