Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
190
result(s) for
"Wiener, Martin J"
Sort by:
Men of Blood
An examination of the treatment of serious violence by men against women in nineteenth-century England. During Victoria's reign the criminal law came to punish such violence more systematically and heavily, while propagating a new, more pacific ideal of manliness. Yet this apparently progressive legal development called forth strong resistance, not only from violent men themselves but, from others who drew upon discourses of democracy, humanitarianism and patriarchy to establish sympathy with 'men of blood'. In exploring this development and the contest it generated, Professor Wiener analyzes the cultural logic underlying shifting practices in nineteenth-century courts and Whitehall, and locates competing cultural discourses in the everyday life of criminal justice. The tensions and dilemmas this book highlights are more than simply 'Victorian' ones; to an important degree they remain with us. Consequently this work speaks not only to historians and to students of gender but also to criminologists and legal theorists.
eBook
Judges v. Jurors: Courtroom Tensions in Murder Trials and the Law of Criminal Responsibility in Nineteenth-Century England
Although it is well known that the criminal law's administration in nineteenth-century England altered decisively, little important change has been noted in the substantive criminal law. Yet change there was, but produced less through legislation (as was much administrative change) or even appeals court rulings than through everyday criminal justice practice. In particular, the effective meanings of legal terms central to the prosecution of homicide—terms such as provocation, intention, and insanity—were in motion during the nineteenth century as part of a broader redefining and reimagining of liability and responsibility. To grasp these often subtle shifts of meaning, we must look to the sites in which they occurred, the most important of which were the courtrooms of the assize courts, where the most serious offenses were tried.
Journal Article
Alice Arden to Bill Sikes: Changing Nightmares of Intimate Violence in England, 1558–1869
Let us begin with two scenes of intimate violence. First, consider a man, a woman, and three male “guests” in a well-furnished locked room. Suddenly one of the men strikes the host, and another stabs him, and he falls to the floor. At this moment the woman steps forward (she had previously tried to poison him), seizes the knife, and plunges it home, crying, “Take this for hind'ring Mosby's love and mine.” Alice Arden, with the help of her new lover, a servant, and his avaricious accomplices, has murdered her landowner husband. So climaxes Arden of Feversham, a powerful play (frequently attributed to Shakespeare) first performed in 1592 and based upon an actual murder that took place in 1551. This murder “assumed an almost totemic significance in early modern culture,” reappearing in a great variety of forms over the following century (even as a puppet show), with Alice, among other things, ranked with the classical uxoricides Clytemnestra and Livia. Consider another scene, set several centuries later: this is a starker setting, only two figures in a bare and shabby room. A ragged woman is pleading with her lover for her life, and she is urging him that it is not too late for both to repent of their former lives. Her lover, a fierce and powerful man, stands over her, nostrils dilated, grasping a pistol. Fearful of being heard, he does not fire, but instead strikes her twice with the handle, then seizes a heavy club and beats her down.
Journal Article
The sad story of George hall: Adultery, murder and the politics of mercy in mid-Victorian England
A close examination of a long forgotten murder trial throws light not only on the workings of Victorian criminal justice but also on a wide range of mid-Victorian concerns and anxieties. The trial of a Birmingham workman, George Hall, for the shooting of his unfaithful wife in 1864 stirred great public interest and a massive and successful petition campaign to spare his life. His case exposed important fault-lines in Victorian society and culture, between the increasing power of sentimental narratives and the similarly increasing official determination to 'civilize' the working classes; between older and newer notions of married life; and between older and newer notions of manliness and Englishness. It also provided both a threat to working-class claims for full citizenship and a means to recuperate those claims through a disciplined and effective movement for reprieve. Hall's story exhibits the Victorian criminal courts as a crucial arena in which these fundamental cultural values and concerns interacted and reshaped themselves.
Journal Article
Murder & the Modern British Historian
Over a century ago, the pioneer English historian of law F. W. Maitland observed that “If some fairy gave me the power of seeing a scene of one and the same kind in every age of history of every race, the kind of scene that I would choose would be a trial for murder, because I think that it would give me so many hints as to a multitude of matters of the first importance.” For many decades Maitland's remark was ignored, as historical scholarship passed over murder trials as far too “atypical” and “sensationalistic” to merit serious study, leaving them to amateur devotees of courtroom drama and detection mysteries. One notable exception was Brian Simpson, the distinguished legal historian, whose
Cannibalism and the Common Law
, published in 1984, for the first time placed in its social context the leading case of R.
v
. Dudley & Stephens, which in 1884 produced the still-authoritative rule governing the “necessity” justification for homicide. In Simpson's hands the case, a “sensational” one indeed, involving the eating of a cabin boy by shipwrecked sailors, opened up the little-known world of late Victorian maritime life. However, Simpson's lead was not followed up, and his book remained a fascinating “one-off,” regarded as an “amusement piece” by an otherwise “serious” scholar of arcane legal reasoning.
Only more recently, with developments such as the rise of the genre of “micro-history” and the legitimation of interest in the “sensational,” have historians come to accept homicide and its legal treatment as a worthy subject.
Journal Article
The Unloved State: Twentieth-Century Politics in the Writing of Nineteenth-Century History
“Who loves the state these days?” Frances Cairncross rhetorically asked in The Times Literary Supplement at the height of the Thatcher era. “People have become more cynical,” she went on, “about the central tenet of socialism: the concept of a wise and beneficent State, representing the best interests of the community at large.” The skepticism about the state as a provider of national well-being which Cairncross was referring to was of course not confined to Britain. Nor was it, in Britain, simply to be identified with “Thatcherism.” Rather, such disillusion developed over a period of several decades and across the political spectrum. As significant in this development as the thunderings of Thatcherites were the reconsiderations of those further left; David Marquand spoke for many when he declared his own tradition of Croslandite social democracy virtually bankrupt, flawed to the root by its statism, through which “civil society was seen, all too often, not as an agent, but as a patient.” The deep shift of opinion embodied in such observations has made its mark in a variety of realms, one of which is the subject of this essay: an alteration in the interpretation of British history, in particular of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the era in which this newly problematical state began to grow into its modern form. It has become something of a truism that historical writing is a part of the wider field of social discourse.
Journal Article
