Early Modern Crime Narratives: Vice, Villains, and Law

Catalog description

This course taps into our continuing collective obsession with criminality, unpacking the complicated web of feelings attached to crime and punishment through early modern literary treatments of villains, scoundrels, predators, pimps, witches, king-killers, poisoners, mobs, and adulterers. By reading literary accounts of vice alongside contemporary and historical theories of criminal justice, we will chart the deep history of criminology and track competing ideas about punishment and the criminal mind. This course pays particular attention the ways that people in this historical moment mapped criminality onto dynamics of gender, race, sexuality, disability, religion, and mental illness according to cultural conventions very different from our own. Authors may include Shakespeare, Marlowe, Massinger, Middleton, Dekker, Webster, and Behn.