Crime and Criminality: Early Modern Europe

Catalog description

The period from 1450 to 1800 was a golden age of fraud, violence, and other crime in Europe--not to mention activities we no longer consider criminal, or even possible, like heresy and witchcraft. This course examines the rich and often bizarre records of this criminality, in court records and in fiction, in order to understand how early modern societies, and rulers' attempts to police them, functioned and failed.