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This edited volume examines the performance and role of scientific experts in modern European courts of law and police investigations. It discusses cases from criminal, civil and international law to parse the impact of forensic evidence and expertise in different European countries. The contributors show how modern forensic science and technology are inextricably entangled with political ideology, gender norms and changes in the law and legal systems. Discussing fascinating case studies, they highlight how the ideology of authoritarian and liberal regimes has affected the practical enactment of forensic expertise. They also emphasise the influence of images of masculinity and femininity on the performance of experts and on their assessment of evidence, victims and perpetrators. This book is an important contribution to our knowledge of modern European forensic practices.
Essays explore forensic science in global and historical context, opening a critical window onto contemporary debates about the universal validity of present-day genomic forensic practices. Contemporary forensic science has achieved unprecedented visibility as a compelling example of applied expertise. But the common public view—that we are living in an era of forensic deliverance, one exemplified by DNA typing—has masked the reality: that forensic science has always been unique, problematic, and contested. Global Forensic Cultures aims to rectify this problem by recognizing the universality of forensic questions and the variety of practices and institutions constructed to answer them. Groundbreaking essays written by leaders in the field address the complex and contentious histories of forensic techniques. Contributors also examine the co-evolution of these techniques with the professions creating and using them, with the systems of governance and jurisprudence in which they are used, and with the socioeconomic, political, racial, and gendered settings of that use. Exploring the profound effect of "location" (temporal and spatial) on the production and enactment of forms of forensic knowledge during the century before CSI became a household acronym, the book explores numerous related topics, including the notion of burden of proof, changing roles of experts and witnesses, the development and dissemination of forensic techniques and skills, the financial and practical constraints facing investigators, and cultures of forensics and of criminality within and against which forensic practitioners operate. Covering sites of modern and historic forensic innovation in the United States, Europe, and farther-flung imperial and global settings, these essays tell stories of blood, poison, corpses; tracking persons and attesting documents; truth-making, egregious racism, and sinister surveillance. Each chapter is a finely grained case study. Collectively, Global Forensic Cultures supplies a historical foundation for the critical appraisal of contemporary forensic institutions which has begun in the wake of DNA-based exonerations. Contributors: Bruno Bertherat, José Ramón Bertomeu Sánchez, Binyamin Blum, Ian Burney, Marcus B. Carrier, Simon A. Cole, Christopher Hamlin, Jeffrey Jentzen, Projit Bihari Mukharji, Quentin (Trais) Pearson, Mitra Sharafi, Gagan Preet Singh, Heather Wolffram
Carrier, Simon A. Cole, Christopher Hamlin, Jeffrey Jentzen, Projit Bihari Mukharji, Quentin (Trais) Pearson, Mitra Sharafi, Gagan Preet Singh, Heather Wolffram
In recent years, writing on early-modern culture has turned from examining the upheavals of the Reformation as the ruptured birth of early modernity out of the late medieval towards a striking emphasis on processes of continuity, transition, and adaptation. No longer is the ‘religious’ seen as institutional or doctrinaire, but rather as a cultural and social phenomenon that exceeds the rigid parameters of modern definition. Recent analyses of early-modern cultures offer nuanced accounts that move beyond the limits of traditional historiography, and even the bounds of religious studies. At their centre is recognition that the scope of the religious can never be extricated from early-modern culture. Despite its many conflicts and tensions, the lingua franca for cultural self-understanding of the early-modern period remains ineluctably religious. The early-modern world wrestled with the radical challenges concerning the nature of belief within the confines of church or worship, but also beyond them. This process of negotiation was complex and fuelled European social dynamics. Without religion we cannot begin to comprehend the myriad facets of early-modern life, from markets, to new forms of art, to public and private associations. In discussions of images, the Eucharist, suicide, music, street lighting, or whether or not the sensible natural world represented an otherworldly divine, religion was the fundamental preoccupation of the age. Yet, even in contexts where unbelief might be considered, we find the religious providing the fundamental terminology for explicating the secular theories and views which sought to undermine it as a valid aspect of human life. This collection of essays takes up these themes in diverse ways. We move from the 15th century to the 18th, from the core problem of sacramental mediation of the divine within the strict parameters of eucharistic and devotional life, through discussion of images and iconoclasm, music and word, to more blurred contexts of death, street life, and atheism. Throughout the early-modern period, the very processes of adaption – even change itself – were framed by religious concepts and conceits.
This book provides the first comprehensive and detailed analysis of the Infanticide Act and its impact in England and Wales and around the world. It is 100 years since an Infanticide Act was first passed in England and Wales. The statute, re-enacted in 1938, allows for leniency to be given to women who kill their infants within the first year of life. This legislation is unique and controversial: it creates a specific offence and defence that is available only to women who kill their biological infants. Men and other carers are not able to avail of the special mitigation provided by the Act, nor are women who kill older children. The collection brings together leading experts in the field to offer important insights into the history of the law, how it works today, the impact and legacy of the statute and potential futures of infanticide laws around the world. Contributors consider the Act in practice in England and Wales, the ways it has been portrayed in the British media and justifications for and criticisms of the provision of special treatment for women who kill their infants within a year of birth. It also looks at the criminal justice responses to infanticide in other jurisdictions, such as Australia, Ireland, Sweden and the United States of America.
Communities great and small across Europe for eight centuries have contracted with doctors. Physicians provided citizen care, helped govern, and often led in public life. Civic Medicine stakes out this timely subject by focusing on its golden age, when cities rivaled territorial states in local and global Europe and when civic doctors were central to the rise of shared, organized written information about the human and natural world. This opens the prospect of a long history of knowledge and action shaped more by community and responsibility than market or state, exchange or power.
A collection of essays from leading scholars in the field that collectively study the rise and fall of witchcraft prosecutions in the various kingdoms and territories of Europe and in English, Spanish, and Portuguese colonies in the Americas.
Juxtaposing and interlacing similarities and differences across and beyond the pre-modern Mediterranean world, Christian, Islamic and Jewish healing traditions, the collection highlights and nuances some of the recent critical advances in scholarship on death and disease.
Interested in the ways in which medieval and early modern communities have acted as participants, observers, and interpreters of events and how they ascribed meaning to them, the essays in this interdisciplinary collection explore the concept of beholding and the experiences of individual and collective beholders of violence during the period. Addressing a range of medieval and early modern art forms, including visual images, material objects, literary texts, and performances, the contributors examine the complexities of viewing and the production of knowledge within cultural, political, and theological contexts. In considering new methods to examine the process of beholding violence and the beholder's perspective, this volume addresses such questions as: How does the process of beholding function in different aesthetic conditions? Can we speak of such a thing as the 'period eye' or an acculturated gaze of the viewer? If so, does this particularize the gaze, or does it risk universalizing perception? How do violence and pleasure intersect within the visual and literary arts? How can an understanding of violence in cultural representation serve as means of knowing the past and as means of understanding and potentially altering the present?
Obscene poetry, servants' slanders against their masters, the diabolical acts of those who committed massacre and regicide. This is a book about the harmful, outward manifestation of inner malice—villainy—in French culture (1463-1610). In pre-modern France, villainous offences were countered, if never fully contained, by intersecting legal and literary responses. Combining the methods of legal anthropology with literary and historical analysis, this study examines villainy across juridical documents, criminal records, and literary texts. Whilst few people obtained justice through the law, many pursued out-of-court settlements of one kind or another. Literary texts commemorated villainies both fictitious and historical; literature sometimes instantiated the process of redress, and enabled the transmission of conflicts from one context to another. Villainy in France follows this overflowing current of pre-modern French culture, examining its impact within France and across the English Channel. Scholars and cultural critics of the Anglophone world have long been fascinated by villainy and villains. This book reveals the subject's significant 'Frenchness' and establishes a transcultural approach to it in law and literature. In this study, villainy's particular significance emerges through its representation in authors remembered for their less-than respectable, even criminal, activities: François Villon, Clément Marot, François Rabelais, Pierre de L'Estoile, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, John Marston, and George Chapman. Villainy in France affords legal-literary comparison of these authors alongside many of their lesser-known contemporaries; in so doing, it reinterprets French conflicts within a wider European context, from the mid-fifteenth century to the early seventeenth century.