Great and Horrible News: Murder and Mayhem in Early Modern Britain

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It’s deficient in any meaningful analysis and the book feels more like a retelling of cases directly from the newspapers rather than presenting it from any specific point of view. I always like when an author uses true crime as a jumping off point to look at the prevailing culture of a time and place. I knocked my rating down from 5 stars because quite a few of the examples were about suicide, and it'd have been nice to have a bit more variety. If the women should miscarry or their baby not survive for long, they then ran the risk of being prosecuted for murder, even if there was little evidence. I’m sorry, I didn’t take a note of the specific years in my notes, but all of them are between 1500 and 1700.

One I heartily recommend both to true crime fans, and to people more generally interested in the social and cultural aspects of the early modern period. We see a mother trying to clear her dead daughter’s name while other women faced the accusations – sometimes true and sometimes not – of murdering their own children. Adams shows that suicide then, as today, often arose out of depression and mental illness, but she also gives an example of what was thought of as “honourable suicide”, a hangover from the days of chivalry, when a man who had failed in some way, especially in public life, would take his own life.Taking us through several crimes of the times, the author delves with compelling intricacy into the laws, the investigations, the punishments of early modern Britain. She has also written a chapter titled 'Notebooks, Play and Legal Education at Middle Temple' in Mapping the Early Modern Inns of Court: Law, Literature and Identity, edited by Jackie Watson and Emma Rhatigan, due to be published by Palgrave. I see the audiobook is narrated by Jonathan Keeble – I’ve listened to a few of his narrations and I really like him!

While these attitudes didn't surprise me, I hadn't realized just how involved the courts got in these matters, and that many women were actually put to death for what were likely natural or unpreventable losses. What I especially like is that it seems to give a really interesting perspective not just on the crimes, but on what they mean within the larger society and how each influenced the other. At once an intriguing true crime examination of historical crime and a sociological dive into Britain’s history, Adams does a stellar job of introducing a nonet of little-known crimes, running the gamut from suicide to child abuse to murder, that while not for the faint of heart, quickly become engrossing to read.I was hopeful the author was going to introduce an angle with which to analyse the behaviour of townsfolk involved in these stories, or the authors own opinion on the nature of the crimes.

Above all, these stories provide insight into the social mores of the time, but also things like the first use of forensic evidence, the societal role of midwives, and church-sanctioned torture. Some of the stories are more detailed than others depending on what records exist – unfortunately the ones that culminated in executions seem to have been the best documented!Thank you to NetGalley, 4th Estate and William Collins for allowing me access to the ARC in exchange for an honest review. Great and Horrible News explores the strange history of death and murder in early modern England, yet the stories within may appear shockingly familiar. In some parts, more time is given to explaining background than the actual story, and in others assumptions appear to be made without historical context being considered. There’s so much packed into each of the nine cases that I’m not even going to try to cover it all here.