The execution narrative was a popular genre in early modern England. This facsimile edition draws together a representative selection of texts to show the evolution of the genre from the late sixteenth century to the end of public execution in England nearly 300 years later.

The execution narrative was a popular genre in early modern England. This facsimile edition draws together a representative selection of texts to show the evolution of the genre from the late sixteenth century to the end of public execution in England nearly 300 years later.

The execution narrative was a popular genre in early modern England. This facsimile edition draws together a representative selection of texts to show the evolution of the genre from the late sixteenth century to the end of public execution in England nearly 300 years later.

The execution narrative was a popular genre in early modern England. This facsimile edition draws together a representative selection of texts to show the evolution of the genre from the late sixteenth century to the end of public execution in England nearly 300 years later.

The execution narrative was a popular genre in early modern England. New printing processes fed a public fascination with sensational eyewitness accounts of executions and transcriptions of felon's scaffold speeches. This eight-volume facsimile edition, the first of its kind, draws together a representative selection of texts to show the evolution of the genre from the late sixteenth century to the end of public execution in England nearly 300 years later. Primary source materials include pamphlets, broadsides, scaffold speeches and newspaper reports. The stories are, at turns, tragic, brutal, pathetic, touching, pious and irreverent. They provide invaluable insights into contemporary ideas of justice and the efficacy of capital punishment. They are tangible remnants of the fragile and complex relationship between a range of oppositional influences: the powerful and the governed, church and state, the market and morality, the moral collective and the individual offender. Usually cheap, sometimes crude, and always produced for sale (and, ideally, for profit), these works also represent a vital component of England's developing print culture and the range of uses to which print media were put in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. The edition includes extensive editorial material with a general introduction, section introductions, headnotes, endnotes and a consolidated index in the final volume. It will appeal to those studying Social and Cultural History, History of Print, History of Government and History of Crime.

The author explores the conspiracy of Gabriel de Espinosa who attempted to pass himself off as the deceased King Sebastian of Portugal sixteen years after his death. Through this the author explores how stories - regarding such topics as prophecies of returned leaders, nuns kept against their will, kidnappings by Moors, etc. - are conceived, told, circulated, and believed.

Royer examines the changing ritual of execution across five centuries and discovers a shift both in practice and in the message that was sent to the population at large. She argues that what began as a show of retribution and revenge became a ceremonial portrayal of redemption as the political, religious and cultural landscape of England evolved.

"A Weak Woman in a Strong Battle provides a new perspective on the representations of women on the scaffold, focusing on how female victims and those writing about them constructed meaning from the ritual. A significant part of the execution spectacle-one used to assess the victim's proper acceptance of death and godly repentance-was the final speech offered at the foot of the gallows or before the pyre. To ensure that their words on the scaffold held value for audiences, women adopted conventionally gendered language and positioned themselves as subservient and modest. Just as important as their words, though, were the depictions of women's bodies. Drawing on a wide range of genres, from accounts of martyrdom to dramatic works, this study explores not only the words of women executed in Tudor and Stuart England, but also the ways that writers represented female bodies as markers of penitence or deviance. The reception of women's speeches, Jennifer Lodine-Chaffey argues, depended on their performances of accepted female behaviors and words as well as physical signs of interior regeneration. Indeed, when women presented themselves or were represented as behaving in stereotypically feminine and virtuous ways, they were able to offer limited critiques of their fraught positions in society. The first part of this study investigates the early modern execution, including the behavioral expectations for condemned individuals, the medieval tradition that shaped the ritual, and the gender specific ways English authorities legislated and carried out women's executions. Depictions of the female body are the focus of the second part of the book. The executed woman's body, Lodine-Chaffey contends, functioned as a text, scrutinized by witnesses and readers for markers of innocence or guilt. These signs, though, were related not just to early modern ideas about female modesty and weakness, but also to the developing martyrdom tradition, which linked bodies and behavior to inner spiritual states. While many representations of women focused on physical traits and behaviors coded as godly, other accounts highlighted the grotesque and bestial attributes of women deemed unrepentant or evil. Part Three considers the rhetorical strategies used by women and their authors, highlighting the ways that women positioned themselves as stereotypically weak in order to defuse criticism of their speeches and navigate their positions in society, even when awaiting death on the scaffold. The greater focus on the words and bodies of women facing execution during this period, Lodine-Chaffey argues, became a catalyst for a more thorough interest in and understanding of women's roles not just as criminals but as subjects"--

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This volume provides a series of illuminating perspectives on the timings of death, through in-depth studies of Shakespearean tragedy, criminal execution, embalming practices, fears of premature burial, rumours of Adolf Hitler’s survival, and the legal concept of brain death. In doing so, it explores a number of questions, including: how do we know if someone is dead or not? What do people experience at the moment when they die? Is death simply a biological event that comes about in temporal stages of decomposition, or is it a social event defined through cultures, practices, and commemorations? In other words, when exactly is death? Taken together, these contributions explore how death emerges in a series of stages that are uncertain, paradoxical, and socially contested.