Cover; Contents; List of Figures and Tables; Notes on Contributors; Acknowledgements; Introduction; PART I Imag(in)ing Female Transgression and Transgressors; 1 Criminalizing the Woman's Incest: Pericles and Its Analogues; 2 Body Crimes: The Witches, Lady Macbeth and the Relics; 3 The Witch of Edmonton: The Witch Next Door or Faustian Anti-Heroine?; 4 Fact versus Fiction: The Construction of the Figure of the Prostitute in Early Modern England, Official and Popular Discourses; 5 Appropriating a Famous Female Offender: Mary Frith (1584?-1659), alias Moll Cutpurse
Part II Reading (into) the Social Picture6 Mothers, Wives and Killers: Marital Status and Homicide in London, 1674-1790; 7 Women and Violence in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century England: Evidence from the Cheshire Court of Great Sessions; 8 'Angels with Dirty Faces': Violent Women in Early Modern Scotland; 9 'The lowest and most abandoned trull of a soldier': The Crime of Bastardy in Early Eighteenth-Century London; 10 Coverture and Criminal Forfeiture in English Law; Index
Containing wide-ranging reflections on the subject of female transgression in early modern Britain, this volume presents a richly productive dialogue between literary and historical approaches to the topic. The contributors illustrate the dynamic relation between fiction and fact that informs literary and socio-historical analysis alike, exploring female transgression as a process, not of crossing fixed boundaries, but of negotiating the epistemological space between representation and documentation
