Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England, 1550-1700

Frances E. Dolan

Published by Cornell University Press 1994

Dangerous Familiars

Representations of Domestic Crime in England, 1550-1700

Frances E. Dolan

https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501707285

Overview
Contents

About this book

Looking back at images of violence in the popular culture of early modern England, we find that the specter of the murderer loomed most vividly not in the stranger, but in the familiar. A gripping exploration of seventeenth-century accounts of domestic murder in fact and fiction, this book is the first to ask why.

Reviews

David Underdown, Renaissance Quarterly:

Dolan's later chapters, showing her characteristic sensitivity to language and historical context, are based on... careful balancing of canonical and noncanonical texts.... Dolan's epilogue provides a fitting, perceptive, conclusion.

Margaret W. Ferguson:

In this brilliant andinnovative book, Frances Dolan argues that the home was no more a refuge from violence in early modern England than it is in twentieth-century North America. Dolan considers not only textual representations of domestic violence but also visual materials, notably the woodcuts included on pamphlet title pages to advertise the sensational wares within.

Natasha Korda:

Dangerous Familiars is of more than merely antiquarian interest. Dolan's analysis of the social pressures motivating the production of pamphlets, ballads, and plays, which spread the 'news' of domestic crime in the 1590s, for example, raises intriguing questions about the modes of cultural dissemination that bring us high-tech 'gavel to gavel' coverage of courtroom dramas. Equally relevant to contemporary cultural criticism is her careful unraveling of the complex articulations of gender, race, and class, that inform such cultural productions.

Anthony B. Dawson:

Dangerous Familiars is a richly textured book that opens up a variety of texts and places them in a complex historical perspective. Dolan's main argument is that the 'familiar' in early modern discourse was frequently construed as a prime source of danger to those within the domestic circle.We may think first of the witch's putative companion in evil, but Dolan, while she devotes her final chapter to witchcraft, wants also to remind us that common and everyday familiars had their pressing dangers-in the form, for example, of tyrannical masters, rebellious household servants, and murderous wives, husbands, or parents. Fear and anxiety about the known rather than the unknown is her theme. Her focus is on violent crime, more precisely on the representation of such crime, whether it appears in legal documents and statutes, ballads, broadsides and pamphlets (the tabloids of their time), learned discourse, or drama.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
List of Illustrations Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	ix
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	xi
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
I. "Home-rebels and House-traitors": Petty Treason and the Murderous Wife Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	20
II. The Subordinate('s) Plot: Petty Treason and the Forms of Domestic Rebellion Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	59
III. Revolutions, Petty Tyranny, and the Murderous Husband Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	89
IV. Finding What Has Been "Lost": Representations oflnfanticide and The Winter's Ta/.e Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	121
V. Witchcraft and the Threat of the Familiar Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	171
Epilogue Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	237
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	247

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Audience: General/trade;
Pages
- Main content: 272
Illustrations
- Other: 8 halftones
Keywords: Literary Studies; England; Womens Studies

eBook

Published: April 15, 2017
ISBN: 9781501707285