In their opening chapter charting the development of the historiography on gender and crime, the editors of this collection, all connected to Leiden University, explain that since the 1970s historians have moved from counting how many women committed crimes to considering how offences were gender-related, arguing that fully contextualized studies are needed for motives, treatments and representation of female criminals to be understood. This opening manifesto is paired with an essay by Manon van der Heijden, who demonstrates that numbers of female offenders declined across Western Europe after 1850, after which the remaining pieces, authored by early career and senior scholars, are grouped into three thematic sections, containing two, four and three contributions respectively.
The first section focuses on violence, with Saane Muurling using cases brought before the Tribulane del Torrone in Bologna between 1655 and 1755 to explain why and how female victims of verbal or physical violence used the court to obtain summary justice in the form of conflict resolution or the binding over of assailants. This is paired with an essay on cases of common assault by working-class women in Stafford between 1880 and 1905, where Jo Turner draws attention to how such interpersonal violence was the result of working patterns, living conditions and alcohol consumption.
In the next section, on prosecutions and punishments, Sara Beam focuses on adultery cases in Geneva between 1550 and 1700 to show that non-elite women, especially those with multiple partners or working as retailers, were most likely to be charged with such offences. Lucy Williams and Barry Godfrey use the British census of 1881 to demonstrate that more women than men were incarcerated during the later nineteenth century, with age and offence committed determining whether they were confined in an asylum, prison or workhouse, while Helen Johnson and David J. Cox examine how refuges helped transition female prisoners back into society between 1855 and 1876 by attempting to ensure former offenders emerged literate, pious, sober and possessed of a strong work ethic. Alana Piper, Catrine Bijleveld, Susan Dennison and Jonathan de Bruin conclude the section by revealing that in late nineteenth-century Brisbane women were twice as likely as men to reoffend due to factors including age, geographical origins, sentence length and fewer employment opportunities.
The third section, on representations of crime, opens with a review of historiography on the criminality of young women in north-west Europe by Sarah Auspert, Margo de Koster and Veerle Massin, who draw attention to long-term continuities in the treatment of female offenders prosecuted for sexual misdemeanours, theft and vagrancy. Analysing reports of child sex abuse in English and Welsh newspapers between 1830 and 1914, Daniel Grey then unpacks how accounts of victims and offenders were shaped by ideas of what constituted ‘respectable’ behaviour and knowledge. In the final essay, Clare Wilkinson uses reports of violence between intimate partners in Dutch newspapers to demonstrate how between 1880 and 1910 such accounts became more detailed and emotional, with attention shifting from spousal violence to cases involving young sweethearts, or similar crimes which had occurred in foreign locations.
All authors discuss primary evidence in detail and engage closely with historiography, often drawing on arguments presented by scholars whose foci of research are chronologically and geographically divergent from their own, while several analyse ‘big data’ using digital history methodologies. Although not a collection specifically about urban history, major cities feature prominently, with one significant finding of the volume being that women in urban centres were more likely than their rural counterparts to seek justice in law courts, but were also more likely to be charged and incarcerated for acts of public disorder. As well as considering similarities and differences in female experiences across time and space, it is pleasing also to see authors consider how gender intersected with age, class and ethnicity to shape how women experienced legal systems. However, the chronological and geographical coverage of the collection might have been more balanced. The primary focus is north-west Europe, with five essays focusing on Britain (and one on Australia) in the decades after 1850, and while these six pieces dovetail well, historians whose interests lie pre-1850 and those who study southern or eastern Europe will find less to engage than they might hope.
This is an impressive collection of strong essays, albeit with less breadth than the title suggests, with the introductory statement about contextual methodology likely to provoke strong responses, while the uses made of digital resources will provide readers with much to ponder. This is not the definitive statement on gender and crime in (early) modern Europe, but constitutes an important series of interventions which will stimulate debates about methodologies, in particular how to use ‘big data’, and how women of different ages, classes and ethnicities have engaged with various legal systems since the sixteenth century.
