Felony and the Guilty Mind in Medieval England is an important addition to medieval English legal history scholarship. Although the work on this subject has progressed since S. F. C. Milsom said “nothing worth-while was created” (Historial Foundations of the Law [1981], 403), this field has been neglected, and further research is needed. Existing research on mens rea in medieval criminal law is sparse. Elizabeth Kamali's book is an impressive contribution to filling this gap.

Kamali explores the question of what influenced jurors in determining the guilt and innocence of those charged with felonies. She focuses on intentionality as a key element and what it meant to act feloniously. What led jurors to find that the actor had a guilty mind? Kamali emphasizes nonlegal sources such as religious and literary texts as influencing jurors, providing a “wide-angle-lens view of medieval felony adjudication” (8). Revealing an amazing and extensive knowledge of these works, she discusses a wide variety including those of Seneca, John Gower, and Robert Grosseteste as well as legal records and texts—especially Bracton.

The book is organized into an introduction and four parts whose titles reflect these literary and religious sources: Felonia Felonice Facta: Felony and Intentionality; Þe Deuvlys Doghtyr of Helle Fyre: Felony and Emotion; Handlyng Synne: Guilt and Innocence; Dies Irae: Judge and Jury. As Kamali explains, her objective is to answer three questions: first, “what might account for the high rate of acquittal in thirteenth and fourteenth century felony cases”; second, what were “the origins of mens rea”; and third, “the book's main focus … the extent of which mens rea or guilty mind—by which I mean to encapsulate what we might call intent, along with volition and free will—drive jury decision-making in these early days of the use of juries to felony cases” (304). Although acknowledging that identifying what went on in the mind of jurors is speculative, the argument that the contemporary culture that produced these literary and religious texts and practices had a significant influence on the juries’ decisions in felony cases is persuasive.

Part one focuses on the meaning of the word felony. Although it became the designation for the most serious category of criminal offenses, its etymology is less well defined. Its origins relate to infidelity, but its use in legal records is “much more abstruse and intangible” (48). Using nonlegal sources, Kamali asserts that the word “imported a sense of mens rea” into criminal law (35) and that “the idea of criminal intent lay at [its] heart” (36). She poses an interesting question: “Could one commit a felony not feloniously?” (37). Offering a “multi-layer definition,” she argues that the guilty mind involved an act done with volition, deliberation, rationality and capacity, maturity, and sanity. The quintessential non-felonious act was self-defense, a product of “unavoidable necessity,” or action under duress (67). Kamali concludes, “felony was, perhaps, in its very essence, a state of mind” (90). Given that many of these elements contained in this articulation of the meaning resembled concepts of morality and sin, her argument regarding the meaning of felony is persuasive.

Part two examines the language and the cultural understanding of anger. Medieval literary and religious works dealt with it extensively. “Ambivalence surrounding extreme passion” and its moral nature was complex (95). Like infancy and insanity, anger negated reason, and vindication of honor could also produce anger. But given its complexity and ambiguity, anger could be both inculpatory and exculpatory: “English jurors [were] tasked with distinguishing excusable anger from condemnable irascibility and hatred” (77). Kamali argues that treatment of anger may have been a precursor to the later defense of provocation or action in the heat of passion. Although anger was not irrelevant to understanding juror behavior, this chapter contributes to broader research regarding the history of emotions and the connection to law.

Part three is especially critical in Kamali's analysis of jury determinations in medieval felony cases. The first chapter draws on medieval England's nature as a confessing society. Kamali argues that the confessional practice of inquiring into all the circumstances of the act paralleled the approach of the coroner, which then became the “state-of-the-art means for discerning state of mind” (169). Thus medieval felony prosecution “relied heavily on confessions and on inquisitorial investigative techniques derived from the confessor's toolkit” to elucidate the accused's intent (171).

The second chapter examines how a multitude of factors, including contemporary culture, the nature of the act, the defendant's reputation (fama), and the impact of the death penalty on the defendant's family and the community influenced the jurors’ determination of guilt or innocence. That analysis involved the relation between sin and crime and religious treatment of volition and reputation in perceptions of sin. Kamali argues that the religious understanding that homicide consisted of deed, word, or thought produced “a capacious understanding of homicide that encompassed literal and figurative slayings,” which might lead jurors to focus as much on “a person's inward disposition as with any actual acts” (216). But she also recognizes that whether these religious views influenced jurors is unknown, and that religious and legal texts were both consistent and different in their views of guilt. She concludes, “jurors put the flesh on the law's bones by bringing to bear their own understandings of guilt and innocence” (241).

The book's final part deals with judging by both jurors and judges. The fear of the Last Judgment created peril in judging an innocent person guilty. In noting this danger, Kamali draws on James Whitman's The Origins of Reasonable Doubt (2008). Jurors’ concern for their own souls may have produced a tendency toward mercy and judicial deference to jury verdicts. In making judgments, just verdicts required jurors to be cognizant of mercy, which was an important royal and biblical quality, and the human capacity for redemption. A further possible inquiry into the nature of the jurors might have reinforced the book's argument.

In sum, this impressive and important book provides new insights into a neglected topic in English legal history. While Kamali's argument on the importance of intentionality in jury determinations in felony cases is difficult to doubt, her extensive and eclectic examination of the influence of sermons, confession, and literature on jurors as they examined their own consciences is persuasive but ultimately unknowable.

Further, although the thrust of this book concerns the medieval period, it is also relevant to later periods. It provides a starting point for the study of intentionality in later periods when criminal law doctrine became more formalized. Kamali's examination of mens rea challenges some of the modern scholarship on the history of the mental element in criminal law. Understanding jury determinations of guilt and innocence are relevant to all periods. With its exploration of legal issues in a broad context and focus on nonlegal sources, the book brings a needed realist influence on English legal history and blurs the line between legal and social history.