There are certain logical and legal puzzles implicit in the insanity defense: What use is it to punish someone who is mentally incapable of comprehending either her own actions or their punishment? If punishment is inappropriate, how can the law prevent the mentally infirm from posing a continued danger to others? And how can the law accurately define and gauge sanity so as to prevent dissemblers from getting away with murder or lesser crimes?

It is one of the great merits of Dana Rabin's work, Identity, Crime and Legal Responsibility in Eighteenth-Century England, that these puzzles are explored not simply within the context of English legal history, as part of a serious and growing challenge to the doctrine of mens rea. Rabin's larger purpose is to read English law, both its doctrines and its practices, within the contexts of eighteenth-century British culture. Rabin's main argument is that the development of the insanity defense in English law can best be understood as part of an eighteenth-century “age of sensibility,” an age preoccupied with self, sentiment, morality, and reason. The claim that her “study reconstructs the courtroom as a site of cultural production, with special attention to the role of emotion in the criminal trial” (4) signals Rabin's indebtedness to a Foucauldian perspective, and indeed one of her goals is to demonstrate that the creation of a “medicalized,” “criminalized,” “essentialized” modern self was underway by the mid-eighteenth century, earlier than scholars have recognized (166–67). Rabin also clearly positions herself within a long tradition of scholarship on English criminal law, as she frames her questions around exculpatory defense, pardon, and mitigation of the notoriously harsh eighteenth-century law. She usefully adds to this perspective, however, with her contributions to scholarship on Enlightenment philosophy and theories of sensational psychology and on gender, sensibility, and the sentimental novel.

One main finding of this study is that an eighteenth-century interest in psychological motivation, sensibility, and emotion led to an amplification of what Rabin terms the “language of the mind” and “language of mental excuse” in the English courtroom. Defendants, their witnesses, and newly admitted counsel used this language to broaden the definition of mental illness; in doing so they built upon an emerging understanding of a “true self ” and a “displaced self ”—a self displaced because of “temporary phrenzy” or the pressures of poverty, necessity, and passion. Rabin also demonstrates that legal authorities were receptive to these nuanced forms of exculpatory insanity, but they struggled with what they perceived as its destabilizing influence on the criminal justice system. An emphasis on chronological change is obviously an important part of Rabin's argument, and her tracking of a shift from a seventeenth-century preoccupation with sin to an eighteenth-century preoccupation with psychology at times shades into a teleological progression toward nineteenth-century reform. Her conclusion offers an interpretation of nineteenth-century reform, exemplified in the Hadfield case and the Criminal Lunatics Act, as both the culmination of these eighteenth-century trends and a reaction against them: the “true self,” now seen as diseased rather than depraved, merited acquittal, while the “displaced self ” could be justly incarcerated.

An important aspect of Rabin's work lies in her attention to questions of gender and class. A chapter devoted to the crime of infanticide analyzes the increasing success of the temporary insanity defense as part of middle-class sympathy for, and emotional identification with, their social inferiors fostered by a culture of sensibility. Moreover, Rabin acknowledges, this sympathy and identification not only indicated the recognition of a female agent but also allowed for a concurrent emphasis on female weakness and victimization. Even more, Rabin underscores “the importance of gender in the reception of all psychological pleas” through her insight that with the admission of this excuse for the exceptional (and biologically determined) case of postpartum women “the legal system may have prevented the admission of other excuses that built upon the language of mental states” (110).

The chapter on infanticide is the only one to use quantification: Rabin claims at the outset that although she did the remarkable work of researching “about 10,000” cases, hers is not a quantitative study (6). In fact, in addition to depositions from the Northern Circuit and trial transcripts from the Old Bailey Session Papers, Rabin utilizes an abundance of literary and philosophical sources, evidence that she has canvassed the work of all the major theorists from Justinian to William Blackstone, Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury, to Adam Smith, as well as key literary figures such as Daniel Defoe, Samuel Johnson, and Samuel Richardson. The numerous examples of cases employing “mental excuse” are thus embedded in a rich philosophical, legal, and literary context, but this context does not provide the kind of compelling proof Rabin requires for her assertions of popular agency. Although these legal records of ordinary people and ordinary trials are the stuff of social history, Rabin's claims to be reconstructing popular self-understanding or charting the intersections between social groups remain the weakest part of her project. Brief references to a growing popular press, the impact of the novel, and the rise of Methodism offer hints of a way to further contextualize popular experience; more attention to questions about circulation and modes of reading, enthusiasm, and popular piety might allow for a broader understanding of a culture of sensibility. Attention to socioeconomic realities would also help in assessing the agency of these ordinary defendants. Rabin is surely right to encourage us to think about the early modern trial “as a potentially empowering experience, an opportunity for creativity and agency” (165), although the status and rigidity of English legal authorities (evidenced especially in her fifth chapter) don't give much indication that that empowerment was frequently realized. If the work of social history remains underexplored here, however, Rabin more than makes up for it with her contributions to the legal and cultural history of eighteenth-century English criminal law.