One of the more persistent misconceptions about medieval and early modern murder is its ubiquity: modern scholars often attribute a certain barbarism to earlier periods in an effort to construct a more civilized modernity. K. J. Kesselring's Making Murder Public challenges that misconception by analyzing the ways in which homicide was politically and publicly defined between 1480 and 1680. Drawing on a dataset of 3,601 homicides and the 4,324 people implicated in the killings during this time, Kesselring offers a sociological interpretation for diverging definitions of murder and manslaughter and the shift in community response from seeing murder as a crime against the king's peace to seeing it as one against public justice.

Unlike other studies of the early modern period, which often envision the sixteenth century as the starting point for unique innovations, Kesselring acknowledges the continuity from medieval legal and social conventions regarding murder. She explores the links between law, crime, and politics through legal and social documents, including news reports about homicides, coroners’ inquests, court records, legal treatises, statutes, law reports, private correspondence, pamphlets, and plays. While the recorded data on crime in the early modern period may be relatively sparse, Kesselring draws upon a wealth of related contextual sources for her analysis. Rather than claiming that the developments in legal definitions regarding murder were the outcome of a more civilized age, Kesselring argues that existing criminal procedures were sharpened and refocused as the power structures in England shifted after 1480, with a greater emphasis on the public good, rather than royal prerogative. She also traces a decline in the rates of interpersonal homicide, though judicial homicides increased as more offenses were classified as capital crimes. Defining manslaughter as an offense that required trial and punishment, even though it was a lesser crime than murder, shaped the way that people understood and responded to criminal killings well past the early modern period.

The first chapter, which also serves as the introduction, provides a detailed historiographical survey of the existing scholarship regarding murder as well as the sociological and political framework for understanding public responses to both manslaughter and murder. Without explicitly defining either, Kesselring rightly explains the significance of how early modern jurists and audiences understood manslaughter in their own context, “increasingly as an offence not just against individuals and their kin, but also against a ‘king's peace’ that was being reconceptualized as belonging to a bigger, broader community” (1). In this chapter she delves into the background of the classical application of res publica, tracing the judicial developments of the twelfth century and the expansion of that idea into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. At times, the discussion of the legal terminology and its medieval origins is somewhat vague, but the focus of the entire work sharpens with each chapter, as Kesselring pays diligent attention to the individual case studies and primary sources. Kesselring constructs a compelling argument regarding the social and political developments in homicide law and murder punishment over the course of two hundred years.

The detailed discussion of coroners’ inquests in chapter 2 yields a treasure trove of documentary evidence about how individual homicides became known and how they were categorized by coroners and juries. Kesselring again contextualizes the early modern material within the history of the coroner's office dating back to the twelfth century. Adding her findings to those of Sara Butler, Carol Loar, and Matthew Lockwood, Kesselring challenges modern assertions about jury incompetence in the early modern period. She argues that juries, in tandem with coroners, decided which corpses to treat as victims of homicide and whom to charge for that crime based on changing interpretations of murder and manslaughter. She expands her observations about the distinctiveness of coroners’ inquests, examining them through a political rather than primarily medical or legal lenses.

Chapter 3 focuses on private settlements for slaying, building on the tradition of feud and the history of compensation that long preceded the early modern period. This chapter examines sources regarding private seeking of satisfaction, proving that payments for homicides continued much beyond the Middle Ages. Kesselring also points out that these private arrangements often conflicted with the king's peace, as well as any emerging notion of a public peace. However, compensation for homicide continued well beyond the sixteenth century, thanks in part to appeals instigated by victims’ widows.

Another form of private, unauthorized revenge among elite men specifically was the duel, which became a special focus of King James I upon assuming the throne of England. Chapter 4 interrogates the circumstances under which these duels were held and the charges of murder or manslaughter that could be levied against the victor. Because the idea of unsanctioned, individual vengeance threatened the supremacy of royal rule, James I responded in ways problematic to ideas of public justice and the common good, issuing proclamations against it because he thought it impertinent that gentlemen would take vengeance into their own hands. Kesselring argues that while duels certainly limited the number of participants in a feud, they did not necessarily mitigate the violence among elite men.

The final chapter centers on the public expression of legal and political power in executions, exploring how the spectacle of the scaffold played into narratives about individual homicides and conversations about criminal killing, rendering them public in the most visible way. In this chapter Kesselring more fully defines “making murder public” as an act against the public good, an offense against the community rather than the king or against individuals, explaining how public executions offered a form of sanctioned vengeance. Executions were sensationalized in the new genre of murder pamphlets and in more widely available printed legal documents. These case studies indicate that execution did not become more public in the early modern period, but that more people were being executed for crimes that the authorities deemed public offenses and for which they demanded the supposed deterrent of a highly legible spectacle.

Overall, this work raises some intriguing questions about the changing nature of judicial and criminal homicide from 1480 to 1680 and the ways in which murder was politicized and popularized. By the end, there is a clear sense of what the enactment of public justice regarding murder actually meant to spectators and participants in the early modern period.