Were women in eighteenth-century Scotland more violent than their English and European counterparts? This central question structures Anne-Marie Kilday's book. An invaluable contribution to the almost nonexistent field of Scottish criminal justice history, Women and Violent Crime in Enlightenment Scotland is also of great interest to scholars engaged in comparative histories of women, gender, and criminality. The book focuses specifically on the operation of the Justiciary Court in lowland Scotland in 1750–1815 (although, in many cases, data appear to relate more specifically to the southwest rather than the urban centers of Glasgow and Edinburgh). Kilday neatly contrasts her findings to studies of the English, Irish, Dutch, and French criminal court systems, not only showing that lowland Scottish women featured unusually highly in prosecutions for offenses against the person but also suggesting that they adopted particularly brutal styles of aggression. Cases of homicide, infanticide, assault, popular disturbances, and robbery are discussed in discrete chapters, each systematically examining the demographic characteristics of prosecuted women, the techniques they were alleged to have employed in committing offenses, and possible reasons for their behavior. Particularly striking are Kilday's findings for robbery prosecutions, in which women (who were rarely charged with this offense elsewhere) formed over a third of all defendants; unlike England, where their marginal involvement was treated with leniency, they were just as likely to be executed as convicted males. Data are not assumed to be necessarily representative of Scotland as a whole; rather, Kilday suggests that women's socioeconomic independence in lowland areas may have led to different patterns of behavior or prosecution than in the highlands.

The book is unable, ultimately, to tease out the precise relationship between actual offending behavior and patterns of prosecution. This is partly because the indictments that form the main primary source material, while containing detailed descriptions of charges, give few insights into the decision-making process in the courtroom and little contextual information about defendants, the circumstances that structured an accusation, or the families and communities in which defendants lived. It is also a function of a mismatch between, on the one hand, the introduction and conclusion that act as bookends to the volume and, on the other, the substantive chapters dealing with types of offense. The approach taken within chapters is broadly literal. In cases of homicide and infanticide, Kilday argues, “the high degree of violence shown by Scottish women killers … [is] startling and unexpected” (44). Similarly, female robbers demonstrated “levels of violence … unparalleled in brutality and ferociousness” (129). This is a worthy attempt to assess and interpret women's criminal agency, an approach that has been missing from much existing historiography, but the sources are perhaps too limited to achieve this convincingly; indeed, preconditions (witness statements) are only rarely referred to. Assessment of levels of aggression is often based on the wording of indictments, which leads Kilday to conclude that “these women seemed to relish inflicting hurt and injury on their victims” (137). What is not accounted for here is the rhetorical effect of indictments, whose formulaic language arguably served to construct and interpret acts of violence as “wicked and felonious,” involving “great effusion of blood” and “danger of life.” Kilday presents the acts that are described as incontrovertibly proven, rather than viewing a trial as a process in which meanings are negotiated. Perhaps the high levels of physical aggression described necessitate this treatment, but the issue requires further discussion. The book's conclusion moves against the tide of the previous discussion by suggesting that patterns of prosecution may well reflect new strategies of governance and anxieties about gender roles, acknowledging that criminality is in this sense socially constructed. Yet, such an approach is not really used as an analytical tool in the main body of the book. The unevenness is also reflected in discussions of the conceptual frameworks of “Enlightenment” and “civilizing mission” that frame the introduction and conclusion but which do not inform or shape the discussion within chapters.

Given that so much of the argument rides on quantitative evidence, it is surprising that the data are not presented in tables or charts; there is little sense of the distribution of prosecutions across the sixty-five-year period. Also sidestepped is the problem that the proportion of women prosecuted for violence was tiny in relation to the overall population, which makes it difficult to argue that lowland women were “more comfortable with violent behaviour than women south of the Tweed” (82). At various points in the discussion Kilday wants us to believe in a “dark figure” of unreported offenses that somehow mirrored prosecuted trends, but it is difficult to sustain such an argument, given that the whole point about unreported crime is that it is unknowable.

These problems are of course largely symptomatic of the difficulties facing criminal justice historians in working with officially generated sources. There is much to commend Kilday's work to readers, none the least the ways in which matters of interpretation are exposed for debate. What is strikingly apparent is that notions of “gendered leniency” that were common in England were rarely practiced in Scotland (23). While she perhaps raises more questions than she solves, Kilday's book is without doubt an important addition to a growing historical literature on women and crime.