"Exceptional Crime in Early Modern Spain delights us with its wealth of sources from literature on crime in early modern Spain. [...] With Exceptional Crime Prof. del Río Parra brings together the history of crime and the history of taxonomy, proving that the classificatory obsession was not the exclusive domain of early modern natural philosophers or the Enlightenment. [...] This book may also inspire further research into areas such as the gendered component of crime narrative as well as its authorship by comparing the Iberian case to its counterparts elsewhere in the world.Marta V. Vicente, University of Kansas, in Bulletin for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies Vol. 45 : Issue 1, Review 5, 147-9"The study of violence in the early modern Hispanic world tends to focus on the exclusion of minority religious groups and the exploitation of native populations across imperial domains. Little attention, however, seems to have been given to what Elena del Rio Parra calls 'private crimes': the quotidian accounts of stabbings and dismemberments that occurred among friends, lovers, relatives, and strangers who crossed paths and swords. In her Exceptional Crime in Early Modern Spain, Del Rio explores early modern narratives of unique murders and blood crimes, and shows how they reveal an eclectic period where superstitious, religious, and scientific ideas were intertwined. [...] Drawing from a wide array of noncanonical sources involving correspondence, judicial documents, legal allegations, chapbooks, ballads, chroniclers, and medical treatises, her work persuasively argues that we can trace embryonic forms of criminology and criminal anthropology to a period some two hundred years prior to their formal establishment as sciences." Beatriz E. Salamanca, in Sixteenth Century Journal 52.1 (2021).
