Women's Criminality in Europe, 1600-1914

Manon van der Heijden is Professor of Comparative Urban History at Universiteit Leiden. Her research interests include crime and justice, marriage and the family, urban finances and public services. In 2012, she was granted a NWO VICI project Crime and Gender 1600–1900. She is a member of the Academia Europaea and author of Women and Crime in Early Modern Holland (2016). Marion Pluskota is Assistant Professor in Social History at Universiteit Leiden. She has published extensively on prostitution and criminality in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She is the author of Prostitution and Social Control in Eighteenth-Century Port (2015). Sanne Muurling recently completed her Ph.D. at Universiteit Leiden with a dissertation on everyday crime and gender in early modern Bologna, Italy. Her research focuses on the social history of everyday life, including crime and deviance, single motherhood, welfare institutions, poverty and living culture.

• 1. Introduction: women and crime in history Sanne Muurling, Marion Pluskota and Manon van der Heijden; 2. Explaining crime and gender in Europe between 1600 and 1900 Manon van der Heijden; Part I. Violence, Space and Gender: 3. Women, violence and the uses of justice before the Criminal Court of early modern Bologna Sanne Muurling; 4. The 'vanishing' female perpetrator of common assault Jo Turner; Part II. Prosecution and Punishment: 5. Gender and the prosecution of adultery in Geneva, 1550–1700 Sara Beam; 6. 'Find the lady': tracing and describing the incarcerated female population of London in 1881 Lucy Williams and Barry Godfrey; 7. Gender and release from imprisonment: convict licensing systems in mid- to late-nineteenth-century England Helen Johnston and David J. Cox; 8. Female and male prisoners in Queensland 1880–1899: re-entry, risk factors, recidivism Alana Piper, Catrien Bijleveld, Susan Dennison and Jonathan de Bruin; Part III. Representation of Crime: 9. Girls, young women and crime: perceptions, realities and responses in a long-term perspective Sarah Auspert, Margo de Koster and Veerle Massin; 10. 'Monstrous and indefensible'? Newspaper accounts of sexual assaults on children in nineteenth-century England and Wales Daniel J. R. Grey; 11. Gender and Dutch newspaper reports of intimate violence, 1880–1910 Clare Wilkinson.

'A welcome contribution to the historiography of female criminality, and the influence that gender played in European criminal justice systems. It brings together some of the foremost scholars in the field and provides both depth and breadth. Broader analyses of space and place are complemented by closer examinations of policy and representation.' Heather Shore, Leeds Beckett University