Prisoners and Prison Staff at the Cold Bath Fields House of Correction
by Kiran Mehta In The Promise of Punishment: Prisons in Nineteenth-Century France, published in 1982, Patricia O’Brien argued that the prison guard was ‘the most important person in the operation of...
View ArticleRape and Infanticide at the Halstead House of Correction
George Dewing, the keeper of the Halstead House of Correction, was a monster who raped an inmate and murdered her child. Or he was framed. The version of the story in which he was a monster...
View ArticleReading Megan Comfort’s Doing Time Together as an Early Modernist.
Sometimes I try to lift my head out of the archives and read around in the growing and really awesome new literature on prisons in more recent times. This is the first of what I hope will be a series...
View ArticleEarly Modern Coroners’ Inquests into Deaths in Custody
Originally posted on Legal History Miscellany: Posted by Krista Kesselring, 9 July 2017. Deaths in gaol have long required investigation by coroners. In Canada, one provincial jurisdiction recently...
View ArticleFurther Thoughts on Coroner’s Inquests into Deaths in Custody
Last week we cross-posted Krista Kesselring’s essay on early modern coroner’s inquests into prisoner deaths, which originally appeared on the blog Legal History Miscellany. I have never looked...
View ArticleRethinking the meaning of imprisonment in the 1690s
What does it mean to be a prisoner? Most of us today would cite confinement within bars or walls as a defining characteristic. But this was not necessarily the case in the early modern period, when...
View ArticleEngland’s Island Prisons
We are delighted to publish this guest post by David Cressy, who is Research Professor in Arts and Humanities at Claremont Graduate University, and George III Professor of British History Emeritus at...
View ArticleRadicalism, Respectability, and the Case of the Imprisoned Politician
We are delighted to publish this guest post by John Owen Havard, Assistant Professor of English at Binghamton University, whose forthcoming work includes a book on the origins of disaffected attitudes...
View ArticleSome Recent Calls for Papers
Below are three calls for papers and proposals that have come into our inbox recently. None of these are specifically about early modern prisons, but they touch on related subjects that might interest...
View ArticleSome Trump-Induced Thoughts on the History of Detention
In 1689 the merchant John Farmer complained to the Earl of Nottingham that he and a companion had been imprisoned at Beaumoris without accusation or warrant. Although held only two days before being...
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