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Exceptional Crime in Early Modern Spain
Taxonomic and Intellectual Perspectives
Series: - The Medieval and Early Modern Iberian World, Volume: 68
Author:
Exceptional Crime in Early Modern Spain accounts for the representation of violent and complex murders, analysing the role of the criminal, its portrayal through rhetorical devices, and its cultural and aesthetic impact.
Proteic traits allow for an understanding of how crime is constructed within the parameters of exception, borrowing from pre-existent forms while devising new patterns and categories such as criminography, the “star killer”, the staging of crimes as suicides, serial murders, and the faking of madness. These accounts aim at bewildering and shocking demanding readers through a carefully displayed cult to excessive behaviour. The arranged “economy of death” displayed in murder accounts will set them apart from other exceptional instances, as proven by their long-standing presence in subsequent centuries.
Proteic traits allow for an understanding of how crime is constructed within the parameters of exception, borrowing from pre-existent forms while devising new patterns and categories such as criminography, the “star killer”, the staging of crimes as suicides, serial murders, and the faking of madness. These accounts aim at bewildering and shocking demanding readers through a carefully displayed cult to excessive behaviour. The arranged “economy of death” displayed in murder accounts will set them apart from other exceptional instances, as proven by their long-standing presence in subsequent centuries.
Elena del Río Parra, Ph.D. (2001), Georgia State University, is Professor of Hispanic Studies. Her body of work deals with monstrosity, casuistry, extremophilia, accident, and the role of singularity in early modern Spain from an intellectual history perspective.
"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).
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).
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
A Murder of Crows
1 The Taxonomic Axis of Fatality: From Series of Monsters to Serial Murderers
1 From Series to Individuals
2 Series and Fatality
3 From Series of Monsters to Serial Murderers
2 Sketching the Face of Evil: Pioneering Serial Killers
1 The Antihero Factory
2 In Search of Singularity
3 Sketching the Face of Evil
4 Printing in Parts
3 On the Edge: Living between Suicide and Madness
1 Official and False Madmen
2 Books, Titles, Laws
3 “Hanging from a Beam by Choice”
4 Living on the Edge
4 Expressing Criminal Behavior
1 Detection before Detectives
2 Patterns in Crime
3 Killers as Pretenders
4 Killing and Obsession
5 Dying in Parts: Criminography and the Cult of Excess
1 The Syntax of Evil: From Fait-Divers to the Crime Catalogue
2 Casus and Criminography
3 Dying in Parts
4 The Cult of Excess
Cleaning the Crime Scene
Bibliography
Index of Names and Subjects
List of Illustrations
A Murder of Crows
1 The Taxonomic Axis of Fatality: From Series of Monsters to Serial Murderers
1 From Series to Individuals
2 Series and Fatality
3 From Series of Monsters to Serial Murderers
2 Sketching the Face of Evil: Pioneering Serial Killers
1 The Antihero Factory
2 In Search of Singularity
3 Sketching the Face of Evil
4 Printing in Parts
3 On the Edge: Living between Suicide and Madness
1 Official and False Madmen
2 Books, Titles, Laws
3 “Hanging from a Beam by Choice”
4 Living on the Edge
4 Expressing Criminal Behavior
1 Detection before Detectives
2 Patterns in Crime
3 Killers as Pretenders
4 Killing and Obsession
5 Dying in Parts: Criminography and the Cult of Excess
1 The Syntax of Evil: From Fait-Divers to the Crime Catalogue
2 Casus and Criminography
3 Dying in Parts
4 The Cult of Excess
Cleaning the Crime Scene
Bibliography
Index of Names and Subjects
All interested in the history of the non-fictional criminal genre, both academic and non-academic readership, since -analysis aside- primary sources include enticing, brief cases.