Harnessing the Power of the Criminal Corpse (Palgrave Historical Studies in the Criminal Corpse and its Afterlife) - Hardcover

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Sarah Tarlow is Professor of Historical Archaeology at the University of Leicester, UK. She has published extensively on the archaeology of death and burial, archaeological ethics, and the post-medieval archaeology of the British isles. She was PI on ‘Harnesssing the Power of the Criminal Corpse’, the research project on which this book is based.

Emma Battell Lowman is Lecturer in the History of the Americas at the University of Hertfordshire, UK, with research interests in historical narrative, connections between bodies and memory, and the use of power to shape social identity. She holds postgraduate degrees from the University of Victoria, Canada, and the University of Warwick.

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This open access book is the culmination of many years of research on what happened to the bodies of executed criminals in the past. Focusing on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it looks at the consequences of the 1752 Murder Act. These criminal bodies had a crucial role in the history of medicine, and the history of crime, and great symbolic resonance in literature and popular culture. Starting with a consideration of the criminal corpse in the medieval and early modern periods, chapters go on to review the histories of criminal justice, of medical history and of gibbeting under the Murder Act, and ends with some discussion of the afterlives of the corpse, in literature, folklore and in contemporary medical ethics. Using sophisticated insights from cultural history, archaeology, literature, philosophy and ethics as well as medical and crime history, this book is a uniquely interdisciplinary take on a fascinating historical phenomenon.