Crime, Criminals, and Criminality, 1500-1700

“Truth Will Out”

[this info from Mike Pincombe's Tudor Mailing ...]

This 2-day international conference aims to provide a forum for scholars who work on various aspects of crimes, the people who commit them, and how such acts and people are imagined in the early modern period. We hope to encourage inter-disciplinary exchange and debate which will contribute to the widening interest and scholarship in these areas. To facilitate diversity in theoretical approaches, interests, and methodologies, the topical, temporal and geographical scope of the conference is purposefully broad.

Papers might address, but are not limited to, the following:

Definitions of Crime
Patterns of Crime
Urban and / or Rural Crime
Crime and Geography
Crime and Punishment
Political Crimes
Crime and Religion
Crime and Philosophy
Crime and the Early Modern Stage
Crime and Printing
The Early Modern Criminal Underworld: Fact or Fiction?
Criminals and Social Class
Criminals and Gender
The Psychology of the Criminal
The Body of the Criminal
Visual Representations of Criminals
Criminal Auto/Biography
Uses of Archetypal Criminals (Biblical and/or Classical)
Writing Criminals: Representations of Criminals in Plays, Poems, Prose Fictions, Diaries, Letters, and Ephemera
Criminals Writing: Writings by Criminals
Rhetoric of Criminality
Imagining Criminals
The After-Lives of Early Modern Criminals
Methodological and/or Theoretical Problems raised by the Multi-Disciplinary nature of Source Materials

Truth Will Out will be held at Canterbury Christ Church University, Kent, 23-24 August, 2007. Please send abstracts of approximately 500 words to Dr Nadia Bishai nadia.bishai@canterbury.ac.uk and Dr Astrid Stilma astrid.stilma@canterbury.ac.uk by 1 May, 2007.