About this Item
VERY GOOD hardcover in VERY GOOD dust jacket, no marks in text, tight binding, clean exterior. Seller Inventory # 139164
Bibliographic Details
Title: Tyburn's Martyrs: Execution in England, 1675...
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Publication Date: 2007
Binding: Hardcover
Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
Book Type: Book
About this title
The public execution at Tyburn is one of the most evocative and familiar of all eighteenth-century images. Whether it elicits horror or prurient fascination - or both - the Tyburn hanging day has become synonymous with the brutality of a bygone age and a legal system which valued property over human life. But, as this fascinating cultural and social history of the gallows reveals, the early modern execution was far more than just a debased spectator sport. The period between the Restoration and the American Revolution witnessed the rise and fall of a vast body of execution literature - last dying speeches and confessions, criminal trials and biographies - featuring the criminal as an Everyman (or Everywoman) holding up a mirror to the sins of his readers. The popularity of such publications reflected the widespread, and persistent, belief in the gallows as a literal preview of ‘God's Tribunal': a sacred space in which solemn oaths, supernatural signs and, above all, courage, could trump the rulings of the secular courts. Here the condemned traitor, "game" highwayman, or model penitent could proclaim not only his or her innocence of a specific crime, but raise larger questions of relative societal guilt and social justice by invoking the disparity between man's justice and God's.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
Store Description
Items can be returned for full refund in cases when their condition was not accurately described. All other sales are final.
1
Payment Methods
accepted by seller