Sex, privilege, corruption, and revenge--these are elements that we expect to find splashed across today's tabloid headlines. But 17th century England saw a sex scandal that brought disgrace to the ruling class and ended with the beheading of an earl.

In A House in Gross Disorder, Cynthia Herrup presents a strikingly new interpretation of the case of the 2nd Earl of Castlehaven and of the sexual and social anxieties it cast into such bold relief. Castlehaven was convicted of assisting in the rape of his own wife and of committing sodomy with his servants. But more than that, he...

The Common Peace traces the attitudes behind the enforcement of the criminal law in early modern England. Focusing on five stages in prosecution (arrest, bail, indictment, conviction and sentencing), the book uses a variety of types of sources - court records, biographical information, state papers, legal commentaries, popular and didactic literature - to reconstruct who actually enforced the criminal law and what values they brought to its enforcement. A close study of the courts in eastern Sussex between 1592 and 1640 allows Dr Herrup to show that an amorphous collection of modest property...