With their reputations or lives at stake, ordinary men and women in the Eighteenth Century presented their complex emotions and passions as grounds for acquittal or mitigation of punishment. To account for their criminal behaviour and to excuse it, they claimed a space between the coherent self and the insane self: the 'displaced' self. This language had complicated implications within the context of sensibility and the concern with the self that was so distinguishing a characteristic of the Eighteenth Century. English legal culture struggled not only to contain and to direct the...
With their reputations or lives at stake, ordinary men and women in the Eighteenth Century presented their complex emotions and passions as grounds fo...
