Recent work on execution emphasizes broad similarities in the character and causes of changing practices across the western world, as well as the strength of resistance to reform in England before the 1830s. In fact, five features gave rise to a distinctive path of change in England following the Restoration of 1660. First, the variable scale of enforcement from one place to another contained the potential excesses of England’s “Bloody Code.” They were additionally contained, secondly, by the “early” advent of constitutional monarchy, which made parliament – and new urban elites – partners in making and enforcing the laws. England’s “urbane” peoples derived particular strength, thirdly and fourthly, from the unique extent of urbanization in England and the vigorous public sphere to which it gave rise. Finally, the experience of London, by 1750 the largest European city, compelled changing practices which gave those people ascendancy in public political culture by the 1830s.

The transition from one culture of governance to another explains the character and timing of changes in the nature, location and scale of English executions from 1660 to 1900. Traditional landed elites adhered both to a “Bloody Code,” whose enforcement against common criminals could be regularly adjusted through consultations between trial judges and themselves, and to the occasional use of prolongedly agonizing execution rituals against traitors. The men who dominated England’s uniquely extensive and steadily expanding urban realms, and embraced new cultures of desacralization, feeling and reason, increasingly viewed the purposes, numerical extent and staging of executions differently. As the numbers and power of urbane people grew, first the extent and finally the practices of execution were adjusted accordingly. The many paradoxes of “feeling”, however, ensured their continued commitment to execution for murder, and some measure of hypocrisy in their views of executions and the people who attended them.

Ch 1: The first chapter centers on three classical authors’ representations of the descent of Orpheus into the underworld to retrieve his wife. It focuses not on the myth of Orpheus or its abundant allegorical interpretations but on the workings of the representations themselves. In the Virgilian version, irony and pathos work together to produce an empathy that allows for the reader’s judgment and provides elements that prepare a case for equity. The Ovidian version places rhetoric at the foreground, on the one hand (specifically, a rhetoric of compelling respect), and privileges a different case for pardon, one based on the physical movement of the couple, on the other. The Senecan versions elide pathos and rhetoric entirely, in order to allow the reader to understand what is lacking in the gods unable to pardon.

Known references to medieval marriage litigation in the kingdom of Castile are very rare, and information about it seems most readily available in the Roman registers of the Apostolic Penitentiary. Based on this testimony, it is possible to conclude that the typology of cases handled in Castilian bishoprics did not depart from what was common experience in church tribunals of the Latin West. At the same time, ecclesiastical control over marriage formation in Castilian society was minimal, and belief in marital consent as the collective concern of families was paramount. In addition, legislation provided support for alternative forms of intimate partnership. Often introduced under the names of barragania and mancebía, they defied sacramental permanence and monogamy by legalizing relations that were temporary and non-exclusive. Local (and Aragonese) notaries also registered service contracts stipulating sexual favors for a period against payment of a dowry. They articulated obligations of cohabitation with clergy in the sacred orders and husbands to a different woman, or they recorded the consensual breakup of couples short of priestly approval. The notarial output is clearly reflective of arrangements that altogether ignored church claims to undiminished jurisdiction over the validity of spousal ties.