Violent Death in Fourteenth- and Early Fifteenth-Century England
- 1 April 1976
- journal article
- abstracts
- Published by Cambridge University Press (CUP) in Comparative Studies in Society and History
- Vol. 18 (3) , 297-320
- https://doi.org/10.1017/s001041750000829x
Abstract
Murder has both an attractive and a repellent quality. The tingling, fearfully pleasurable sensation of reading or hearing about murders makes them popular in literature and in the media. George Orwell perceptively sums up this human reaction when he says of one of his characters, “Mother preferred the News of the World which she considered had more murders in it.” The fascination with split heads, spilled brains and dismembered bodies was a dominant theme of medieval as well as of modern literature.Keywords
This publication has 2 references indexed in Scilit:
- Societal Concepts of Criminal Liability for Homicide in Mediaeval EnglandSpeculum, 1972
- Patterns in Criminal HomicidePublished by University of Pennsylvania Press ,1958