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Garthine Walker Chapter Summary

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Garthine Walker is an established scholar who specialises in Early Modern social and cultural history who has published numerous pieces of work, particularly on gender and crime in early modern England. In this book Walker challenges the existing historiography of crime in Early Modern England. Previous research into the topic has been conducted quantitatively creating the perception that women were a minority, in comparison to data on male criminality, and therefore were discounted as an anomaly. Walker challenges this previous impression by using qualitative analysis as well as quantitative analysis on the exceptional court records of Cheshire available. She argues that previous research by historians doesn’t examine in enough detail what …show more content…

She states that books are still being produced in this way of ‘history from below’ drawing on methods of positive social science to identify pattern using quantitative analysis to analyse and evaluate statistics of indictments, verdicts and sentencing. Walker however in her aims to focus on the individual sexes approach to crime and specifically gender she take a new approach of combining both quantitative and qualitative analysis of court records to produce a more unique and deeper understanding into criminality within England in the Early modern Period and how the importance of society thus impacted this. This is supported by Malcolm M. Feeley and Deborah L. Little who in their article The Vanishing Female: The Decline of Women in the Criminal Process, 1687-1912 suggest a factor contributing to the decline of female involvement in crime was due to societal views on

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