This story is used as a basis to discuss women’s vulnerability to their masters, the horrific misogynistic laws around bastardy and infanticide, and early forensic ways of differentiating between stillbirth and infanticide. The one example you cite about the housemaid being repeatedly raped by her employer reminded me of the Madame Restell book I read about abortion in the 1800s – sadly not much had changed between the time period of this book, and the one I read.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this and feel like I've gained a greater understanding of what drove the early moderns, and how they lived (and died). It's no surprise that many women hid the results of these pregnancies, even when no foul play was committed. An absolutely macabre fascinating account of deaths of real people in London during the middle part of the last 1000 years.A couple of them did get under my skin, but a few of them are really more interesting than upsetting.

She explains the need for him to be “converted” to satisfy the prevailing religious agenda, and how this was achieved. This book outlines a series of cases that highlight broader trends in law and crime and the public's reaction to them. It’s deficient in any meaningful analysis and the book feels more like a retelling of cases directly from the newspapers rather than presenting it from any specific point of view.

I found it interesting about how suspicious deaths were investigated and what type of 'forensics' were available to them at the time. In terms of our thirst for knowledge for all things grisly, it seems like we haven't changed much in 500 years. Each individual crime is used as a jumping off point to discuss a wider topic, be it suicide, infanticide, or the abuses of the Church, and smaller stories are woven into the narrative to further illustrate the point.

These intensely personal stories portray the lives of real people as they confronted the extraordinary crises of murder, infanticide, miscarriage and suicide. I was hopeful the author was going to introduce an angle with which to analyse the behaviour of townsfolk involved in these stories, or the authors own opinion on the nature of the crimes. This story is used as a basis to discuss women's vulnerability to their masters, the horrific misogynistic laws around bastardy and infanticide, and early forensic ways of differentiating between stillbirth and infanticide. Each one is like a short story in the way it's written, but backed up by remaining documentary evidence.But these moments were rare and I never felt she extrapolated unreasonably – I always felt her assumptions, if that’s what they were, were more likely to be true than not. I had never heard of any of the cases presented in this book, which is a wonderful surprise, since it seems we tend to get a lot of the same historical true crimes over and over (understandably, since not all crimes have left a lot of records behind). She argues that this period, 1500-1700, saw the beginnings of a secular, scientific approach to investigation, with increasing reliance on physical evidence, influenced by the cultural changes that accompanied the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. Great and Horrible News explores the strange history of death and murder in early modern England, yet the stories within may appear shockingly familiar. I had heard of Great and Horrible News on a podcast I listen to so I was delighted to get an ARC copy of the book.