Moral Panics, the Media and the Law in Early Modern England

D. Lemmings, C. Walker, D. Lemmings, C. Walker

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9780230527324
• eBook ISBN:
  9780230274679
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

An exploration of links between opinion and governance in Early Modern England, studying moral panics about crime, sex and belief. Hypothesizing that media-driven panics proliferated in the 1700s, with the development of newspapers and government sensibility to opinion, it also considers earlier panics about cross-dressing and witchcraft.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Note on Works Cited in Endnotes
• 1 Introduction: Law and Order, Moral Panics, and Early Modern England
• 2 The Concept of the Moral Panic: An Historico-Sociological Positioning
• 3 ‘This Newe Army of Satan’: The Jesuit Mission and the Formation of Public Opinion in Elizabethan England
• 4 Cross-dressing and Pamphleteering in Early Seventeenth-Century London
• 5 Fear made Flesh: The English Witch-Panic of 1645–7
• 6 ‘A sainct in shewe, a Devill in deede’: Moral Panics and Anti-Puritanism in Seventeenth-Century England
• 7 ‘Remember Justice Godfrey’: The Popish Plot and the Construction of Panic in Seventeenth-Century Media
• 8 The Dark Side of Enlightenment: The London Journal, Moral Panics, and the Law in the Eighteenth Century
• 9 Forgers and Forgery: Severity and Social Identity in Eighteenth-Century England
• 10 ‘How frail are Lovers vows, and Dicers oaths’: Gaming, Governing and Moral Panic in Britain, 1781–1782
• 11 A Moral Panic in Eighteenth-Century London? The ‘Monster’ and the Press
• 12 The British Jacobins: Folk devils in the Age of Counter-Revolution?
• 13 Conclusion: Moral Panics, Law and the Transformation of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England
• Index