Criminal Knowledge: Mapping Murder in (and onto) Early Modern Metropolitan London

Abstract

This essay considers the ways in which crime reports produced in late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London mapped — physically and socially — the crimes they described onto the city. Crime-writers tended to presume a primarily urban audience, and employed familiar language that implied readers might already be familiar with the places, and in some cases the stories, about which they wrote. While the writers and readers of early modern crime reports will likely always remain anonymous, these details offer some clue to their identity, and, moreover, suggest that the urban environment was not quite so vastly unknowable as has sometimes been suggested.