Elwin Hofman. Trials of the Self: Murder, Mayhem and the Remaking of the Mind, 1750–1830.

Abstract

In Trials of the Self: Murder, Mayhem and the Remaking of the Mind, 1750–1830, Elwin Hofman, a bright young scholar making his debut, has written a book for and of our times. The public culture of our age is deeply preoccupied with identity—with selfhood. Many people now seem convinced that one important road to happiness and self-esteem is to publicly define and proclaim one’s identity, as precisely as possible, in as public a forum as possible. What might Jean-Jacques Rousseau, so obsessively concerned to isolate and give voice to his “authentic self,” have done had he lived in our age of social media? He would probably have fit right in, though he would surely also have lamented losing the distinctive voice and standing that he was able to cultivate in self-conscious contrast with the more professedly “rational” era of the Enlightenment. As one might expect, Rousseau is a recurrent touchstone here. Hofman is more concerned, however, to give voice to the new concerns for defining, asserting, and claiming the potential privileges of selfhood that he argues were being expressed, not by elite figures like Rousseau, but by common people when brought to trial for serious crimes in the southern Netherlands (later Belgium) between 1750 and 1830. Hofman is particularly interested in how an interior, authentic self featured in the claims that such people made in defense of their behavior during their preliminary interrogation, their trial, and in their petitions for grace.