Exceptional Crime in Early Modern Spain

Elena del Río Parra, Ph.D. (2001), Georgia State University, is Professor of Hispanic Studies. Her body of work deals with monstrosity, casuistry, extremophilia, accident, and the role of singularity in early modern Spain from an intellectual history perspective.

"Exceptional Crime in Early Modern Spain delights us with its wealth of sources from literature on crime in early modern Spain. [...] With Exceptional Crime Prof. del Río Parra brings together the history of crime and the history of taxonomy, proving that the classificatory obsession was not the exclusive domain of early modern natural philosophers or the Enlightenment. [...] This book may also inspire further research into areas such as the gendered component of crime narrative as well as its authorship by comparing the Iberian case to its counterparts elsewhere in the world.Marta V. Vicente, University of Kansas, in Bulletin for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies Vol. 45 : Issue 1, Review 5, 147-9"The study of violence in the early modern Hispanic world tends to focus on the exclusion of minority religious groups and the exploitation of native populations across imperial domains. Little attention, however, seems to have been given to what Elena del Rio Parra calls 'private crimes': the quotidian accounts of stabbings and dismemberments that occurred among friends, lovers, relatives, and strangers who crossed paths and swords. In her Exceptional Crime in Early Modern Spain, Del Rio explores early modern narratives of unique murders and blood crimes, and shows how they reveal an eclectic period where superstitious, religious, and scientific ideas were intertwined. [...] Drawing from a wide array of noncanonical sources involving correspondence, judicial documents, legal allegations, chapbooks, ballads, chroniclers, and medical treatises, her work persuasively argues that we can trace embryonic forms of criminology and criminal anthropology to a period some two hundred years prior to their formal establishment as sciences." Beatriz E. Salamanca, in Sixteenth Century Journal 52.1 (2021).

• AcknowledgementsList of IllustrationsA Murder of Crows1 The Taxonomic Axis of Fatality: From Series of Monsters to Serial Murderers1 From Series to Individuals2 Series and Fatality3 From Series of Monsters to Serial Murderers2 Sketching the Face of Evil: Pioneering Serial Killers1 The Antihero Factory2 In Search of Singularity3 Sketching the Face of Evil4 Printing in Parts3 On the Edge: Living between Suicide and Madness1 Official and False Madmen2 Books, Titles, Laws3 “Hanging from a Beam by Choice”4 Living on the Edge4 Expressing Criminal Behavior1 Detection before Detectives2 Patterns in Crime3 Killers as Pretenders4 Killing and Obsession5 Dying in Parts: Criminography and the Cult of Excess1 The Syntax of Evil: From Fait-Divers to the Crime Catalogue2 Casus and Criminography3 Dying in Parts4 The Cult of ExcessCleaning the Crime SceneBibliographyIndex of Names and Subjects