Jenner, M and Liapi, E (2022) Cheap Print, Crime and Information in Early Modern London: The Life and Death of Griffin Flood. The Seventeenth Century. ISSN 0268-117X

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Abstract

This article centres on the pamphlet The Life and Death of Griffin Flood informer (1623), which tells the career and execution through pressing of an informer and murderer working in early modern London. It outlines what archival research reveals about this figure, and thereby re-examines how far crime pamphlets were rooted in social actuality. Secondly, it shows that The Life and Death does not follow what historians have identified as the conventions of rogue literature and murder pamphlets, and that scholars’ treatment of cheap print has often overlooked its generic instability and inconsistency of tone. Finally, it highlights how the representation of Flood’s career as an informer casts new light on attitudes towards non-citizens within early modern London. The article concludes by arguing that The Life and Death (and many similar pamphlets) invoked communitarian understandings of justice, and emphasized neighbourliness, social peace, and charity, rather than the themes of redemption and divine retribution.

Item Type: Article
Additional Information: © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way
Uncontrolled Keywords: Crime; early modern London; informers; pamphlets; print culture; neighbourliness
Subjects: B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > B Philosophy (General)
Divisions: Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Humanities
Depositing User: Symplectic
Date Deposited: 06 Dec 2022 16:14
Last Modified: 27 Feb 2023 13:33
URI: https://eprints.keele.ac.uk/id/eprint/11762

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