Penal Methods of the Middle Ages: Criminals, Witches, Lunatics

What did medieval English society do to those it feared? This scholarly work dissects the brutal machinery of premodern justice: the stocks and gallows, the spectral evidence of witch trials, the chains that bound the mentally ill. Ives reconstructs a world where the line between criminal, heretic, and lunatic blurred dangerously, where punishment served not just justice but social terror. He examines the legal frameworks, the class dimensions, and the theological beliefs that animated everything from hanging to branding to confinement in iron cages. This is not comfortable history. It is a rigorous excavation of how societies manufacture enemies and what they do to them.