This book draws upon three overlapping bodies of work to generate fresh approaches to the study of crime and criminal justice in Britain and Ireland between 1660 and 1850: the conceptual lens of the "public sphere", "performativity" and speech act theory, and the history of the emotions. It opens new perspectives on the theatre of justice.

1. Historicizing Emotions: Performance, Sensibility, and the Rule of Law Part I: Feminine Performances and the Criminal Trial: Women’s Emotional Work in the Public Sphere 2. "It Will Be Expected by You All, To Hear Something from Me": Emotion, Performance, and Child Murder in Britain in the Eighteenth Century 3. The Prosecutorial Passions: An Emotional History of Petty Treason and Parricide in England, 1674-1790 4. Shame and Malice in the Eighteenth-Century Criminal Court and Community Part II: Emotional Communities and Sensibilities: Truth, Theatre and Blasphemy in Court 5. Sympathetic Speech: Telling Truths in the Nineteenth-Century Irish Court 6. Swearing and Feeling: The Secularization of Truth-Seeking in the Victorian English Court 7. Irish Sensibilities and the English Bar: The Advocacy of Charles Phillips Part III: Emotional Regimes and the Legal Process: Stories of Terror, Sensibility and Patriotism in the Representation of Criminal Trials 8. Theatre of Blood: On the Criminal Trial as Tale of Terror 9. Doctor Dodd and the Law in the Age of the Sentimental Revolution 10. Thomas Erskine and the Performance of Moral Sentiments: The Emotional Reportage of Trials for "Criminal Conversation" and Treason in the 1790s