Joy Wiltenburg

True Crime: The Origins of Modern Sensationalism

A few years ago, an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer reported on a study finding that "heavy watchers" of television news reports greatly overestimated the incidence of crime in their communities, as compared with "light watchers." In the newspaper's survey of local residents, none of the respondents had an accurate idea of the incidence of crime or their own statistical likelihood of becoming a victim of crime. But while all overestimated these figures, those exposed to the fewest reports were closest to the truth. In other words, increased consumption of true news reports actually decreased people's objective knowledge about the prevalence of crime. Despite their low or even negative informational value, such reports have substantial emotional impact. The fears sparked by perceptions of crime influence decisions about where to live, how to raise children, where to invest social wealth, what punitive governmental actions to support, how to view groups perceived as likely criminals—a broad range of choices and attitudes that affect the quality of a society and its political life.¹ This story forcefully underlines the impact of sensationalist crime reporting. Irrespective of the intent of their originators, who may see themselves as neutrally conveying factual material, the crime reports exert substantial political and cultural power. Representations of crime influence people's conceptions of their lives and communities far out of proportion to the actual incidence of criminal activity.

This modern example points to a number of considerations that inform this study of the historical roots of "sensationalism"—the purveyance of emotionally charged content, mainly focused on violent crime, to a broad public. First, the representation of crime operates semi-independently of crime itself. In all periods, discourses and rituals of crime, rather than direct experience of criminal acts, are the key determinants of crime's cultural impact.² Not specific events, but varying cultural uses of them, bring deviant actions from the margins of experience into the mainstream. Second, the social effects of such representations do not necessarily mirror the goals of their creators and purveyors. This will surprise no one but is worth pointing out, because the obvious commercial aims of sensationalism have often led to its dismissal as culturally insignificant. Third, and most important for this essay, emotion plays a central role in the reception of crime reports, in this case even ones that aimed at objectivity. If one sees the mind as divided into emotional and rational components—a dubious though time-honored division—these cultural products operate much more powerfully on the emotional side. This feature of sensationalism, like its commercialism, has downgraded its status among modern rationalists. However, just as psychology has been uncovering cognitive aspects of emotions that undermine the attempt to segregate them from the fields of knowledge and culture, scholars are beginning to overcome their traditional squeamishness about emotional appeals in order to understand their effects.³

Sensationalism has often been decried, but the full history of the phenomenon has yet to be written. Scholars have tended to dismiss sensationalism as unworthy of serious study, based on two pervasive though somewhat incompatible assumptions: first, that sensationalism is essentially a commercial product, built on the exploitation of modern mass media; and second, that it appeals to a basic though depraved human taste for gore, and thus has little history apart from the changing technological means for spreading it.⁴ An exploration of sensationalism's early history, however, challenges both assumptions and suggests that they have tended to obscure the complexity and historicity of the genre. Its dependence on emotional response—the factor that most tends to arouse scholarly disdain—emerges as central to the genre's functioning, in particular its ability to mold common responses to extreme violations of social norms. Its growth and development in the modern era reflect not merely the growth of commercialism but the success of sensationalism in employing the discourse of violent crime to address changing cultural needs and sociopolitical agendas.

The word "sensationalism" was invented in the nineteenth century as a pejorative term, to denounce works of literature or journalism that aimed to arouse strong emotional reactions in the public. Focusing on the senses as the key site of stimulation, the word emphasizes bodily and nonrational reactions.⁵ In modern Western culture these nonrational elements have been rated low—in the hierarchy of human capacities, in social value, and in social location.⁶ One of the first uses of the term, cited in the Oxford English Dictionary, speaks of "the vicious sensationalism which renders so objectionable a large portion of the cheap periodical literature of the day."⁷ As this quotation suggests, the contempt of critics has been based partly on an objection to the effects of sensationalism—associating it with vice and depravity—and partly on a perception of it as appealing to the low instincts of uneducated masses. More recent usage has retained the negative appraisal of the term's originators and has intensified its connotations of cynical manipulation and commercial exploitation.

Although the term dates only to the nineteenth century, the phenomenon itself is a good deal older. While sexual scandals and other shocking events have become staples of modern sensationalism, its chief focus has always been crime, especially the most bloody and horrifying of murders. In Germany, the epicenter of early printing, broadsheets and pamphlets were regularly used by the mid-sixteenth century to recount crimes and the executions of the condemned. Even at this early date, accounts of crimes were marked by deliberate techniques designed to enhance the emotional impact of their contents. Their explicit appeal to emotion underlines the kinship of these early works with the later popular press. Karen Halttunen, in her recent study of American gothic murders, suggests reserving the term sensationalism for works that raise emotion merely as a pleasurable end in itself.⁸ Such a distinction appears difficult to sustain, however, since accounts of crime, like all texts, have multiple and complex aims and impacts. In her formulation, sensationalism would remain a term of blame rather than an analytical tool. The common feature of heightened emotional content runs through crime accounts from their very beginnings, linking various forms of sensationalism with their roots in the early days of print.

This study adopts the term sensationalism, despite its negative associations, as the best means of expressing the genre's most salient feature—its appeal to the emotions. Sensationalist crime accounts build their emotional potency on both a visceral response to violence itself and the quasi-religious dilemma posed by transgression of core values. The term also serves to link a seemingly familiar modern phenomenon with its less-familiar early forms. Beginning with the growth of crime reporting out of the early printing centers of Germany, significant cultural dynamics, emotional techniques, and social contexts shaped sensationalism into a cultural agent. Brief comparative case studies from later centuries serve to illustrate the continuing significance of such representations. Linking violent crime and criminal justice procedures with a prescribed emotional response both personal and communal, these works have been a powerful means of constructing both shared values and individual identity.

Research into the history of crime has expanded greatly over the past twenty-five years, as scholars have come to recognize its pivotal roles in the exercise of power and the definition of social boundaries. Spurred by Michel Foucault's analysis of the inscription of power in the rituals and institutions of criminal justice, historians have shed new light not only on the social dynamics of crime and punishment but also increasingly on their cultural underpinnings.⁹ Even as the records produced by courts offer rare points of access to the mentality and experiences of the less privileged, the assumptions and practices of court systems are closely linked with the processes of social discipline that produced the modern state on the one hand, the modern citizen on the other. Richard van Dülmen, drawing on the "civilizing process" theorized by Norbert Elias as well as on the history of criminal justice, sees judicial procedures as paradoxically helping to train early modern people in the elements of individualism: while they curbed individual license with their punitive power, they encouraged self-examination with increasing probes after motive and intent.¹⁰ What might seem a purely public matter—of prescription, violation, and punishment—is bound up with the most private of matters, the elusive subjectivity of the past.

This distinctive connection between public and private is inherent in criminal justice, at least in societies with a central concept of the individual soul. In the Christian West, the strong parallels between crime and sin, separated only by the human or divine nature of the legislating and punishing authorities, inevitably raise questions about the inner state of the criminal. The discourses of sensationalism, however, extend this public-private nexus far beyond the relationship between criminal and state, to encompass as wide an audience as possible. These representations of crime mark a unique point of intersection between structures of power and normative emotional demands—between public order and the interior life of the individual. The sensationalist text uses emotional resonance to draw its audience, assuming a given emotional response. Of course, any emotions that sensationalism may succeed in arousing cannot be simply personal, though experienced by individuals: On the one hand, their very existence presumes a like-minded community, a group responding to a common appeal; on the other, they are implicitly political, based on a given attitude toward violation of law and the actions of authority. If representation generally is a means of exercising power—naming and controlling the field of discourse where social order is articulated¹¹—sensationalism intensifies this process. Crime texts are powerful even though they may not be cast or intended as propaganda; in fact, their typical avoidance of explicit argumentation and reliance on unanalyzed emotional response have served to enhance their effect.

In the Western world, the modern concept of crime draws on older conceptions of sin but focuses expressly on acts that are forbidden and punishable by human authority. As a violation of public order, crime came to new prominence with the emergence of increasingly effective states and judicial systems in the later Middle Ages. Of course, violent acts like those featured in sensationalist accounts were also committed in the earlier Middle Ages and became the subject of discourse, although not in the forms later taken by sensationalism. Medieval chronicles record acts of mayhem and murder committed by noblemen and rulers against each other, subject to retribution through revenge, feud, or warfare. Unlike the events recounted in later sensationalism, these violent clashes lacked an ordering authority to seal their significance and focus the action on a single miscreant and his punishment.¹² In city chronicles of the late Middle Ages, the standard patterns of crime and punishment began to emerge, punctuated by feuds between urban authorities and robber barons who resisted all attempts to define their actions under the rubrics of criminal justice.¹³ Chronicles generally were not aimed at a wide audience but were used by ruling classes or individuals as a record of past events.¹⁴ Their descriptions of crimes, while sometimes extensive and dramatic, could not have the impact of later media.

In the early modern period, the increasingly efficient pursuit of criminal justice to secure public order, combined with the new means of communication offered by printing, created the conditions necessary for the development of journalistic accounts of crime. By the late fifteenth century, printers had begun publishing topical news reports, and from the mid-sixteenth century, they produced crime reports in increasing numbers.¹⁵ The earliest news accounts were derived from correspondence regarding distant events, particularly wars, and were written mainly by public officials, merchants, and such members of the urban intelligentsia as scholars and clerics.¹⁶ The clergy were especially prominent among authors of local news, which included various wonders and disasters as well as crimes. Crime reports were read by clerics, as well. The Zurich pastor Johann Jakob Wick, in the second half of the sixteenth century, compiled the largest extant collection of over 900 broadsides and pamphlets on sensational crimes and other unusual events such as monstrous births and supernatural phenomena.¹⁷

News reports used the new technology to reach a wide audience and soon developed standardized features. Many were written in rhyme, set to music, and decorated with woodcuts.¹⁸ Their visual appeal and oral performance expanded the potential audience beyond the prosperous and literate classes. The core audience, however—the one that made such publications viable for publishers—was the paying audience of purchasers. Given the common assumption, voiced by nineteenth-century critics, that sensationalism panders to the tastes of lower-class, uneducated consumers, it is instructive to note the respectable status of early sensationalism. The first waves of emotion-laden crime reports were not aimed at masses in the modern sense, but were produced and probably purchased mainly by the literate upper levels of early modern society. Familiarity with written or printed texts was still highly stratified by social class. Although many such works were published anonymously, others were signed by established clerics and educated burghers. Those with the disposable income to buy these items were far from the bottom of the social scale and were probably limited mainly to the artisan class and above.¹⁹ These works addressed a much wider audience than was possible for medieval manuscripts, but they could not have sustained themselves on a market among the low alone. Thus although the sensationalist focus on shock and emotion later came to be read as a marker of lower-class appeal, this was not the case in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Depictions of violent crime, as observed at the outset, rouse emotional reactions even when presented by news media in the modern "objective" mode. In early crime accounts there was no attempt at the modern dissociation between feeling and reportage. While early news reports on political events served the practical needs of merchants and other elites, sensationalist accounts of crime sought to convey a state of feeling.²⁰ Titles regularly emphasized the emotive quality of the content: it was "erschrecklich" (frightful), "erbermlich" (pitiful), "unerhört" (unheard-of), "grausam" (dreadful), "jämmerlich" (lamentable), "grewlich" (horrible), "trawrig" (grievous), "kläglich" (pitiable). In the reporting too, conventions emerged that heightened the emotional triggers inherent in the material. Such features as emphasis on familial relationships, graphic descriptions of violence, and the inclusion of direct dialogue worked along with emotive language to enhance visceral effect. These techniques are explored in more detail below.

It may be tempting to ascribe the emotional features of sensationalism—in its early days as later—to commercialism pure and simple, to the need to increase sales by arousing maximum interest. Such explanations may have some validity, but they are not adequate. The assumption that commercial profit was the central motive behind these early productions is questionable. In sixteenth-century Germany, the income from such items must have repaid the efforts of printers, but it almost certainly brought little reward to authors.²¹ More fundamentally, commercial explanations cannot account for why particular forms of interest-arousing features were chosen and others not. Sensationalist crime accounts, far from being historically uniform, differ substantially with time and place. The inspiration of their producers was not one-dimensional. More important than ascribing motives, however, is the recognition that such representations are themselves cultural agents: the texts' effects and reception by their audiences cannot be bound by the aims of their authors and purveyors, commercial or otherwise.²²

An essential element in the emotional resonance of these works lay in their claim of truth. Implicitly, these stories were not trivial or recreational like fiction, but rather should be taken seriously. The majority of crime accounts advertised truth in their titles, with the "warhafftige newe Zeitung" (truthful new report) becoming a standard formula. The repeated emphasis on truth has been linked with oral traditions as well as with these developing genres whose veracious status was still in question.²³ Just as established newspapers do not bother to describe their contents explicitly as "true," while less respected publications may advertise "true crime," the sixteenth century already saw a tendency for application of the "warhafftig" label especially to accounts whose events were surprising or hard to believe.²⁴ The author of a 1582 pamphlet dealing with both disasters and crime commented explicitly on both the emotional content and the importance of the reader's perception of truth: "My dearest reader, this is unfortunately, may God have mercy, one piece of horrifying news after another ... so that my heart nearly breaks and my eyes fill with tears. I don't know how it seems to you, for there are many who will refuse to believe, since it does not affect them and appears to be false and invented."²⁵ Disbelief made people ignore signs of God's punishment; but as they realized the truth, they should join in heartfelt sympathy for the woes of others. As Lennard Davis has pointed out, the "truth" purveyed in such works might have little to do with modern standards of literal truth; the deeper moral truth took precedence over mere factual details.²⁶ Yet the demand for truth, the insistence that the content derived from and bore directly on real life, was an integral part of sensationalism.

The combination of truth with appeals to the heart underlined the religious focus of these works. Virtually all crime accounts published during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries connected their stories with an edifying Christian message. Many crime reports in song form were set to the tunes of hymns, such as "Kompt her zu mir spricht Gottes Sohn" (Come unto me, says the son of God) or "Ewiger Vater in Himmelreich" (Eternal Father in heaven).²⁷ Authors of crime reports explicitly advertised crime stories as relevant to all Christians because they gave warning of the consequences of sin. While the crimes recounted in print tended to be only the most horrific, authors could point to the slippery slopes that led from seemingly minor infractions to the worst of crimes. The Protestant cleric Johannes Füglin, reporting on the dual murder in 1565 of a Basel burgher and his granddaughter by the old man's godson, emphasized the early vices that led to the criminal's fall. He had neglected his family, had run into debt, and had taken to drink—sins that set him on the path to murder.²⁸ Similar claims were made about such entry-level sins as disobeying parents, cursing, drinking, gambling, and of course, giving way to lust.²⁹ Reports about youthful offenders regularly pointed to the need for a rigorous godly upbringing to avoid raising such monstrous criminals.

Although commentators on later sensationalism often dismiss the pious moralizing of authors,³⁰ the early clerical authors were undoubtedly sincere in their religious goals. Given the overlap of crime and punishment with the church's territory of sin, clerics felt a duty to explain the place of such events in the divine plan. In fact, the shock value of horrific crimes could be read not simply as a commercial opportunity, but as a sign that God was trying to get people's attention—just as he might with supernatural signs or monstrous births.³¹ God allowed such dreadful crimes, according to Füglin, so that people in their horror would recognize the need for repentance and reform.³² The author of a 1589 broadside discussed at length the need for such examples to rouse sinners from their easy security to a sharpened sense of repentance, "but because of great grief and sorrow, and even more from natural human horror, no writer can easily accomplish this." The temptation was to be silent—but this would be cowardly shirking of responsibility, letting slip a chance to do good.³³

The juridical conception of crime and punishment strongly paralleled the Christian scheme of sin. In the primal drama of Christian doctrine, violation of God's law deserves the punishment of damnation. Redemption becomes possible only through the miraculous blood sacrifice of Christ, who takes on the inevitable punishment and overcomes it by his divine innocence. Like sin, crime demands punishment and was in fact defined primarily by this characteristic. In early modern Germany, serious crimes were peinlich—that is, punishable by damage to the body of the offender.³⁴ The reference points of these parallels worked constantly to shape the emotional structure of crime narratives.³⁵ The criminal reenacted both the fall of unaided humanity and the well-deserved punishment that must ensue.

This basic scenario cut across confessional lines, even though both Catholic and Protestant authors sometimes used accounts of crime and punishment to drive home confession-specific messages. A Catholic pamphlet of the seventeenth century, for instance, used the story of a man who murdered his family to emphasize the inevitable punishment of sin: "no one will be spared / as he sows so shall he reap / no one can escape this."³⁶ Protestant authors could use similar content to stress the power of God's word to redeem even the worst sinners through faith. Despite such differences of emphasis, the basic religious framework of sin and punishment underlay all crime narratives.

The first full-blown sensational treatment of crime, written by the accomplished author and Lutheran minister Burkard Waldis, shows this literature's characteristic combination of horror and uplift, and it marked out the basic contours of the genre. Although little-known today outside the circle of specialists in German literature, Waldis was an active player in the religious, political, and cultural transformations of his day.³⁷ His best-known work, the play The Prodigal Son, used the biblical parable to dramatize a Lutheran message on the priority of faith over works, while presenting vivid characterizations of contemporary life. He also wrote a new version of Aesop's fables, psalms, anti-papal satires, and other works. Possibly his least-read publication in modern times, despite its multiple editions in the sixteenth century, is a pamphlet published in 1551: "A true and most horrifying account of how a woman tyrannically murdered her four children and also killed herself, at Weidenhausen near Eschwege in Hesse."³⁸

This pamphlet shares sensationalist features with many later sixteenth-century crime pamphlets, including the "horrifying" title and a grisly woodcut of the mother dismembering her children. Even more striking, however, is Waldis's use of literary techniques to magnify the emotional impact of the crime. He effectively juxtaposed the seeming normality of household routine with the sudden outbreak of horrific violence. The narrative builds suspense and pathos by depicting the pursuit of each child in detail, complete with their direct speeches pleading for their lives. The scene of the first murder illustrates the intensity of his portrayal:

She first went for the eldest son
Attempting to cut off his head;
He quickly to the window sped
To try if he could creep outside;
By the leg she pulled him back inside
And threw him down onto the ground;
He got up and away did bound.³⁹

He ran to hide in the cellar, but she instantly followed him. The account traces her movements as, hatchet in hand, she searched in every corner and finally found him hiding behind a barrel. With no escape possible, he pled for his life:

He said, "O dearest mother mine,
Spare me, I'll do whate'er you say:
I'll carry for you from today
The water the whole winter through.
O please don't kill me! Spare me, do!"
But no plea helped, it was in vain;
The Devil did her will maintain.
She struck him with the self-same dread
As if it were a cabbage head.⁴⁰

Waldis went on, in great circumstantial detail, to recount how she hacked until he was dead, then killed the other children just as gruesomely.

Waldis's mode of storytelling deliberately intensifies the story's horrifying effect. The story directs and demands the audience's imaginative participation: though one knows at the outset that the children have been killed, one cannot help hoping that each attempt to creep into a corner and hide will succeed. The protracted account of the mother's fury allows ample time for the audience to be amazed, at each step, that she does not stop; and the author expressed this amazement. Repeatedly he paused to point out how she lacked the pity that the audience feels for the children. More wrenching than the bare description of bloodshed in the home is the textual insistence that the audience fully imagine the children's terror and innocent pleadings.

Waldis used this emotionally charged crime story to promote a confessional message. The pamphlet reminded readers of the ever-present, prowling devil, warning that all are vulnerable to constant temptation. Only God's grace offered an escape from sin. Further, even the worst of sinners, like this murderous mother, could hope for salvation through faith. After attempting suicide, the mother lived long enough to repent, under Lutheran tutelage in the word of God:

Th'eternal God then lent his grace,
That by God's word improved was she,
So she converted blessedly,
And earnestly did yield her soul to God.⁴¹

The story thus drove home a Lutheran lesson to souls stirred by the story's emotional intensity.

Although Waldis was unusual among crime authors in his literary ability, his pamphlet encapsulates key features of sixteenth-century sensationalism. The patterns of emotional focus found in this pamphlet were widely repeated in crime accounts of the later sixteenth century and on into the seventeenth. Murder within the family was by far the most common theme, accounting for over half of the reports, not counting attacks on families that came from outside the household. Among these familial killings, the murder of children appeared in two-thirds of the reports (42 of 63).⁴² In most cases (47 of 63), the murder did not stop with just one family member. Multiple murder within the family became the most widely featured pattern of sensationalist reporting, with emphasis on violation of the ties of blood.⁴³ Intergenerational violence, especially of parents against children or children against parents, recurred again and again. Failures of parental care to the point of murder, or failures of discipline that allowed children to run wild and attack their parents, regularly received the blame.⁴⁴

Even the most inherently shocking crimes, like these multiple familial murders, were not left to do their work of horrifying unaided but were reinforced by techniques of representation. Although few authors were as virtuosic as Waldis, the emotive language, direct dialogue, building of suspense through circumstantial detail, and graphic description of bloody violence were common in the genre. The emotional appeals of these works regularly invoked the bonds that ought to exist between blood relations, as well as the tenderness for helpless children and pregnant women that should be felt by all but was violated by the killers. Typically, in 1585, a father killed his young son in the course of a nine-murder killing spree, "as if all natural inborn blood loyalty was extinguished in him."⁴⁵ Relations of family, blood, and household received special emphasis even in nonfamilial killings. In one case, for example, two 1573 editions of the same song recounted a case of rape, murder, and mutilation by a foster son of the victim's father; though the texts are the same, in one of the titles a hasty or overzealous printer made them blood brother and sister.⁴⁶

Direct dialogue was especially likely to be placed in the mouths of victims, fostering a vivid reimagining of the scene and encouraging audience sympathy.⁴⁷ The scenario of victims pleading for their lives—particularly such pathetic scenes as depicted by Waldis, with children naively attempting to bargain with heartless killers—became a repeated feature. The children offered simple gifts, promised good behavior, cried, or smilingly offered to play, in ways that strongly evoked childish innocence in the face of unthinkable horror. In a song from 1573, a young man and a friend killed his guardian and the whole family in order to steal his inheritance. The three small daughters were slaughtered even though "they pleaded with sweet words from their lovely mouths, that they would spare their lives."⁴⁸ A murderous father in 1580 killed the little boy who ran up "to play with his father; he quickly took him by the arm and stabbed him to the heart."⁴⁹ The children's direct speeches are especially pathetic, like that of one five-year-old girl: "indeed she cried most bitterly / and said unto her mother / O mother dear, don't do to me as you did to Philip there." But the mother went on to kill her as she had her brothers.⁵⁰ These are just a few among many examples.⁵¹

Direct personification conveyed immediacy and intensity in other cases, too. In a Basel killing of 1565, a song account gave not only the words of the young female victim as she sought to dissuade her murderer, but also her thoughts:

O God, now must I die?
Then thought the pious maid;
Is there no one on earth
Who will come to my aid?
Then I Lord Jesus' mercy pray,
Who for us lowly sinners
On the cross his life did lay.⁵²

This same song also feelingly recorded the grief of the girl's father and the horror of the townspeople, both in direct speech. In another familial killing, this time of a mother by her daughter, the victim appealed to their relationship: "Think of how with great suffering I bore you for nine months beneath my heart! God will punish you for this."⁵³

Extensive detail about the events of the crime, as in Waldis's account, injected drama into a scenario whose outcome was known. Accounts of multiple murders typically recounted each killing separately, with details of place and action. The killer moved inexorably from one room to the next; victims awoke at the noise of the first killings and ran to see what was the matter. Some resisted their attackers, as in the heartrending murder of pastor Johan Schwanfelder's daughter in 1570.⁵⁴ Reports regularly described the means of discovering the crime, such as the suspicious smoke in the night noticed by neighbors of a woman who chopped up and cooked her husband,⁵⁵ or the alarm given by a horrified eyewitness.⁵⁶ Where the killer was not immediately known, authors sometimes traced the unfolding of the mystery, as in Basel in 1565, when the killer was tracked through stolen goods.⁵⁷ Accounts also detailed attempts to hide the evidence, such as the setting of fires, which could lead to further mayhem,⁵⁸ and other actions taken to hide or disguise the body. Circumstantial description vividly recreated the scenes of violence.

Abundant detail could be offered in nonliterary form as well. Broadsides typically provided woodcut images that gave a literal depiction of the crimes, mirroring the textual account and sometimes surpassing it. Nonliterate consumers could reconstruct the essentials from the picture alone. Often the specific punishments prescribed for the culprit's execution could be "read," along with the setting and circumstances of the crime itself. Most artists were scrupulous about showing the precise weapons used, and they often illustrated specific wounds inflicted on the victims. Coloration, added by stenciling, could provide the red of blood. In some cases, the level of depiction reached a surprisingly clinical completeness. The 1573 case of rape, murder, and mutilation inspired at least four publications; two of them featured, in addition to a depiction of the murderer hacking up the victim's body into sixteen pieces, a sort of parts diagram showing the body reconstructed like a jigsaw puzzle.⁵⁹ These broadsides also gave a graphic rendition of the victim's disfigured head (mutilated to the point that, as explained in the text, authorities actually did reassemble the body in order to identify the victim). The report of another dismemberment in 1605 provided a similar diagram.⁶⁰

Authors attributed little mystery to the motives, often economic, behind such heinous crimes. The killers' deeds, rendered inexorable by the known outcome, appeared as the result of their giving the devil an opening by prior sin: often drinking, gambling, greed, or anger, but sometimes only cursing or failing to pray and attend church. Past a certain point, the devil seemed to drive them on to ever-greater crime. Their capture and punishment, usually described in detail, offered the assurance of retribution. In contrast to the sensationalism of later centuries, the perpetrators were usually not examined closely as individuals, nor was the audience offered vicarious entry into their minds.⁶¹ The chief focus of imagined experience was on the victims—with perhaps some shift to the killer once he or she was condemned and repentant, suffering the excruciating but well-deserved pangs of execution. As Daniel Cohen and Karen Halttunen have argued for the later gallows sermons of early America, the religious assumptions of this literature interpreted crime as resulting from inadequate curbs on general human sinfulness, rather than unique characteristics of the criminal.⁶² Not the killers' distinctive psyches, but their weakness and the devil's temptation led to their fall.

Although the treatment of criminal psychology may appear thin to modern sensibilities, the narratives of early sensationalism are thick with blood. The scenes overflowed with gore, as culprits seized such weapons as hatchets and cleavers with which to attack their families. Crime accounts typically gave exact specifics on the number and location of the wounds—often messy mutilations, decapitations, even disembowelings. These killings involved no simple daggers to the heart, as in contemporary depictions of, for example, the suicide of the chaste Lucretia.⁶³ Rather, their grotesque effects on the bodies of victims underlined the devilish inspiration of the criminals. At the same time, the flow of blood evoked symbolic inversion of the holy bleeding of Christ's sacrifice. Some pieces even attached pious songs on the blood and passion of Christ to their portrayals of criminal mayhem.⁶⁴ Just as circumstantial as the graphic crimes were the complete recitations of punishments: the number of tearings with red-hot pincers, the specific instruments used, the number of hours it took for the sufferer to die. The horrors of the bloody murders had religious connotations in their evocation of hellish disorder, as well as a political undercurrent in their implicit justification of the gruesome mutilations inflicted on the condemned at the time of execution.

Also political, of course, was the implicit or explicit endorsement of governmental authority in its role as crime fighter. Accounts sometimes praised authorities—"Ein Erbar vnd Wolweiser Rat" (a wise and honorable city council)—for their zeal in bringing the guilty to justice, especially when the arrest required unusual measures.⁶⁵ In the Basel case of 1565, authorities had searched far and wide to track down the killer and achieved the unusual coup of an arrest outside the city's territory. Wolfgang Meyer, writing about the murders, dedicated his song to the Basel authorities and praised their efforts in glowing terms. Going further than most authors, he explicitly reminded the public that the government was the source of their peace and security and thus deserved their utmost loyalty.⁶⁶ Such accounts were sometimes endorsed by authorities themselves, for whom they could serve the same purposes as the spectacle of public execution. A broadside about a murder in 1593 boasted of how its account bore the seal of the local judge, attesting to its veracity.⁶⁷ In a 1589 case near Augsburg, the local judge went to the imperial city to get legal instructions, taking with him on his return an Augsburg artist (Hans Schultes the Elder) to portray the scene. The artist's work decorated the resulting broadside.⁶⁸

The generic patterns I have been describing—particularly the emotive conventions that governed the portrayal of familial murders, but also the elements shared with crime reporting more broadly—suggest a powerful interplay among texts, audiences, and authors. Clearly, these texts were shaping broadly held expectations about how criminal violence was to be recounted and interpreted.⁶⁹ Of course, the generic conventions could not constrain all readers to approve or accept the authors' views, but the patterning of the narratives along common lines shows what was perceived by authors as successful and appropriate for such discourse. The pleading of the murdered children, for example, which to modern readers seems an odd interpolation of invented dialogue into supposedly factual narratives, was clearly accepted as a normal and even expected feature in accounts of familial murder. While in some cases, like that of Waldis, it was at least conceivable that the author could have spoken with the murderer and received some account of the victims' words, the children's pleas are repeated in formulaic terms across many accounts. Circumstantial details of the victims' behavior could be included even when the murderer died before capture, leaving no possible witness.⁷⁰ Despite their claims to truth, the essence of these accounts lay less in factual accuracy than in emotional impact.

The strength of the genre's appeal is illustrated not only by the appearance of multiple editions but even more by the retelling of stories that fit the pattern. In the 1560s, this appeal apparently motivated the resurrection of a decades-old crime, that of a baker's apprentice who killed his master's family. The published account offered a fairly standard familial killing, complete with direct speech of the young child begging for life, and of the repentant killer at his gruesome execution. Only at the end did readers learn that the events took place over fifty years earlier, in 1504.⁷¹ Entire scenarios of familial killing could be transposed from one time and place to another. Waldis's 1551 account of the murderous mother was reprinted as news in 1578. Similarly, the case of the bloodthirsty daughter Magdalena, who killed her whole family, was reported as news from Flanders in 1650 and again more than twenty years later, in 1673, as events in Moravia.⁷² These revivals bespeak popularity, with a receptive audience particularly for the emotive features emphasized in these depictions of household mayhem.

The resonance of these texts extends to social, religious, and political arenas, in ways that respond to the events of their age but also preserve for the texts themselves a role in constructing contemporary social meanings. The major outpouring of early sensationalist crime reports fell, perhaps not surprisingly, in a period of high crime in the second half of the sixteenth century. Richard van Dülmen has identified the decades from 1560 to 1600 as showing particularly high numbers of executions and high activity among bands of robbers.⁷³ The numbers of extant crime reports—growing from the 1550s, ballooning in the 1570s–1580s, then tapering after 1610—do owe something to the accidents of collection and survival; over half of my examples from the 1570s–1580s were preserved in the single collection by Johann Wick. Nevertheless, the pattern coincides generally with an upsurge in crime, as well as with the growth of witchcraft prosecutions in the later sixteenth century. Although one cannot necessarily assume a correlation between high crime and high sensationalism, these accounts did emerge from an atmosphere charged with actual violence and fear.

Of course, the crimes featured in sensationalist accounts were not the most common, but rather those perceived as most horrifying. In the shapes these dangers took, in particular of damage to family, one can discern tensions related to social change. One might argue, perhaps, that blood ties, as the deepest of human bonds, are the natural ground for sensationalism. In other historical settings, however, emotional weight could be placed elsewhere, such as on sexual or marital bonds. The focus on familial and particularly intergenerational ties sent powerful messages about perceived threats to social and especially familial order. In their evocation of the horror of household bloodshed, a number of works pointed also to economic strain: The children were hungry and reminded the raging father of his economic failure; the greedy youths demanded their inheritance; the father's anger over debts drove him to violence.⁷⁴ In the hard economic times of the later sixteenth century, such burdens bulked large, even as they interacted with the new importance placed on family by social authorities. Post-Reformation reformers, convinced of the central importance of the family, sought to boost parental power by such steps as outlawing clandestine marriages and requiring parental consent for marriage.⁷⁵ These reinforcements of parental authority, however, coincided with pressures of price inflation and population growth that tended to undermine parents' ability to back their will with real economic clout. Increased intergenerational tensions contributed to both the outbreak of familial violence and the intense interest in its portrayal.⁷⁶

The sensationalist portrayals of family violence dramatized the ways in which familial relations could go terribly, inhumanly wrong. Such accounts furthered confessional aims by encouraging a posture of fear in the face of unthinkably horrifying invasions of domestic and civic peace. Such ghastly realities, by implication, could not be countered by mere human means but underlined the need for repentance. And not only religion, but the right brand of religion, was needed to avert attack from the ever-prowling devil. In addition to general exhortations to pious life, authors recommended godly familial discipline as an essential condition for both basic social cohesion and the saving of souls. Parents were urged to "take them under the rod while they can still be bent,"⁷⁷ to prevent their children from literally going to the devil. While they encouraged empathetic involvement in the suffering of victims and cultivated tenderness for the helpless innocence of children, these works also endorsed authoritative discipline in both family and society.

The religious content of these works, linking shocking crimes with the devil and urging moral reform, were not mere formulas but an essential part of the early sensationalist outlook. From this point of view, there was no significant difference between, on the one hand, accounts of killers who were so overtaken by the devil that they killed their own families or mutilated corpses, and, on the other, accounts of witchcraft or of murderers who used black magic to evade capture. While moderns would find supernatural forces at work in the latter and not the former, authors of these accounts saw the drama of God and the Devil equally in both. Thus a pastor-author could find "a living sermon" even in murders committed against his own family, with their lessons on the godly acceptance of death and the blessings of repentance and forgiveness.⁷⁸ Religious messages not only promoted personal reform to individuals but also conveyed a broader sense of living in especially troublous and sinful times. Crime combined forces with comets, misbirths, and other ills to contribute to a widespread post-Reformation sense of crisis, one that fueled growing apocalyptic ideas as well.⁷⁹ For Johann Wick, with his astonishing collection of wonders, disasters, and crimes, the cultivation of horror was both practical and devotional exercise, gathering evidence of divine wrath as a means of urging humanity to change its ways.

The sense of threat fostered by sensationalist reports worked in support of political authority, even in the absence of explicitly political messages. They could also be used specifically to buttress religious and political arguments for increased social discipline. Johannes Füglin, in his own account of a familial murder, invoked what he saw as a larger trend toward such crimes to support his view of general moral decay and the need for greater governmental action against vice:

In the shedding of human blood, such shocking and horrifying cases have sometimes also occurred in the past, but more and more in the present day. So that not only those who are somewhat related (although in truth we are all brothers and sisters) have dipped their hands in each other's blood, but also the very nearest relations ... A few years ago a father stabbed his own son to death over a single pin. Just a few years later a son hardheartedly hacked his father to death, only because of his faithful admonition. ⁸⁰

Crime discourses fed on each other and assumed a level of exposure in the audience that would prime them for the reception of directive messages. Their political thrust not only encouraged submission to authority but also could urge political rule to more conscientious recognition of its moral and religious duty.

Sensational crime accounts, in the sixteenth century as later, occupied a distinctive rhetorical space created by their emotional resonance. The raising of emotion, or appeal to the passions, was traditionally the province of rhetoric. The most important task for an orator, according to Cicero, was "to discover how to convince the persons whom he wishes to persuade and how to arouse their emotions."⁸¹ Although scholastic intellectuals may have shied away from emotional rhetoric precisely because of its dependence on human response rather than objective logic, the power of words to rouse the passions was well known. ⁸² Medieval commentators expected strong emotional reactions to literature. Clerics complained, in fact, that people were more deeply moved by trivial stories than by serious religious instruction: "One who is left unmoved by the story of Christ's Passion read in the Gospel for Holy Week, is stirred to tears when the tale of Guy of Warwick is read aloud to him."⁸³ The renewed enthusiasm for rhetoric among humanists, growing in the fifteenth century, endorsed the ability of language to move and delight, as well as to instruct, its audience.⁸⁴ This represented both a return to Cicero's principles of rhetoric and an enhanced appreciation of the role of emotional response in both oral and written communication.⁸⁵

The persuasive power of emotion in rhetorical situations was widely recognized and exploited in late medieval religious practices. The spreading of God's word was, in fact, a field in which the ancient focus on persuasive power had revived well before the Renaissance.⁸⁶ Preachers sought to inspire piety by encouraging strong emotional reactions to the passion of Christ. Popular sermons used homely anecdotes and humor, as well as direct address and emotional appeals, to rouse listeners. Religious art famously began to emphasize the humanity of the suffering Jesus in ways that encouraged responses of pity and grief.⁸⁷ Tears came to be seen as a hallmark of genuine religious response.⁸⁸ Thus the differing genres and aims of political persuasion, entertainment, and religious instruction converged in their enhanced awareness and uses of emotional appeals.

The particular emotions invoked in early German sensationalism—principally pity, horror, sorrow, and fear—called for both empathic and personal reactions from the audience. Readers and hearers were asked, often explicitly, to imagine and pity the situation of others, people with whom they had previously had no contact whatever. Implicitly, the texts promoted the fear that, by extension, the horrifying potential of sin could pose danger to anyone who was not vigilant enough. Far from encouraging calculation of the probable odds against falling victim to such outrageous crimes, authors routinely drew general lessons for self-protection—chiefly, avoidance of sin and vice, strict discipline of children, and support of the authorities. And in fact, the danger was not so much that of falling a victim to crime as of falling victim to one's own sinful nature and the snares of the devil.

In aspiring toward the wakening of emotion, early sensationalism was in good company. But although rhetoric may broadly aim at the power to move and persuade, sensationalism relies more strongly on emotive appeal than do most other forms of discourse. In ancient thinking, the rousing of emotion—"pathos"—was only one component of effective communication. Yet it was a distinctively imposing power, one with divine associations: the capacity of passion to transform both poet and audience borrowed from the powers of the gods. Such emotional power was awe-inspiring, and dangerous, precisely because it tended to deactivate normal processes of judgment.⁸⁹ In modern usage, "pathos" is associated with the emotions evoked by tragic events, especially sorrow and pity. Such is the territory of crime accounts. By long tradition, however, such emotional intensity has been seen as too weighty and grand for any but serious genres—such as epic and tragedy—that dealt with high and imposing subjects. The reliance on pathos in topical reports of crime has created for many a jarring clash of genres—a sense of feelings roused in the wrong place. However, it underlines the distinctive rhetorical stance of sensationalism as a genre. Because its starting point, violent crime, is the raw material of tragedy, sensationalism operates in a mode that tends to mute the norms of ordinary debate.

The uses of sensationalism in these early accounts suggest that it is not useful to ascribe their intense emotional focus on the most repellent of crimes to a simple desire for titillation. Rather, their emotional appeal serves as a key rhetorical tool, seeking to foster unanimity of response even across the widely scattered and invisible audience of the printed text. The expected, appropriate responses of horror and pity are constructed as natural and inevitable, common to all who share a basic human identity. The religious resonance of violent crime itself, as the ultimate sin, intensifies this effect. Through their affective triggers, the narratives powerfully assert their status as nonpolitical and unmediated, despite the use of purposeful literary techniques and the frequent inclusion of specific religious or political messages. This could make them effective propaganda for religious agendas—the superiority of a given confession in fighting sin—or political ones, especially the buttressing of strong governmental authority. Their emotional resonance made it difficult to contest them—to stand up, say, for the views of rebellious children—without aligning oneself with horrific violence. If they are not mere titillation, then, perhaps these works can be dismissed as mere propaganda? This, too, would be an oversimplification. By fostering bonds of common emotional response, these works offered a means of healing violent tears in the social fabric. The apparent commercial success of their formulaic approaches to this task suggests that they had some success in guiding common responses to the unthinkable and horrific.⁹⁰

The preoccupations of these early sensationalist works suggest a blend of religious, political, and social concerns. While the main messages of the post-Reformation confessions were conveyed in sermons and religious writings, the religious elements of crime literature created a distinctive means of underpinning the linkages between religious authority and political power. The conception of government as wielding God's punishing sword on earth was of course not new, but it was newly linked in these narratives with an intense vicarious experience of threat to religious, familial, and physical order. The increasingly active early modern state, taking on new responsibility for securing order and monopolizing violence, received steady support from sensationalism. At the same time, the familial crimes so prevalent in early German sensationalism reflect the centrality of intergenerational tensions in sixteenth-century social thought.

While sensationalist accounts from different periods share common features that mark their generic kinship, they also vary considerably with time and place. It is not possible, of course, to examine every significant cultural variant that appeared in the transition to the modern world. However, a few examples will suggest both the continuities in this genre's cultural functioning and its complex relationship to historical change. A comparison with sensationalist forms in seventeenth-century England, together with brief looks at the work of other scholars on Germany and the United States in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, will illustrate the genre's responsiveness to changing cultural concerns.⁹¹ Far from an unchanging reflection of the low side of human nature, sensationalism has shifted its cultural ground and points of emotional focus, while retaining its rhetorical stance. Like the earliest sensationalism, these later forms use emotional appeals to mark out distinctive discursive territories, eluding the norms of dialectic and debate.

In contrast to the focus on victims so notable in the literary features of early German sensationalism, crime accounts in seventeenth-century England fixed their gaze squarely on the criminal.⁹² Developing the distinctive sensationalist subtype of the "last good-night" ballad, English publications frequently cast the condemned as the speaker of a first-person narrative, modeled on speeches delivered before execution by repentant malefactors.⁹³ The authorities in charge of executions, along with the clergy who helped manage the last days and hours of the condemned, strongly promoted the expectation that every culprit should make a "good end," supportive of God and good government. The appropriate behavior included expressions of contrition for one's crime, respect and even gratitude toward the punishing authorities, faith in the possibility of Christian redemption, and warnings to others against one's own evil example. While this conception of the "good end" was common across Europe,⁹⁴ English practice and expectations gave special prominence to the repentant criminal's voice. Ballads and pamphlets featuring their purported words were already being published in the late sixteenth century and became a standardized form in the seventeenth.

Like earlier crime accounts, these publications dealt most with violent crimes, particularly murder, but their sensationalist, emotion-enhancing features were focused not only on the bloodiness of the crimes but also on the mind of the murderer. The first-person narrative demanded direct imaginative identification with the culprit, however temporary and qualified. This demand was especially intense in the many ballads in which the singer adopted the voice of the criminal. These productions personalized the character and situation of lawbreakers, even as they assimilated them to an expected and regularly stylized set of emotional reactions and social values. Such verses, repeating standard formulas of regret and guilt but with vividly imagined details of both the crime and the perpetrator's state of mind, were a mainstay of popular publication throughout the century.

This shift to a focus on the criminal, regularized in the English "last good-nights," occurred elsewhere also and intensified in the following centuries. While the intense victim-focus of the early German works evoked empathy with victims, these were generally interchangeable figures: the helpless child, the betrayed parent. The turn to the distinctiveness of the individual confessor, for all its limitations of convention and formula, marks an increased interest in individual subjectivity. Certainly, it implies a deviation from the religious assumption that human depravity requires no unique explanation. Richard van Dülmen's analysis of developments in criminal justice suggests a useful way of thinking about such changes, more concrete than broad trends toward individualism and modernity. He notes that medieval justice had focused on restitution for harm done, but the early modern state was concerned with violations of law, attacks on the sovereign authority. In this context, he argues, the intent of the criminal became as important as the actual damage, and courts increasingly inquired into motive, state of mind, and character.⁹⁵ Such considerations were certainly operative in England, where the need to persuade a jury, rather than meet the strict evidentiary standards of Roman law, made intangible factors especially influential.⁹⁶ Paradoxically, while on the one hand state authority represented increased secular oversight, on the other, such regard for the individual's inner state could bring crime into even closer parallel with the traditional religious territory of sin. Not only the individual's actions, but also thoughts and feelings, became matters for public attention.

If attention to the criminal as an individual had some roots in criminal justice, in the "last good-night" it took on an independent life, one fraught with ambiguity. An early example, "The Lamentation of Master Page's Wife" of 1591 by Thomas Deloney, illustrates the complex combination of empathy and condemnation this form could offer. The young Eulalia Glandfield, forced to marry against her will, conspired with her lover to kill her husband. In the ballad, while she repents of her crime and asks forgiveness in suitable form, she also strikingly conveys her emotional state. She recounts how she begged her parents not to make her marry Page, stressing her prior love for George Strangwidge: "With sighs and sobs I did them often move / I might not wed, whereas I could not love." Once she was tied to Page, her feelings intensified:

My chosen eyes could not his sight abide;
My tender youth did scorne his aged side;
Scant could I taste the meat whereon he fed;
My legs did lothe to lodge within his bed.
Cause knew I none I should despise him so,
That such disdaine within my hart should grow,
Save only this, that fancie did me move,
And told me still, George Strangwidge was my love.⁹⁷

These last lines suggest her irresponsible weakness in succumbing to such feelings, yet her physical revulsion could hardly be made more palpable. She admits her death is deserved but shares the blame with her greedy and coercive parents.

These works sharply recreated the varied emotions that led their protagonists into crime, particularly anger, lust, and greed. They typically also gave extensive circumstantial details of the events leading up to murder, though these tended to fall into conventional patterns: the downward slide into robbery and murder via idleness and loose living, the violent quarrels over a husband's drinking or a wife's ill-temper. Although the repentant criminal was reinscribed into the Christian scheme of redemption at the close, these explorations of the killer's mind and circumstances moved the implied causes of criminal violence in a decidedly secular direction. Crime was to be avoided partly by piety but also by adherence to secular norms, especially the proper regulation of emotion.

In addition to the particularized elements of each account, authors regularly applied emotional descriptors drawn not from the specifics of a given case, but from socially prescribed norms. Thus ballads of men who killed their wives in the late seventeenth century almost invariably described their victims in the language of conjugal affection. William Terry laments his murder of "my kind and loving Wife."⁹⁸ Likewise Edmund Allen: "Was I not cruel to my Dear / ... I weep to think I sought the Life, / of her that lov'd me so."⁹⁹ George Feast killed "my dear and Loving Wife."¹⁰⁰ Anne Wallen's earlier lament for having killed her husband speaks of him as "my dearest husband" and regrets the loss of "his sweetest breath."¹⁰¹ The protagonists thus express the emotions of normally accepted marital relationships while underscoring their own transgression of emotional ties. The enjoyment of such performances offered audiences the invitation to dabble in the dangerous feelings that led to crime, from within the safe retreat of the orderly and conventional emotional life to which the penitent returns. While the emotions that underlay the crimes were tied to distinctive, individual traits and situations, the emotions invoked in the penitent phase returned to universally accepted norms.

As these examples suggest, the speakers of "last good-nights" might be distinctive in their crimes but became homogeneous in their contrition. This was no accident and was not left to the chance of the actual speeches that might be uttered on the day of execution. Two of the pieces cited above were signed by authors, and thus explicitly presented as an imaginary version of the culprit's words. Clearly, "last good-nights" did not necessarily represent the real sentiments any more than the literal words of their protagonists. The "true account" of Francis Cooper, "The bloody Miller," noted that he denied the crime to the last, yet described his crime in a first-person ballad.¹⁰² Miscreants need not even survive their misdeeds to speak in such accounts. "The Unnatural Mother" featured a woman who killed herself and two of her children after a quarrel with her husband, yet here she gave voice: "Jane Lawson was my Name, / James Lawsons Cruel Wife, / By him I had three Children small, / and liv'd a happy Life."¹⁰³ The ventriloquism of these pieces constructed an emotive persona, not in order to represent the culprit's actual feelings, but to convey what he or she ought to have felt. While most criminals did conform to the expected conventions of the "good end" on the day of execution, their shortcomings in this respect were not an insuperable bar to the expected edification.

These pieces, and the custom of the gallows speech itself, gave a paradoxical public voice and prominence to society's worst offenders.¹⁰⁴ Still, their public voice was largely constrained within prescribed limits. These customary patterns served the ends of authority by legitimizing judicial coercion and punishment. State power was here endorsed not only by abstract principles but also by the internal conviction of those most harshly affected: by feeling, in other words, as well as by reason. Like earlier sensationalist accounts, too, the "last good-nights" worked through the emotions of their audience—horror, pity, sympathy, guilt. The shape of their emotionalism is not simply reducible to their uses as tools of political authority. Rather, their shifting of focus to the inner life of the criminal both drew on and fed broader cultural changes, from increasingly secular explanations for social evils to the emotive expectations of companionate models of marriage.

England was not alone in the long-term shift of sensationalist interest to the individual psyche and emotional life of malefactors. Tom Cheesman, in his study of German "shocking ballads," finds increasing focus on individual identity in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, associated with the decline of traditional ascribed status and the growth of more urban, commercial society.¹⁰⁵ Sensationalist accounts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries continued the earlier interest in familial violence but also turned markedly toward a focus on the criminal mind and on the circumstantial details of the descent into crime.¹⁰⁶ The alteration of perspective is especially evident in comparing works on similar themes across the centuries. The early period, as noted, featured a number of cases of familial murder in which a father killed his whole family, crimes that in the sixteenth century were typically attributed to his vicious course of life and the influence of the devil. The title of a pamphlet on a parallel case from 1846 dramatizes the changed outlook: "Christian Holtzwart, the killer of his wife and five children, as person, thinker, and poet. Selections from his journals and complete account of the sixfold murder and arson committed on the night of December 28–29, 1845 in Sudenburg-Magdeburg. (With a picture of the murderer and the scene of the grisly deed.)"¹⁰⁷ The publisher of this pamphlet was unusually lucky to find a multiple murderer who was also an author. In addition to an account of the killer's life, the pamphlet includes parts of a three-act drama he wrote, as well as poetry and extracts from his letters and religious opinions. Ironically, the murders got him published, though debt and failure had evidently driven him to his desperate acts. Although Holtzwart's was an unusual case, it was merely an extreme of the more general interest in the criminal's inner life.¹⁰⁸

Recent works on the history of discourses of crime in the United States have found similar patterns of historical development in crime literature. Starting with the regular publication of execution sermons in the late seventeenth century, American publications combined social and religious agendas with features aimed at maximizing emotional response.¹⁰⁹ As with earlier examples, the function of sensationalist elements was partly commercial, aiming to arouse maximum interest and sales, but it served many other purposes as well. Daniel Cohen has suggested, for example, that the salacious material of nineteenth-century American crime literature responded to the tensions of the developing competitive society, with its simultaneous offering of limitless temptation and demand for internalized self-control.¹¹⁰ Karen Halttunen argues that the violent sensationalism of the same period should be seen as an attempt to fill cultural needs formerly served by religious discourse. In place of the older conception of general human depravity as explanation for evil actions, crime literature turned to narrative techniques that marked the murderer as uniquely monstrous. The variations in modern sensationalism have both reflected and influenced cultural changes that reshaped key areas of emotional resonance and public concern. In seventeenth-century England, sensationalist crime reports aligned companionate marital ideals with intense imagining of subjective experience and visceral endorsement of state power. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a sharp focus on the aberrant individual sought new secular explanations of criminal violence. This contemned genre addressed central issues of cultural meaning and social discipline, while retaining the nondisputatious mode of emotional evocation at its operative core.

Thus evidence from the sixteenth century into the modern age shows the cultural significance of sensationalist crime literature. It arose not as a commercial ploy but as a means of interpreting the meaning of severe breaches of social bonds to the expanding public accessible through the medium of print. The genre was neither low-class nor scurrilous in its beginnings. It was linked strongly with religious understandings of sin and punishment, political goals of strengthening public order and authority, and cultural tensions over the changing political dynamics of family life. At other historical periods, it has retained key elements of these concerns as it addressed the social and cultural conflicts of its time and place. Its emotion-arousing features make it powerfully persuasive, even as it presents itself as noncontroversial and thus deserving of the same emotional response from all right-thinking people who disapprove of criminal violence. Modern intellectual categories, with their attempt at rigorous separation of the emotive and imaginary from the real and rational, have tended to promote an unwarranted dismissal of sensationalism as debased and trivial. It has had religious, political, and cultural impact, promoting the ready acceptance of punitive governmental actions, the advancement of religious agendas, the internalization of mainstream emotional expectations, the habit of vicarious emotional experience, and the focus on distinctive individual identity. Its influence is difficult to measure, but too real to ignore. As attested by the role of crime in modern American political discourse, intellectuals' contempt for sensationalism has distracted attention from its often powerful effects.

I am very grateful for helpful advice on drafts of this paper from Janet Moore Lindman, Frances E. Dolan, Daniel A. Cohen, and anonymous reviewers for the AHR. Thanks also to John Herman for related research assistance. I received useful feedback on early versions of this work from audiences at the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference and the Popular Culture Association. I would like to thank the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Rowan University for supporting my work.

Joy Wiltenburg is a professor of history at Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey. She received her Ph.D. in early modern European social history from the University of Virginia, where she studied with Erik Midelfort. She is the author of Disorderly Women and Female Power in the Street Literature of Early Modern England and Germany (1992) and recently published Women in Early Modern Germany: An Anthology of Popular Texts (2003). This article is a product of her current research interest in the cultural history of crime.

Notes

^1. Stephen Seplow, "Heavy TV Viewing Found to Deepen Fears," Philadelphia Inquirer, December 2, 1994, sec. A,1; see also N. Signorielli, G. Gerbner, and M. Morgan, "Violence on Television—The Cultural Indicators Project," Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 39, no. 2 (1995): 278–83; Leo Barrile, "Television and Attitudes about Crime: Do Heavy Viewers Distort Criminality and Support Retributive Justice?" Justice and the Media: Issues and Research, Ray Surette, ed. (Springfield, Ill., 1984), 141–58.

^2. Julius R. Ruff makes a similar observation in Violence in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1800 (Cambridge, 2001), 40; see also Uwe Danker, Räuberbanden im Alten Reich um 1700: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte von Herrschaft und Kriminalität in der Frühen Neuzeit, 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main, 1988), 1: 15.

^3. Many studies could be cited but see, for example, Julie Ellison, Cato's Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion (Chicago, 1999); Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150–1750 (New York, 1998); see also Barbara H. Rosenwein, "Worrying about Emotions in History," AHR 107, no. 3 (June 2002): 821–45; Carol Z. Stearns and Peter N. Stearns, eds., Emotion and Social Change: Toward a New Psychology (New York, 1988).

^4. Dismissive comments about sensationalism are too numerous to list, but some scholars have begun to study crime literature seriously, especially in recent years. See, for example, in addition to those cited below, Frances E. Dolan, Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England, 1550–1700 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1994); Lincoln B. Faller, Turned to Account: The Forms and Functions of Criminal Biography in Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1987); Lisa Duggan, Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence, and American Modernity (Durham, N.C., 2000).

^5. A simultaneous coinage by historians of philosophy used the same term for "materialist" philosophies positing the senses as the sole source of knowledge. The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford, 1971), s.v. "sensationalism."

^6. For a recent commentary on the devaluation of emotion in philosophy, see Michael Stocker Valuing Emotions, with Elizabeth Hegeman (Cambridge, 1996), 91–108; on the devaluation of emotion and its association with feminized cultural elements, see Catherine A. Lutz, "Engendered Emotion: Gender, Power, and the Rhetoric of Emotional Control in American Discourse," Language and the Politics of Emotion, Lutz and Lila Abu-Lughod, eds. (Cambridge, 1990), 69–91.

^7. This quotation is from 1886; also cited is an earlier use in 1865. Oxford English Dictionary.

^8. See Karen Halttunen, Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), 29–30.

^9. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Alan Sheridan, trans. (New York, 1977). Among recent works on the social and cultural history of crime, see, in addition to those cited below, Garthine Walker, Crime, Gender, and Social Order in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2003); Joan Neuberger, Hooliganism: Crime, Culture, and Power in St. Petersburg, 1900–1914 (Berkeley, Calif., 1993); Richard J. Evans, Rituals of Retribution: Capital Punishment in Germany 1600–1987 (Oxford, 1996); J. A. Sharpe, Crime in Early Modern England, 1550–1750, 2d edn. (London, 1999); Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1992).

^10. Richard van Dülmen, Die Entdeckung des Individuums 1500–1800 (Frankfurt am Main, 1997), 54–55; Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, Edmund Jephcott, trans. (New York, 1978).

^11. For this argument, see Roger Chartier, Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations, Lydia G. Cochrane, trans. (Cambridge, 1988), 8–9.

^12. See, for example, Friedrich Roth, ed., Des Ritters Hans Ebran von Wildenberg Chronik von den Fürsten aus Bayern (Munich, 1905), 95–96.

^13. A classic example is the fourteenth-century contest between the imperial city of Augsburg and the renegade nobleman Jacob Puttrich. See Die Chroniken der deutschen Städadte vom 14. bis ins 16. Jahrhundert, 20 vols. (Leipzig, 1862), 4: 22–58.

^14. On the uses of chronicles, see, for example, Chroniken der deutschen Städadte, 3: 3–22; Heinrich Schmidt, Die deutschen Städadtechroniken als Spiegel des bürgerlichen Selbstverstäandnisses im Spätmittelalter (Göttingen, 1958), 14–28.

^15. This study is based on my compilation of approximately 120 broadside and pamphlet accounts of crime printed in German during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They are drawn from collections in the Deutsche Staatsbibliothek in Berlin (hereafter, SBB), the British Library in London (BL), the Zentralbibliothek in Zurich (ZB), and other libraries, in addition to reprinted sources. Although I cannot claim to have found every example, my sample is representative of those now extant.

^16. Paul Roth, Die neuen Zeitungen in Deutschland im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert (Leipzig, 1914), 17–20; Karl Schottenloher, Flugblatt und Zeitung: Ein Wegweiser durch das gedruckte Tagesschrifttum (Berlin, 1922), 150–56.

^17. See Matthias Senn, ed., Die Wickiana: Johann Jakob Wicks Nachrichtensammlung aus dem 16. Jahrhundert (Zurich, 1975), 14; Bruno Weber, ed., Wunderzeichen und Winkeldrucker 1543–1586: Einblattdrucke aus der Sammlung Wikiana in der Zentralbibliothek Zürich (Zurich, 1972).

^18. In my sample, about half of the crime accounts are in song form.

^19. See Joy Wiltenburg, Disorderly Women and Female Power in the Street Literature of Early Modern England and Germany (Charlottesville, Va., 1992), 35–39; Gisela Ecker, Einblattdrucke von den Anfängen bis 1555: Untersuchungen zu einer Publikationsform literarischer Texte, 2 vols. (Göppingen, 1981), 1: 102–9.

^20. I should note that sensationalism did not focus exclusively on crime, since emotive style was also used in reports on such events as natural disasters. The focus on crime, however, is the longest lived, and I would argue the most culturally significant.

^21. On authors' low pay, see Walter Krieg, Materialien zu einer Entwicklungsgeschichte der Bücher-Preise und des Autoren-Honorars vom 15. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert (Vienna, 1953), 79–82.

^22. For an effective treatment of crime texts as shapers as well as reflectors of culture, see Daniel Cohen, Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace: New England Crime Literature and the Origins of American Popular Culture, 1674–1860 (New York and Oxford, 1993).

^23. See Roger Chartier, ed., The Culture of Print: Power and the Uses of Print in Early Modern Europe, Lydia G. Cochrane, trans. (Princeton, 1989), 8; Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1983); Lorna Jane Abray, The People's Reformation: Magistrates, Clergy, and Commons in Strasbourg, 1500–1598 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1985), 77–78; Lennard Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (Philadelphia, 1997), 42–70.

^24. In my sample, over half of the crime reports were explicitly labeled as true; in a randomly selected listing of news reports (neue Zeitung) in the VD 16 bibliography of sixteenth-century works, fewer than a quarter (22 of 120) were so labeled; Verzeichnis der im deutschen Sprachbereich erschienenen Drucke des XVI. Jahrhunderts: VD 16, 22 vols. (Stuttgart, 1983-), 14: 464–81.

^25. "Mein gelebster Leser / es ist leider Gott erbarms ein erschröckliche Neue zeitung vber die ander ... das mir mein Hertz zerspringen wil / vnnd meine Augen zu wasser wöllen werden / nit weiß ich wie es vmb dich sicht denn deren viel sind / die jnen kein glauben geben / dieweil sies nit antrifft / vnd als erlogen vnd erdicht muß sein." Drey Wahafftige [sic] Newe Zeitung. Die sehr erschröcklich sind / Die erst vo[n] der Statt Straßburg ... Die Ander von Peter Niern wie derselbig wunderbarlich gefangen / vnnd gericht ist worden ... (Heidelberg, 1582), Wick F30.2, 22a-23, ZB. Here and elsewhere translations are mine.

^26. See Davis, Factual Fictions, 82.

^27. Examples include, for the first tune, Newe Warhaffte / Auch Erschröckliche Zeitunge: Wie ein Son vnd Dochter Sampt einer Dienstmagdt / jhren Leiblichen / Natürlichen Vatter / Hauptman Jacob Eliner ... zu Brägentz am Bodensee jämerlicher ... weiß Ermördt haben ... (Augsburg, 1595), Ye 5071, SBB; Eine Warhafftige vnd erschröckliche Newe Zeittung / Welche sich begeben vnd zugetragen hat / in der Statt Limburg / mit eines reichen Becken Tochter / mit Nahmen Catharina ... (Frankfurt am Main, 1626), reproduced in Rolf Wilhelm Brednich, Die Liedpublizistik im Flugblatt des 15. bis 17. Jahrhunderts, 2 vols. (Baden-Baden, 1974–1975), 2: no. 118; Zwo warhafftige newe Zeitung / Die Erste / Welche sich begeben ... hat in der Stadt Braunschweig ... (Magdeburg, 1605), Yd 7852.23, SBB; Eine warhafftige Newe zeyttung / so sich begeben hat zu Eschwein / wie allda ein mörder ist eingebracht worden / welcher 55. Mord mit seiner eygen Hand verbracht hat ... (Coburg, 1597), BL; Ein Gründtliche auch warhafftige vnd erschlöckliche [sic] newe Zeitung / von sechs Mördern ... (1603), Ye 5571, SBB. For the second, Warhafftige vnd zuvor Vnerhörte erschröckliche newe Zeitung: Von einem Mörder / sampt seinem Weyb vnd Tochter ... (Constance, 1602), BL; Drey Warhafftige Newe Zeittungen. Die Erste / Von dem gewaltigen ... Wetter ... Die Ander / auß dem Niderland (Cologne, 1598), BL.

^28. Johannes Füglin, Beschreibung eines grausamen Mordts / so in der Loblichen vnd weitberümpten Statt Basel / nach Christi geburt M.D.LXV. vergangen ist (Basel, 1565), ZB.

^29. See, for example, on disobedience: Eigentlicher Bericht und traurige Zeitung / Von unterschiedlicher Wunderzeichen ... Erbärmliche Neue Zeitung / Von einer ungehorsamen Tochter (1673), Ye 7681, SBB; on cursing: Warhafftige Zeitung / So niemals erhöört / weil die Welt gestanden / welche sich begeben zu Quedelburg in Sachsen (Erfurt, 1621), in Brednich, Liedpublizistik, no. 117; on drinking and gambling: Ein warhafftiger / grundtlicher Bericht vnd newe Zeitung: Was sich mit einem vollen Weinschlauch vnd seinem ehelichen Weib / die groß schwanger gewesen ... (Erfurt, 1616), BL; on lust: Ein warhafftigen bericht vnd neuwe zeittung von einem kloster ... von der Aabtissin welche grosse vnzucht getrieben mit einem vogt welche zehen kinder mit im gehabt / vnnd dieselbigen jämerlich ermördt ... (Cologne, 1599), Ye 5301, SBB.

^30. See, for example, W. A. Coupe, review of The Shocking Ballad Picture Show, by Tom Cheesman, Journal of European Studies 25 (1995): 212–13.

^31. On the similar evocation of horror in accounts of monstrous births, see Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York, 1998), 180–81.

^32. Füglin, Beschreibung eines grausamen Mordts, 16–17.

^33. "Jedoch vor grossem Hertzlaid vnd trawren / Javil mehr vor entsetzung Menschlicher Natur / wird solches kein Scribent leichtlich verbringen mögen." Ware Abcontrafectung ainer erbärmlichen / vnd erschröcklichen Newen Zeytung / so sich zu Erlingen / 4. Meil Wegs von Augspurg ... verlauffen ... (Augsburg, 1589), in The German Single-Leaf Woodcut, 1550–1600: A Pictorial Catalogue, Walter L. Strauss, ed., 3 vols. (New York, 1974), 3: 948.

^34. See Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch rev. ed. (Leipzig, 1965), s.v. "peinlich."

^35. On the power of these parallels in art, see Mitchell B. Merback, The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Chicago, 1999) and Samuel Y. Edgerton, Jr., Pictures and Punishment: Art and Criminal Prosecution during the Florentine Renaissance (Ithaca, N.Y., 1985).

^36. "keins Menschen wird gar nicht verschont / wie er arbeit wird ihm belohnt / keinem wirds anderst geschehen." Warhafftige Beschreibung von einer schröcklichen Mordthat / so geschehen 1652 ... in der Neisischen Herrschafft ... (Neisse, 1653), in Brednich, Liedpublizistik, no. 121.

^37. Gustav Milchsack, Burkard Waldis (Halle, 1881); Milchsack, introduction to Der verlorene Sohn, ein Fastnachtspiel by Burkard Waldis (Halle, 1881); Angelika Reich, "Burkard Waldis," Deutsche Dichter der frühen Neuzeit (1450–1600): Ihr Leben und Werk, Stephan Füssel, ed. (Berlin, 1993).

^38. Burkard Waldis, Eyne warhafftige vnd gantz erschreckliche historien / Wie eyn weib jre vier kinder tyranniglichen ermordet / vnd sich selbst auch vmbbracht hat / Geschehen zu Weidenhausen bei Eschweh in Hessen ... (Marburg, 1551), BL. Other editions were printed in Strassburg and Erfurt, and the same text was reprinted as news in Magdeburg, 1578; see Emil Weller, Annalen der Poetischen National-Literatur der Deutschen im XVI. und XVII. Jahrhundert (1862; rpt. edn., Hildesheim, 1964), 1: 228; Ye 4415, SBB.

^39. "Sie greyff erst nach dem eltsten sohn / Im seinen kopff zuhawen ab / Bald er zum fenster sich begab / Vnd wolt hinaus gekrochen sein / Beim beyn zog sie jn wider hinein / Vnd warff jn vff die erd darnider / Er macht sich auff / entlieff jr wider." Waldis, Eyne warhafftige vnd gantz erschreckliche historien, A2.

^40. "Er sprach hertz liebste mutter mein / Verschon mein doch vnd laß dir sagen / Ich wil dir all das wasser tragen / Das dir den winter thut von nöten / Verschon mein doch wölst mich nit tödten. / Da halff keyn bitt es war vmb sunst / Ihrn willen schafft des Teuffels kunst / Sie schlug vff jn gleich nach der schwer / Als obs eyn frisches krautheupt wer." Waldis, Eyne warhafftige vnd gantz erschreckliche historien, A2.

^41. "Da gab der ewig Gott sein segen / Da sie durch Gottes wort gelert / Das sie sich seliglich bekert / Mit ernst thet sich zu Gott ergeben." Waldis, Eyne warhafftige vnd gantz erschreckliche historien, A3v.

^42. If multiple accounts of the same crime were excluded, these figures would be 37 of 56, about the same proportion. Since the focus here is on representations, I count different reports of a single crime as separate items.

^43. For a fuller discussion of this pattern, see Wiltenburg, "Family Murders: Gender, Reproduction, and the Discourse of Crime in Early Modern Germany," Colloquia Germanica: Internationale Zeitschrift für Germanistik 28, nos. 3–4 (1995): 357–74.

^44. See, for example, in addition to those cases cited elsewhere, Eigentlicher Bericht und traurige Zeitung / Von unterschiedlichen Wunderzeichen ... Erbärmliche Neue Zeitung / Von einer ungehorsamen Tochter (1673), Ye 7681, SBB [daughter kills parents, children, siblings]; Erschröckliche neuwe Zeittung. Vonn einem Mörder Christman genant ... (1581), BL [father kills children, many others]; Newe Warhaffte / Auch Erschröckliche Zeitunge: Wie ein Son vnd Dochter ... jhren Leiblichen / Natürlichen Vatter ... (1595), Ye 5071, SBB [children kill father]; Newe Zeittung vnd Warhaffte erzehlung ... (Augsburg, 1602), in Dorothy Alexander and Walter L. Strauss, eds., The German Single-Leaf Woodcut 1600–1700: A Pictorial Catalogue, 2 vols. (New York, 1977), 2: 452 [father kills children]; Warhafftige Beschreibung von einer schröcklichen Mordthat / so geschehen 1652 ... in der Neisischen Herrschafft ... (1653), in Brednich, Liedpublizistik, no. 121 [father kills pregnant wife and son].

^45. "als bey dem alle natürliche angeborne blutstrew verloschen." Warhafftige vnd schröckliche Newe zeitung / von einer Fürnemmen Person / welche durch verfürung deß bösen Feindes / vnd grimmigem zorn / auff ein mal Acht mordt verbracht ... zu Wangen im Algäw ... (Lauingen, 1585), A2v, Flugschr. 1585–12, SBB. See also Newe Zeittung vnd Warhaffte erzehlung / welcher gestalt ein reicher Bawr ... Bernhard Kuntz ... (Augsburg, 1602), in Alexander and Strauss, German Single-Leaf Woodcut, 2: 452. The father was so possessed by greed that he even forgot fatherly love: "ja der angebornen Liebe / vnd Vätterlichen hertzlichen Trew / gegen seinen Leibeignen Kindern."

^46. Ein warhafftig vnnd doch Erbermlich Geschicht / so sich begeben hat / zu Dürssenreit / von einem vngeratne[n] Ehrlosen Bößwicht / wie er ein Junge Tochter zu vnehrn begert ... (Eger, 1573), Wick F22.23, p. 299, ZB; Ein warhafftig vnnd erbermliche Geschicht / Von einem vngeratnen Son welcher seine leibliche[n] Schwester hat notzwingen wöllen ... (Eger, 1573), Universitätsbibliothek Tübingen.

^47. Direct dialogue appears in at least 28 of my approximately 120 reports (likely an underestimate because I was not systematically looking for this feature early in my research) and is especially common (23 of 63) in reports of familial killing.

^48. "Bath sie mit süssen worten / auß jhren lieblichen mundt / solt jhn jr leben fristen thun." Ein Jämerlich vnd Erbärmlich new Lied / Von einem jungen Gesellen / welcher durch bose gesellschafft / verführt worden / das er sein Vormund selb eylfft / ermördet hat ... (n.p., 1573), A3, Universitätsbibliothek Tübingen.

^49. "mit dem Vatter zu schertzen / das nam er bey dem Arm geschwindt / vnd stach jm nach dem hertzen." Die Drit / von einem Küffer Christoff Bihl genanndt / Welcher 9. seiner Kinder jemerlich hat vmbgebracht ... (n.p., 1580) [fragment of title page], Wick F29.110, p. 214, ZB.

^50. "Weinet bitterlich in der gestalt / Vnd thet zur Muter sagen. Ach liebe Muter thu mirs nit / Wie dem Philipp dort hinden ..." Drey Warhafftige Newe Zeittungen. Die Erste / Von dem gewaltigen ... Wetter ... Die Ander / auß der Niderland (Cologne, 1598), A3, BL.

^51. For other examples of direct speech by child-victims, see Wiltenburg, Disorderly Women, 225–31; Zwo Warhafftige Newe Zeitung / Die erst / Von einem Mörder / der sein Ehelich W