Moral Panics, the Media and the Law in Early Modern England

Moral panics - about religion, women, witchcraft, revolution, crime and corruption - were a recurring feature of public life in early modern England. Examining a number of examples from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this book considers whether media-driven 'law and order' panics proliferated after 1700, fuelled by a more prominent press, heightened sensibility to crime, London's anonymity, and the availability of legislative solutions from regular law-producing parliaments. Together, the essays reveal the importance of opinion as an influence on government throughout the period, but they also nuance our understanding of the public sphere. Whereas sixteenth-and early seventeenth-century panics imply a political culture where popular involvement in affairs of state was exceptional, by the mid-eighteenth century media-savvy governments routinely sought to manipulate public opinion to legitimize their rule. Moreover, the popular discourses informing moral panics shifted from a fundamentalist heaven-and-hell religious mindset to concerns about social problems such as crime and the corrupting effects of commerce. By 1800, the reading public was clearly much less deferential and more demanding of government: the rule of law now depended on extended public discussion, even through much of it took the form of sensationalist reporting and panic.