ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Technologies of Proof: Legal Texts, Criminal Procedure, and the Circulation of Early Modern Evidentiary Culture

• In Event: New Insights in Early Modern Science: Knowledge Production

English Abstract

Rumors of filial betrayal swept through Edinburgh after Sir James Standsfield was found dead in his bedchamber in November 1687. Once the coroner confirmed that he had died by strangulation, suspicion quickly turned toward his eldest son, Philip. When his trial began in February at Scotland’s Court of Judiciary, throngs of townspeople appeared to deliver testimonies under oath. Although none could place Philip at the scene of the crime, they implicated him instead by portraying him as someone capable of murder. In a series of corroborating tales dating back to nearly a decade before the murder, jurors came to know Philip as a person prone to “villanous practices and debauches,” and one who had long allowed himself to “Entertain a Hellish Malice and Prejudice” against his father.
Using the 1688 trial of Philip Standsfield as a point of departure, the paper reconstructs how jurors inferred intent from a composite portrait of the accused’s impiety, prior misconduct, and deviant temperament. Rather than treating intent as a discrete, knowable mental state, courts throughout the British Empire assembled biographical, behavioral, and circumstantial elements into narratives that served as proof.
I show that these practices reflect a distinctly early modern epistemology of culpability, one in which criminal law operated as a set of technologies of detection—procedural tools for reading intention from signs, character, and patterned behavior. The paper then traces how this moral-evidentiary framework traveled into the legal environments of the British Atlantic, carried through print culture, juridical habit, and the shared epistemic assumptions of early modern courts.

Author

• Arranne Gernardo Rispoli, UCLA