Профессор Линкольнского университета расскажет о связи средневековых преступлений и современных социальных тревог

During her upcoming lecture, a Lincoln University professor will examine how odd crimes and punishments from early modern England connect to modern society. Hannah Bowling, an assistant professor of English at Lincoln, will be dissecting the "timeless" anxieties of human crime and punishment that appeared in England during the 1400-1600s in her lecture, "Sorcery, Scandals and... Swans? Early Modern Crimes and Punishments." When thinking of a historical kind of punishment, it's common to think of witchcraft, which Bowling will address as part of the LU-Missouri River Regional Library lecture series. The lecture will take place from 6:30-8:30 p.m. Wednesday in the MRRL art gallery. The event is free to attend and open to the public. Bowling said the focus of her talk is to remind people of natural human worries and challenges that aren't much different than those people face today. Bowling -- who also runs and manages the lecture series -- described witchcraft as a common type of punishment during early colonial America that was often used to describe fear toward a deviation of social norms. That kind of deviation, at any place and time, has been a source of anxiety for people. Bowling will describe what that anxiety has been rooted in and how it manifested in early modern England through old court case examples. In one case, two English friends enter a legal battle because of a quarrel one had with the other's wife. According to the case records, the wife had said something to her husband's friend that infuriated him, Bowling said, pushing him to accuse the wife of being a witch. "So this whole court case emerges from this moment of gendered anxiety, in that friend B -- who is a man -- feels as if his manhood is being slighted by friend A's wife," Bowling said. This case is representative of how gender plays a large part in these "timeless" anxieties that Bowling will examine in her lecture because of how ingrained social gender roles are in society. "That's an example of the gendered anxieties that I am talking about, where we're thinking about friends and community members not acting the way that we perceive that they should, or stepping outside of those bounds and violating our social norms, in such a way that we don't know how to respond except by accusing them of being taboo," Bowling said. Other legal ramifications such as property damage or general property laws have also been born from accusations coming from out of left field. Several property laws exist, Bowling said, because "some dude hated his neighbor and decided to make a big deal out of it." As a literary scholar, Bowling's particular interest is finding how threads of the past tie into the way modern society operates. "I think we have a misconception once we get to a certain period in history -- like really anything before World War I or really like turn of the century of the 1900s -- that these people are very foreign and different from us, and that they experienced life in such a different way that we really couldn't possibly connect with them," Bowling said. "And what my talk is really trying to get at is -- at the heart of it -- people are people, across time and space continuums." This is Bowling's first talk in the lecture series. For more information, visit mrrl.org or lincolnu.edu/event s.