The Tears of a Killer: Criminal Trials and Sentimentalism in the Austrian Netherlands

A style of feeling known as the ‘cult of sensibility’ swept through Europe in the second half of the eighteenth century, stressing the importance of both sympathy and public tears. In this article, I argue that this new style to some extent also affected common people’s emotional practices in the Southern Netherlands. Primarily using trial records, three phases in the history of sensibility are roughly distinguished. Up to around 1770, few traces of the cult of sensibility could be found and trial records only reported women as occasionally weeping. This changed in the 1770s and early 1780s, w... Mehr ...