Borders

Nabokov once wrote that ‘[t]he underworld was a world apart’. Like him, men with power and pens four centuries ago thought of criminal communities around them as something apart, somewhere else, an otherness that we might well call an ‘ideological cut’ today. This writing constructed alien criminal worlds on paper. Before 1660 surviving writing comes from only one side of the criminal divide: from magistrates, moralists, or hack-authors whose main aim was to say over and over again that ‘criminals’ were deviant, different, and distant. They believed that they wrote self-evident truths. There are no first-hand stories of criminal lives with a protagonist's care for feeling, though some scholars think that Moll Cutpurse has left us a Life in her own words. No lower-class thief or vagrant put her/his life down on paper, although administrators and authors did it for them all the time. Clerks scribbled as suspects told stories. They often wrote quickly and might have missed what was being said, or perhaps they chose and chopped words later on when suspects were no longer in the room. Thousands of such depositions survive today, and we think of them as narratives framed by both their tellers and transcribers. Other texts were published for the book trade. A continental rogue literature stretched east from Spain all the way across the German lands to Poland, and forked south to Italy.