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Victor M. Uribe-Uran , Fatal Love: Spousal Killers, Law, and Punishment in the Late Colonial Spanish Atlantic (Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press , 2015), pp. xxv + 429, £50.00, hb.
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Covering Spain, New Spain and New Granada, Fatal Love examines spousal homicide and its adjudication at the end of the colonial era. In this multi-site study, Victor M. Uribe-Uran not only meticulously tracks trends in these conflicts across time and space, but points to a change in public and institutional conceptions of punishment within the Spanish Empire that diverges from the trajectory Michel Foucault put forward for France.
The book begins with a thorough overview of the expansive corpus of legal texts - from the medieval Siete Partidas up to nineteenth-century law codes - that informed litigants, lawyers and judges. Uribe-Uran then moves to examine how subaltern groups fared within the criminal courts of the Spanish Atlantic through a breakdown of spousal homicide cases in New Spain. Relying on the seminal work of William Taylor, Uribe-Uran draws important contrasts between homicides in general and those among spouses, paying attention to time, place, method and identities of the culprit. After addressing trends within the sample, the author notes the high indigenous representation, the way the courts perceived these perpetrators, and the questions this raises for understanding gender and ethnicity in court cases.
Chapter 3 points out the discriminatory attributes of the legal system in the Spanish Atlantic. Rather...