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Introduction
This article presents a case study of a little-known, "unseen", female, Victorian serial killer called Mary Ann Cotton. At the heart of this case study is a retrospective application of Hare's psychopathy checklist (revised) (PCL-R) to Cotton, so as to determine whether or not she would now be labelled as a psychopath, and if her behaviour can be solely accounted for in this way. Thereafter, this "micro" analysis is broadened to accommodate wider social and economic factors within Victorian England which, it is argued, might also have influenced Cotton's behaviour. In seeking to analyse Cotton's activities in this way, we are consciously responding to [57] Webber's (2010, p. 3) recent call for a "critical theoretical synthesis" which could be used to push forward the boundaries of both criminology and psychology ([62] Wortley, 2011). In this Webber was echoing [6] Barak (2001, p. 153) who suggested, at the very least, that there should be an "integrated criminology" which could "encompass an interdisciplinary approach to understanding crime and crime control which incorporates at least two disciplinary (or non-disciplinary) bodies of knowledge" ([5] Barak, 1998), and [48] Rosenfeld (2011, p. 15) who, in his Presidential Address to the American Society of Criminology, has championed the idea of a "macro criminology". Rosenfeld further suggested that some of the theoretical roots for such a macro criminology would lie in the "sociological imagination", which would be nurtured by "historical investigation", so as to show the complex connections and interplay between the individual and society. In his plea Rosenfeld drew particular attention to the work of [24] Eisner (2001), [49] Roth (2009), and [55] Spierenburg (2008) in relation to murder and homicide.
There are a number of difficulties in adopting such an approach. Most obviously Rosenfeld's choice of murder and homicide as a subject of academic interest, research and theoretical breadth is, in many respects unusual, especially as far as British criminology is concerned. There has been surprisingly little rigorous academic attention paid to murder in Britain, to the extent that [7] Brookman (2005, p. 1) has gone as far as to claim that the broader subject of homicide has suffered from "academic neglect" ([16] D'Cruze et al. , 2006; [22] Dorling, 2006; Wilson, 2012). As a consequence questions related...