UC Irvine

This dissertation explores the development of medical forensics in the courtroom as centered around women’s bodies and expert testimony, and it offers a new lens for reading the eighteenth-century novel. It performs this examination through an analysis of trial records and the attendant print culture of England in the first half of the eighteenth century, in conversation with the forensic realism of Samuel Richardson’s 1740 Pamela and 1748 Clarissa, teasing out the emerging novel’s use and transformation of what I call the “forensic mode” of reading. Through intrinsic psychological motivations to prove and disprove, to construct and explore cases as presented through the body of the novel, both stories and trial narratives engage in training audiences to approach, process, reimagine, interpret, and demand a high evidentiary standard for historical, criminal, and personal accounts alike, within an immersive context of a print culture that increasingly emphasized and sensationalized crime. Though it reaches back into the seventeenth century for medical context, treatises, and some criminal context (including accounts of matrons and midwives in witchcraft trials, on both the defense and prosecution’s side of the bench), its central area of analysis and consideration are the years 1700 through 1750, with a focus on the evidence-gathering and testimonial properties of rape trials in dialogue with the attempted and actual rape of Richardson’s protagonists.