Crime

Renaissance Florence had a problem: it wanted female sex workers, but it also needed to offer them a way out. The solution was a new brothel district – and a nunnery for former prostitutes

In 1981, a horrific murder case required police in East Germany to go door-to-door collecting handwriting samples. There was no public outrage, because they were not told about the crime.

Naples 1343: The Unexpected Origins of the Mafia – Amedeo Feniello’s history of the Camorra – has this much in common with the case against them: it’s all about the evidence.

There was no law permitting cremation, but there was no law against it either. On 13 January 1884, a Welsh druid took the matter to trial.

The issue of assisted dying was first put before Parliament in 1936. Many of the same questions remain, but the arguments have changed.

Chevaliere d’Eon or Chevalier d’Eon? An 18th-century legal dispute between two French spies unravelled into a public battle about identity.

As convicts celebrated Queen Victoria’s birthday on remote Norfolk Island, debates raged over the purpose of punishment and the merits of Alexander Maconochie’s project of moral reform.

An attempt to prosecute German war criminals in 1921 failed to such an extent that the entire enterprise is largely forgotten. What went wrong?

The real female Victorian detectives were every bit as bold as their fictional counterparts – and far more prevalent than we might assume.

Misfit, Old West villain or tragic hero of the O.K. Corral: who was the real Doc Holliday?