A NOTE ON SOURCES

Although historians have for a long time known about the existence of lunacy investigation law, the sources relating to the law’s use have remained elusive and underappreciated. Specifically, while there are many sources about the functioning of lunacy investigation law, the trial testimony, judges’ statements, lawyers’ interventions, appeals and witness statements have been difficult to locate for most jurisdictions in which this trial process took place. In order to write a history of lunacy investigation law in transatlantic perspective, this book has exploited two major sources: reports on lunacy trials that are found in the English Reports (see below), and a largely intact set of lunacy trial manuscripts found in the New Jersey State Archives. The most comprehensive published interpretation of English lunacy trials for the early nineteenth-century period is Akihito Suzuki’s Madness at Home: The Psychiatrist, the Patient, and the Family in England, 1820–1860. Suzuki’s analysis is based on 196 commissions of lunacy that were published in The Times newspaper. Finding the original manuscript sources for these and earlier commissions of lunacy has so far proved next to impossible. However, case reports of many lunacy trials are now available online. The English Reports is a 179-volume compilation of case reports dating from 1220 to 1866. As Peter Bartlett notes, ‘the vast bulk of the cases date from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries’. A convenient way to access English Reports relating to lunacy trials is through the search engine Justis, which, among other resources, provides an extensive online library of legal sources for the United Kingdom. Using the Justis search engine, I have collected case reports for over two hundred cases in lunacy, dating from Beverley’s landmark case in 1598 to the beginning of the period covered by Akihito Suzuki’s