The Criminal of Passion

Abstract

This chapter explores the categorization of the criminal of passion in the second half of the nineteenth century, in Italy. In this period, legal and medical scholars switched the focus of the criminological debate from the crime to the criminal, looking at the criminal of passion as a social and physiological being. The attempts of the Italian Positivist School and its critics to understand and define crime-of-passion perpetrators fostered and furthered the analysis of the physiology and psychology of human emotional phenomena, highlighting the complex link between the soma, the psyche, and emotions.