e try to understand our world, finding organisation in the commotion of reality. We also seek the answer of the often crucial Wand certainly most intriguing of all questions – ’why?’ In this respect a fundamental question is if this was an existing crime or not. In several countries, it seems to have been seen as being a specific and defined crime, with Britain as the clear exception, seemingly surprised with each new case and treating each of them as an isolated event. It is also unlikely, though not impossible, that there is some reason behind the British judicial view as the empirical ground for our knowledge about these crimes can be quite unsteady.850 Some studies, of course, do not seek deeper explanations. They instead either are underlining how these cases distort often held views of the terrifying effect of executions or how they can be seen as variation of suicide or of dyadic death, which is a term for murder followed by suicide.851 Historians do want to understand and explain, to answer the hardest and central question: ’Why?’ Still, having an answer such as suicide or piety to fit all cases risks steering one’s understanding of the many cases where explanations are uncertain, but naturally the question of why these crimes were and are committed has been answered. One could say that we are given three ways to answer and understand and one to understand that we lack understanding. An important point is made by Roddy Nilsson and Marie Eriksson in a study of women who commit violent crimes. They note that research often uses explanations and motives present in the discourse of the authorities. If a certain commonly suggested motive is given in the documents of the courts, it is not certain that it emerges from the accused woman; equally well it could have been suggested by someone in the longing for the scaffold 850 On the unsteadiness see e g Reeh and Hemmingsen 2018 p 114 sq, 117. 851 Wormer 1995 and Byard and Maxwell Stewart 2018. 240 the explanations of the acts
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