This is a Bibliography of the history of capital punishment. This bibliography is limited to history and excludes other disciplines unless they contain a meaningful amount of historical material.
Capital punishment, also known as the death penalty and formerly called judicial homicide, is the state-sanctioned killing of a person as punishment for actual or supposed misconduct. The sentence ordering that an offender be punished in such a manner is called a death sentence, and the act of carrying out the sentence is an execution. A prisoner who has been sentenced to death and awaits execution is condemned and is commonly referred to as being "on death row". Etymologically, the term capital (, derived via the Latin from , "head") refers to execution by beheading.
Bibliography contains academic level English language books (including translations) and journal articles, published mainly post World War II. Book entries may have references to reviews published in academic journals or major newspapers when these could be considered helpful. These reference reviews also function as a resource to find other works on this subject.
Works listed here are cited in the notes or bibliographies of scholarly sources. Each is published by an academic or major trade press, written by a recognized expert, or substantially reviewed in scholarly journals; borderline cases are omitted. A selection of primary sources are included. Many of the books below carry their own bibliographies; see Further reading section for longer ones, and External links section for historical sites and museums.
Citations follow APA style. Book have citations to academic journal or mainstream published reviews when available. For books only partly about the subject, give relevant chapter or section titles where useful and available. Translators of the original-language edition are included when possible. In cases where a title or name has appeared with more than one English spelling, use the most recent published form is used and a footnote documents any earlier title under which the work appeared.
General surveys
Garnsey, P. (2026). Rethinking capital punishment. Cambridge University Press. Hammel, A. (2010). Ending the death penalty. Palgrave Macmillan. Hood, R., & Hoyle, C. (2008). The death penalty: A worldwide perspective. Oxford University Press. Megivern, J. J. (1997). The death penalty: An historical and theological survey. Paulist Press. Sarat, A., & Boulanger, C. (Eds.). (2005). The cultural lives of capital punishment. Stanford University Press. Sarat, A., & Martschukat, J. (Eds.). (2011). Is the death penalty dying? European and American perspectives. Cambridge University Press. Schabas, W. A. (2002). The abolition of the death penalty in international law. Cambridge University Press. Stearns, P. N. (2023). Punishment in world history. Routledge.
Ancient Near East and Greece
Bar, S. (2021). Death by stoning in the Hebrew Bible and in post-biblical traditions. Old Testament Essays, 34(3), 789–805. Berkowitz, B. A. (2006). Execution and invention: Death penalty discourse in early rabbinic and Christian cultures. Oxford University Press. Cantarella, E. (1991). I supplizi capitali in Grecia e a Roma. Rizzoli. Muhlestein, K. (2008). Royal executions: Evidence bearing on the subject of sanctioned killing in the Middle Kingdom. Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 51(2), 181–208. Radner, K. (2015). High visibility punishment and deterrent: Impalement in Assyrian warfare and legal practice. Zeitschrift für Altorientalische und Biblische Rechtsgeschichte, 21, 103–128. Rosivach, V. J. (1987). Execution by stoning in Athens. Classical Antiquity, 6(2), 232–248. Todd, S. C. (2000). How to execute people in fourth-century Athens. In V. J. Hunter & J. C. Edmondson (Eds.), Law and social status in classical Athens (pp. 31–51). Oxford University Press.
Classical Rome
Bauman, R. A. (1996). Crime and punishment in ancient Rome. Routledge. Coleman, K. M. (1990). Fatal charades: Roman executions staged as mythological enactments. Journal of Roman Studies, 80, 44–73. Cook, J. G. (2012). Crucifixion as spectacle in Roman Campania. Novum Testamentum, 54(1), 68–100. Harley, F. (2019). Crucifixion in Roman antiquity: The state of the field. Journal of Early Christian Studies, 27(2), 303–323. Kyle, D. G. (1998). Spectacles of death in ancient Rome. Routledge.
Medieval world
Cohen, E. (1989). Symbols of culpability and the universal language of justice: The ritual of public executions in late medieval Europe. History of European Ideas, 11(1–6), 407–416. Edgerton, S. Y., Jr. (1985). Pictures and punishment: Art and criminal prosecution during the Florentine Renaissance. Cornell University Press. Gates, J. P., & Marafioti, N. (Eds.). (2014). Capital and corporal punishment in Anglo-Saxon England. Boydell Press. Jankofsky, K. P. (1980). Public executions in England in the late Middle Ages: The indignity and dignity of death. OMEGA - Journal of Death and Dying, 10(1), 43–57. Merback, M. B. (1999). The thief, the cross and the wheel: Pain and the spectacle of punishment in medieval and Renaissance Europe. University of Chicago Press. Olson, T. (2006). The medieval blood sanction and the divine beneficence of pain: 1100–1450. Journal of Law and Religion, 22(1), 63–129. Prosperi, A. (2020). Crime and forgiveness: Christianizing execution in medieval Europe (J. Carden, Trans.). Harvard University Press. Reynolds, A. (2009). Anglo-Saxon deviant burial customs. Oxford University Press. Royer, K. (2013). The English execution narrative, 1200–1700. Routledge. Ruiter, K., & Ashby, S. P. (2018). Different strokes: Judicial violence in Viking-Age England and Scandinavia. Viking and Medieval Scandinavia, 14, 153–184. Summerson, H., & Barron, C. (2025). Lives at stake: Attitudes and responses to the burning of women in medieval England, c.1200–c.1450. History, 111(396), 322–346.
Medieval Islamic world
Anthony, S. W. (2014). Crucifixion and death as spectacle: Umayyad crucifixion in its late antique context. American Oriental Society. Fierro, M. (2008). Decapitation of Christians and Muslims in the medieval Iberian Peninsula: Narratives, images, contemporary perceptions. Comparative Literature Studies, 45(2), 137–164. Lange, C. (2020). Torture and public executions in the Islamic Middle Period (eleventh–fifteenth centuries). In M. S. Gordon, R. W. Kaeuper & H. Zurndorfer (Eds.), The Cambridge world history of violence: Vol. 2. AD 500–AD 1500 (pp. 164–184). Cambridge University Press. Marsham, A. (2011). Public execution in the Umayyad period: Early Islamic punitive practice and its late antique context. Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies, 11, 101–136. Neggaz, N. (2020). The many deaths of the last ʿAbbāsid caliph al-Mustaʿṣim bi-llāh (d. 1258). Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 30(4), 585–612. Widodo, A. P. (2024). Crucifixion in the Muslim world: An overview of prominent cases from 600s to 1300s CE. IIUM Journal of Religion and Civilisational Studies, 7(2), 159–174.
Modern Europe
Bastien, P. (2011). Une histoire de la peine de mort: Bourreaux et supplices, Paris-Londres, 1500–1800. Éditions du Seuil. Evans, R. J. (1996). Rituals of retribution: Capital punishment in Germany, 1600–1987. Oxford University Press. Harrington, J. F. (2013). The faithful executioner: Life and death, honor and shame in the turbulent sixteenth century. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Krogh, T. (2012). A Lutheran plague: Murdering to die in the eighteenth century. Brill. Lunenfeld, M. (2000). Pedagogy of fear: Making the secret-Jew visible at the public autos de fe of the Spanish royal Inquisition. Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, 18(3), 77–92. Martschukat, J. (2000). Inszeniertes Töten: Eine Geschichte der Todesstrafe vom 17. bis zum 19. Jahrhundert. Böhlau. Schild, W. (2011). Töten als Rechtsakt: Zur Geschichte der Hinrichtung. Paragrana, 20(1), 32–50. Spierenburg, P. (1984). The spectacle of suffering: Executions and the evolution of repression: From a preindustrial metropolis to the European experience. Cambridge University Press. Stuart, K. (1999). Defiled trades and social outcasts: Honor and ritual pollution in early modern Germany. Cambridge University Press. van Dülmen, R. (1985). Theater des Schreckens: Gerichtspraxis und Strafrituale in der frühen Neuzeit. C. H. Beck. van Dülmen, R. (1990). Theatre of horror: Crime and punishment in early modern Germany (E. Neu, Trans.). Polity Press.
Britain and the empire
Anderson, S. (2020). A history of capital punishment in the Australian colonies, 1788 to 1900. Springer International Publishing. Bedau, H. A. (1983). Bentham's utilitarian critique of the death penalty. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 74(3), 1033–1064. Black, L. (2022). Gender and punishment in Ireland. Manchester University Press. Briggs, J. (2019). Exemplary punishment: T. R. L. MacInnes, the Department of Indian Affairs, and Indigenous executions, 1936–52. Canadian Historical Review, 100(3), 398–438. Campbell, J. (2015). Murder appeals, delayed executions, and the origins of Jamaican death penalty jurisprudence. Law and History Review, 33(2), 435–466. Cooper, D. D. (1974). The lesson of the scaffold: The public execution controversy in Victorian England. Allen Lane. Devereaux, S. (2009). Recasting the theatre of execution: The abolition of the Tyburn ritual. Past & Present, 202(1), 127–174. Gatrell, V. A. C. (1994). The hanging tree: Execution and the English people, 1770–1868. Oxford University Press. Hay, D., Linebaugh, P., Rule, J. G., Thompson, E. P., & Winslow, C. (1975). Albion's fatal tree: Crime and society in eighteenth-century England. Allen Lane. King, P., & Ward, R. (2015). Rethinking the Bloody Code in eighteenth-century Britain: Capital punishment at the centre and on the periphery. Past & Present, 228(1), 159–205. Koestler, A. (1956). Reflections on hanging. Macmillan. Linebaugh, P. (1992). The London hanged: Crime and civil society in the eighteenth century. Cambridge University Press. McGowen, R. (1987). The body and punishment in eighteenth-century England. The Journal of Modern History, 59(4), 652–679. McGowen, R. (1994). Civilizing punishment: The end of the public execution in England. Journal of British Studies, 33(3), 257–282. Potter, H. (1993). Hanging in judgment: Religion and the death penalty in England. SCM Press. Radzinowicz, L. (1948). A history of English criminal law and its administration from 1750: Vol. 1. The movement for reform, 1750–1833. Stevens and Sons. Strange, C. (2020). The death penalty and sex murder in Canadian history. University of Toronto Press.
France
André, M. (2019). Requérir la peine de mort: Les magistrats militaires entre la France et l'Algérie durant la guerre d'indépendance algérienne. 20 & 21. Revue d'Histoire, (142), 19–32. Arasse, D. (1989). The guillotine and the terror (C. Miller, Trans.). Allen Lane. Bastien, P. (2006). L'exécution publique à Paris au XVIIIe siècle: Une histoire des rituels judiciaires. Champ Vallon. Beccaria, C. (1995). Beccaria: 'On crimes and punishments' and other writings (R. Davies, Trans.; R. Bellamy, Ed.). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1764) Camus, A. (1960). Resistance, rebellion, and death (J. O'Brien, Trans.). Alfred A. Knopf. Carol, A. (2012). Physiologie de la Veuve: Une histoire médicale de la guillotine. Champ Vallon. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). Pantheon Books. (Original work published 1975) Friedland, P. (2012). Seeing justice done: The age of spectacular capital punishment in France. Oxford University Press. Janes, R. (1991). Beheadings. Representations, 35, 21–51. Le Naour, J.-Y. (2011). Histoire de l'abolition de la peine de mort: Deux cents ans de combats. Perrin.