These two books, linked by both subject matter and contributing authors or editors, focus on one conception of ‘a science’ involving policing, crime, criminal law, criminals, criminologists and punishment. The scare quotes around ‘a science’ are more than a matter of convention, since it is significantly unclear why, apart from reasons (which may well be reasonable) of social administration, so many diverse aspects of social life could ever have been thought of as the subject matter of a unified science. But there was once hope at the prospect, and even, according to some, belief that it had been realized: a science of criminology. The clearest-cut claim for such a science assembled around the name and legacy of Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909), even while his many critics complained that his writings had the poorest possible claim to be ‘scientific’ in any disciplined sense of that term. A historical unravelling is manifestly needed; here we have the sources for just that. Neither of these books, it is true, deals at length with the conceptual and historiographic presumptions of supposing that there is, or could be, ‘a history of criminology’. (Lombroso, it seems to me, was blithely oblivious of the need for, or possibility of, conceptual analysis in any form.) But these books do provide an unprecedented wealth and range of resources for understanding the biological approach to crime from about 1870 to about 1945.

Lombroso became the best-known late nineteenth-century voice crying out for society, and especially for the judiciary, to concern itself with study of the criminal not the crime. Further, his name became indelibly linked with the notion that there is a category of ‘born criminals’ (the term he adopted from Enrico Ferri), which Lombroso himself linked to atavism (while increasingly recognizing other causes). In fact his work was only part of a very large literature, itself symptomatic of an important shift in expert or professional opinion, intimately connected to hopes placed in positivist natural and social science, towards the view that social order depends on ‘social defence’ in the light of knowledge, not on the moral exhortation of the individual's will. The historian Martin J. Wiener, in Constructing the Criminal: Culture, Law, and Policy in England, 1830–1914 (Cambridge, 1990) laid out this thesis in systematic and articulate form. Before then, and expanding since, historians have shown a great deal of interest in what now look like the excesses of creating a biological anthropology of criminal types and the consequent advocacy of (supposedly) biology-based policy. The collective volume edited by Peter Becker and Richard F. Wetzell is a summation and extension of this work.

The criminal as subject and the science of criminology formed together, and this, in nearly all accounts, is the achievement of Lombroso and his generation. Papers included here document this dual emergence with scholarly precision, and they extend from the well-known contributions made in Italy and France to excellent studies of Germany, the United States, Australia, Argentina and Japan. It is interesting that, whatever its intellectual contributions to hereditarian thought were, Britain appears to have taken up the notion of a ‘science of criminology’ only later, borrowing the notion from elsewhere. Most significantly, perhaps, the collection extends the range of research in two directions. One direction is towards social, legal and political contexts – for example, to a recognition of the continuing importance of judicial opinion, to consciousness of ‘Jewishness’, to fears of urbanization and of the underworld, and to the process of modernization. One contribution, it should be noted, turns to the earlier hopes for the sciences of man accompanying the French Revolution, steps outside the time frame of the book and, in a gentle way, makes problematic the periodization which implicitly defines the book's scope and subject matter. A second extension of research reaches out to the life and times of criminals themselves – to their tattoos, argot and self-presentation. The last section of the book, reflecting the involvement of the German Historical Institute in the whole enterprise, deals informatively and thoughtfully with crime and the self-appointed experts on crime in the Weimar and Nazi years. The book is replete with reference to and discussion of the state of scholarship on these matters, and it is much the most comprehensive guide to what has all too simplistically been put down to Lombroso's influence.

The collection includes a most clear paper by Mary S. Gibson on Lombroso in relation to Italian criminology, and one by Nicole Hahn Rafter on the reception of Lombroso's criminal anthropology in the United States. These two US historians have also collaborated to produce editions in English translation of both Lombroso's Criminal Man (here reviewed) and his Criminal Woman, the Prostitute, and the Normal Woman (Durham, NC, 2004). To produce an edition of Criminal Man, certainly among that notorious class of endlessly cited but unread books, is a special problem, and the editors' decisions are interesting. The original book, which appeared in Italian in 1876, was short and sloppy, and abundantly demonstrated what David G. Horn, in the collection (p. 334), calls its ‘pastiche qualities’ – but it was provocative. It claimed as the primary cause of criminality what Lombroso identified as atavism, and hence pointed to what should be the primary focus of policy. Lombroso, then, amongst a flood of other writing, carried the book through five editions, each larger than the previous one, modifying but never discarding his earliest ideas or his sloppiness, and especially adding new sections, notably on different criminal types, on moral insanity, on connections between epilepsy and criminality and on penal policy. He was, very significantly, a ‘positivist’, in the sense that he believed that the collection of facts, of whatever character (he used statistics, quotations revealing the insights of writers such as Dostoevsky, tattoos – anything) itself constitutes science. And he was an enthusiast, collecting, examining, measuring, communicating, writing, campaigning, tirelessly, without breath for thought – although, of course, as the editors defensively explain, many of his views were shared by a wider community of self-appointed experts, especially psychiatrists, even if few shared his commitment to the theory of atavism.

The editors have carefully assembled material from each of the five editions to cover the full range of his claims and contradictions, valuably accompanying this with a tabular comparison of the editions (and illustrations). They include a lot of his illustrations. The illustrations were put forward as ‘factual statements’, though it is now very hard for us to see how they ever could have been thought that, though they were. The edition will be very useful both for students and to counter the many uninformed statements made about Lombroso. The resulting text, published here, cuts out his repetitions and much of the mass of data, and, it would seem, generally smooths his style of presentation. Historians will find the text enormously helpful – Lombroso's books are hard to obtain, and the previous English-language edition of his work (in 1911) was actually a compilation by his daughter. But scholars will have to go back to the originals if they wish to be clear about the structure and style of his writing or, indeed, to cite according to conventional standards. This book is in its way a completely new edition. Nowhere here, or in the collection, do the editors really face head-on the question of how, out of all this stuff, it could be thought that ‘a science’ as a opposed to ‘a pretence of a science’ emerged. What did emerge, of course, was the lineaments of a specialist occupation, with large-scale implications for public policy.