The ‘legal turn’ in social, political, and literary history has shown the fundamentality of law to ways of being, knowing, and making in the early modern world. Across intensely legalistic and interconnected cultures, the practice and forms of law structured and reflected gender, power, race, and status relations, as well as systemic forms of subjugation, inequity, and enslavement. These relations are refracted in different ways when situated in different social, cultural, political, and, crucially, disciplinary contexts, and they pose urgent questions for our understanding of and engagements with the early modern past. This colloquium will bring people together from different fields to think critically and collaboratively about law not just at but as a disciplinary juncture. In particular, we ask what intersectional, inclusive, and explicitly interdisciplinary thinking can tell us about the nexus of law, language, and power in the making and experience of the early modern world.
Conveners: Laura Gowing (KCL) & Jonathan Powell (Leiden)
Speakers: Holly Brewer (Maryland), Nandini Chatterjee (Exeter), Lucy Clarke (Sheffield), Clare Egan (Lancaster), Lenny Hodges (Birkbeck), Lorna Hutson (Oxford), Chloë Ingersent (Oxford), Joanna McCunn (Bristol), Subha Mukherji (Cambridge), Tim Stretton (Saint Mary's, CA), Ian Williams (UCL)
Sponsors: The Centre for Early Modern Studies at King's College London (CEMS KCL) & The Society for Renaissance Studies (SRS)
Thanks to the support of the SRS, we're delighted to be able to offer a small number of travel bursaries to postgraduate and/or early career researchers to audit the colloquium. These will be awarded to eligible researchers on a first-come-first-served basis. To apply, please send a paragraph (max. 200 words) to cems@kcl.ac.uk with a short summary of your research interests.
The event will be held in-person at King's. Hybrid attendance will therefore not be possible.
Register via Eventbrite here: https://lawandtheearlymodern.eventbrite.co.uk
Schedule
from 10.15: tea/coffee
10.45-12.45: session 1
Chair: Hannah Murphy (KCL)
Clare Egan (Lancaster): ‘Libellous Articles’ at the Jacobean Star Chamber: Defamatory Manipulations of Form
Chloe Ingersent (Oxford): ‘[N]eyther regarding her duetie to god or anie conscience towards her maiestye’: Christian Conscience in Elizabeth I’s Star Chamber
Lucy Clarke (Sheffield): Monopolising and Weaponising the Law in Early Modern England
Tim Stretton (Saint Mary’s, CA): Controlling Married Women in Early Modern English Equity Courts
12.45-13.30: lunch
13.30-15.30: session 2
Chair: Jonathan Powell (Leiden)
Holly Brewer (Maryland): Slavery and Sedition
Joanna McCunn (Bristol): Mors in olla: Controlling Legal and Biblical Language in Early Modern England
Lorna Hutson (Oxford): Poetic Probability: Emotion, Fiction and Proof in Early Modern Law and Literature
Subha Mukherji (Cambridge): The Poetics of Hypokrisis in Early Modern Judicial Theatre
15.30-16.00: tea/coffee
16:00-17.30: session 3
Chair: Emily Butterworth (KCL)
Lenny Hodges (Birkbeck): Felicité’s Freedom: Law and Slavery across Indian and Atlantic Oceans in the Early Modern French Empire
Ian Williams (UCL): The Rioters went in Two by Two: Law and the Shaping of (Mis)Behaviour in Early Modern England
Nandini Chatterjee (Exeter): Angry Servants: Legal Demands Made On Employers in Late Mughal India