In a study published just over forty years ago, Richard Kagan outlined a Western-European ‘legal revolution’ taking place between 1500 and 1700. Characterised by growing recourse to formalised courts for civil dispute-resolution, and judicial centralisation around monarchs and rulers, this trend has been identified in various cultures and contexts since: in England, Scotland, France, Germany, Italy, the Iberian Peninsula, Scandinavia, and in ‘New World’ colonies. Counts of surviving casefiles, plea roll entries, and register folios among legal archives confirms the general course of this trend. Yet simply enumerating lawsuits across a range of jurisdictions cannot, by itself, explain this social and institutional phenomenon.
Litigation required knowledge about how to find legal counsel, how to write a petition or submit information, and where and when a court was held – and so its rise was driven by some practical, popular knowledge of the law. This phrase encapsulates several semantic challenges, however. What or who is included in the category of ‘popular’, and how do we measure popularity – by number or by status? What constitutes ‘knowledge’ of the law and its processes? How was it gained, who had access to it, and how did they use it? What aspects of the law were open knowledge? There is a tendency to focus on the doctrines and precepts of written law. Yet how widely were the procedures, routines, customs, and documents of courts and their personnel understood?
This one-day, hybrid conference will bring together researchers working on different legal and judicial contexts across early modernity to share the kind of occasional, practical insights which – until we compare and contrast our findings – might feel incidental to individual research agendas. Contributions to this discussion are invited particularly from postgraduate and early-career scholars working with legal archives, and from researchers in history, law, and related disciplines.
Short papers (no longer than 15 minutes) are welcomed on three broad themes:
- The transmission, reception, and collection of knowledge about how to access the law among wider populaces – through literature, performance, and other cultural modes;
- The use of judicial and extra-judicial systems – evidence for how people practically approached the law, made complaints, hired counsel, accessed courts, whether as litigants, informants, witnesses, or jurors etc.;
- The application and adaptation of legal ideas within and outside of courtrooms – the exploitation of perceived loopholes in the law; the deployment of formalities like documents and witnesses to extra-judicial events; communal adaptations of law.
Please send short abstracts (150 words) and a brief biography to Laura Flannigan (laura.flannigan@sjc.ox.ac.uk) by 31 August 2023.
