[We share the following announcement for an online event on 22 March 2021 at 5.30pm-7pm GMT. This zoom webinar is sponsored by the Inner Temple.]
History Society Lecture:
Law in a time of plague--was the law a good doctor?
Further details and registration here.
--Mitra Sharafi
[We have the following announcement. DRE]
Postdoctoral Researcher: History of Slavery in the City of London, Nuffield College, University of Oxford
Nuffield College seeks a Postdoctoral Researcher to research the role of the City of London and its commercial institutions in the eco-system of the transatlantic slave trade and ownership. Co-funded by the global law firm Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer LLP, and under the supervision of Professor Andrew Thompson (Professor of Imperial and Global History, Nuffield College), the researcher will contribute to the growing body of scholarly literature on British imperialism and its intersection with transatlantic slavery, exploring the past and bringing it into close dialogue with the present.
Recent work on medieval heresy has emphasized the ‘constructedness’ of heresy by orthodox power, thus undermining the coherence of heretical sects and tending to suggest that those tried as heretics were essentially unwitting victims. This article examines the evidence from the entire range of surviving Lollard trials, and argues that we can see consciously ‘dissenting’ speech alongside the standard theological positions associated with (and perhaps imposed upon) Lollardy. In each area of dissent anticlerical, sceptical, disputational and rebellious a wider cultural context is explored, demonstrating that the language of dissent is not limited to ‘Lollardy’; at the same time however it is argued that it is precisely through the voicing and reception of such wider referents that a heretical movement comes to exist. The article traces trends in medieval speech through which specific opinions and beliefs are voiced as a challenge, and the linguistic and social contexts within which they give rise to wider meanings—including collective identifications. Thus, whilst we may wish to foreground the impositions of power and orthodoxy that ‘made’ heresy, we should not make ‘heretics’ disappear completely. Through the records of prosecution, we can still hear something of the voices of those who chose to voice dissent; and we can give recognition to that choice as a form of dissenting agency—dependent also however on the reception and interpretation of those voices by neighbours, witnesses and inquisitors.Further information is available here.
A few blurbs:Historians of the English legal profession have written comparatively little about the lawyers who served in the courts of the Church. This volume fills a gap; it investigates the law by which they were governed and discusses their careers in legal practice. Using sources drawn from the Roman and canon laws and also from manuscripts found in local archives, R. H. Helmholz brings together previously published work and new evidence about the professional careers of these men. His book covers the careers of many lesser known ecclesiastical lawyers, dealing with their education in law, their reaction to the coming of the Reformation, and their relationship with English common lawyers on the eve of the Civil War. Making connections with the European ius commune, this volume will be of special interest to English and Continental legal historians, as well as to students of the relationship between law and religion.
‘This valuable book by one of our most eminent legal historians is the product of fifty years engagement with the history of the Church courts in England. It not only provides new insights into the careers of eighteen very different ecclesiastical lawyers over seven centuries but also (in the first half) prepares the way with an accessible and authoritative history of their profession.' -- John H. Baker
‘The Profession of Ecclesiastical Lawyers: An Historical Introduction is an important contribution to the literature on the history of the legal profession by the leading scholar of canon law. It combines a thorough and insightful analysis of the development, education, and regulation of a somewhat neglected segment of the English legal profession with a view of the profession through the activities of its practitioners.' -- Jonathan RoseMore information, including the TOC, is available here.
The Sutherland Prize, named in honor of the late Donald W. Sutherland, a distinguished historian of the law of medieval England and a mentor of many students, is awarded annually, on the recommendation of the Sutherland Prize Committee, to the person or persons who wrote the best article on English legal history published in the previous year.
2018 recipient: Tom Lambert, “Jurisdiction as Property in England, 900-1100” in Legalism: Property and Ownership, edited by Georgy Kantor, Tom Lambert, and Hannah Skoda (Oxford University Press, 2017).
Committee citation: The Sutherland Prize for 2017 is awarded for a piece addressing the issue of jurisdictional rights in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Such rights enabled their holders not merely to receive the revenues associated with a particular offence but also to hold courts and enforce the law in pursuance of such rights. Two separate views are identified within the current historiographical debate about the existence and extent of such rights. The first assumed that an entitlement to legal revenues brought with it an entitlement to perform legal functions as well. The second took the view that aristocratic legal privileges were fiscal rather than jurisdictional. Both, the author notes, are premised on certain assumptions about the chronology of feudalization. The author adopts an alternative approach, contending that ‘the absence of explicit evidence for aristocratic possession of jurisdictional rights before the Norman conquest … should be taken as a sign that jurisdictional rights did not exist as things to be possessed or transferred.’ This, he notes, moves the focus away from feudalization to the issue of when jurisdictional rights emerged as a form of property. The article goes on to discuss the absence of jurisdictional rights in the tenth century, arguing that this was because ‘the performance of functions relating to both judicial decision-making and law enforcement was theoretically open to all’ and given its demanding and sometimes dangerous nature was ‘understood to be more of a burden than a privilege.’ Matters changed in the eleventh century, it is suggested, because of economic incentives, with greater competition for legal revenues leading to the performance of the associated legal functions being perceived as a more desirable task. The result, as the author concludes, was that ‘[g]radually and unevenly – and perhaps initially not very legalistically – jurisdictional rights were probably emerging as a form of property in the decades before the Norman conquest.’The members of this year's Sutherland Prize Committee were Rebecca Probert (University of Exeter) (chair); Paul Halliday (University of Virginia); Allyson May (University of Western Ontario); and P.G. McHugh (University of Cambridge).