Experiencing Law, Government and Politics: a collaborative workshop

Sheffield Centre for Early Modern Studies

A collaborative, interdisciplinary workshop exploring early modern law, government and politics through new approaches.

Firth Court

What did it mean, practically, to be served with legal process? How was a witness of disrespect to authority affected by the experience, and how might we recover that experience? What counted as ‘politics’? How did the law-mindedness that defined this period manifest in daily interactions with authority, and how did it appear in the literature and art of the period? What methods are open to us to think about what it was like to be arrested, to participate in a riot, or to bring a case against your neighbour in court? This one-day event opens interdisciplinary and methodological discussions about the experience of law, government and politics in early modern Britain and Ireland. Building upon recent currents in early modern history that have emphasised the lived experience of government and the extent of legal knowledge and political awareness among the wider population, the workshop will focus on the way ordinary people saw, participated in and understood these elements of their worlds. In focussing on these questions, the workshop will help to build a higher-resolution picture of the lived experience of justice and politics in the period. Participants will be encouraged to discuss how these insights into the quotidian and individual aspects of law and government might enrich our understanding of broader legal and administrative developments in the period, such as the history of state formation. The workshop is open to researchers from any discipline of early modern studies, and will particularly emphasise innovative methodological approaches to its central questions. As such, it will hopefully foster productive new connections between graduate students working on these themes. The day will begin with two panels of papers designed to provoke conversation between researchers across disciplinary boundaries. After lunch, attendees will be invited to participate in a practice-as-research workshop led by Dr Lucy Clarke (Sheffield). This workshop will focus on exploring early modern arrest process as it was experienced both by the arrestee and the audience of such moments. Attendees will participate as ‘bystanders’ to a series of arrests taken from the archival record, staged by actors, and will be encouraged to offer their thoughts and questions throughout the workshop. We will consider what questions are raised by trying to stage a 1604 arrest in 2024, and what new avenues these questions might offer historians of early modern government and law. This workshop will offer new insights into how early modern government functioned on the ground, and into the significance of local resistance to authority, as well as suggesting the utility of practice-based methods for social and political history. The day will end with an open discussion where attendees will be invited to consider the insights drawn from the workshop as a whole, and to bring the various papers and the PAR workshop into dialogue with one another. This event is kindly funded by the Leverhulme Trust and is free to attend. Lunch will be provided, with details to follow. If you would like to attend online, please email lucy.clarke@sheffield.ac.uk to receive an invitation for the Google Meet.

<h3>Workshop schedule </h3>All sessions will take place in the Council Room, Firth Court. <h4>9:45-10:00 Opening remarks</h4>10:00-11:30 Panel 1. (Re)-imagining legal conceptsAimee Louise Smith (Lancaster), ‘Libel and the Law in Provincial English Communities, c. 1603-1640’Lily Freeman-Jones (QMUL), ‘Parchment prisons: experiencing sheepskin legal bonds in early modern drama’Mark A. Jones (Sheffield), ‘[P]eaceable Meetings you seek to make Riots’: Print, Quakers, and Defining Meetings in Bristol’Lucy Ryell (Lincoln), ‘‘The Unnaturall Father’: Representing Child-Murder in Early Modern England’11:30-11:45 Coffee break11:45-13:00 Panel 2. Interacting with the stateDr Richard Bell (Birmingham), ‘Seeing the state from the early modern prison’Anastasios Vavalis (Dublin City University), ‘The experience of petitioning in Restoration Ireland’Dr Laura Flannigan (St John’s College, Oxford), ‘Resisting Royal Justice: defendants and the king’s writs in early Tudor England’13:00-14:15 Lunch (details to follow)14:15-15:15 Practice-as-research workshop on early modern arrest, part I: Experiencing precedentLed by Dr Lucy J.S. Clarke (Sheffield).15:15-15:30 Coffee break15:30-16:30 Practice-as-research workshop on early modern arrest, part II: Being an audience to arrestLed by Dr Lucy J.S. Clarke (Sheffield).16:30-17:30 Closing discussion

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Experiencing Law, Government and Politics: a collaborative workshop

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Experiencing Law, Government and Politics: a collaborative workshop

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