Popular Knowledge of the Law in Early Modernity - one-day online workshop

Join us for an exciting online workshop exploring Popular Knowledge of the Law in Early Modernity. This one-day event will feature short papers and discussion on the study of law and litigiousness from new and established researchers in the field.

Kindly supported by a workshop grant from The Past and Present Society, papers will be given in person at St John's College, Oxford. Due to limited capacity at the venue for this event, additional attendees are invited to sign up here to watch the papers, and to join us for questions and discussions, through a virtual platform.

Provisional programme:

10am - Welcome

10:15 – Panel 1

Mike Kipling (PhD, Oxford) - ‘Elizabethan Merchants and the Court of Requests’

Mabel Winter (Postdoctoral research associate, Sheffield) - ‘Through ‘advice & promocion’: legal knowledge and mill disputes in the Court of Exchequer’

Chloe Ingersent (PhD, Oxford) - ‘Defrauding the Elizabethan judiciary’

Jason Peacey (Professor of History, UCL) - ‘Power and Practices: Litigants as Petitioners in Early Stuart England’

11:30 - BREAK

11:45 – Panel 2

Brodie Waddell (Senior Lecturer in History, Birkbeck)- ‘Voices and Hands: The Composition of Petitions to Judicial Authorities’

Hannah Worthen (Postdoctoral research associate, Hull) - ‘The role of space and place in early modern justice seeking’

Daniel Gosling (Principal Legal Records Specialist, The National Archives) - ‘Limiting Litigants in the early modern period? The effect of court abolition on access to justice’

12:45 – LUNCH BREAK

2:00 – Panel 3

Sue Wiseman (Professor of History, Birkbeck) - ‘Not work: Law, Labour and Lament in Seventeenth-Century Writing’

Sung Yup Kim (Associate Professor, Seoul) - ‘Local Magistracy and Popular Expectations of the Law in Early New York’

Clare Egan (Lecturer in Literature, Lancaster) - ‘‘Libellous Articles’ and ‘Scandalous Interrogatories’: Defamatory Uses of Popular Legal Knowledge in Early Modern England’

3:00 - BREAK

3:15 – Panel 4

Joanna McCunn (Senior Lecturer in Law, Bristol) - ‘‘You tickled the points o’the’law’: depicting legal language in early modern English literature’

Imogen Peck (Assistant Professor, Birmingham) - ‘Keep sure your wrytynges’: The Family Archive as/and Legal Knowledge in Early Modern England’

Jonathan McGovern (Professor, Xiamen University) - ‘A booke bynders shope in Estchepe’: Popular Knowledge of Statute Law in the Reign of Henry VIII’

4:15 – BREAK

4:30 - Roundtable: ‘What was ‘Popular’ about Law in Early Modernity?’ featuring Amanda Bevan (Head of Legal Records, The National Archives), Tom Johnson (Senior Lecturer in Late Medieval History, York), Deborah Youngs (Professor in Medieval History, Swansea), and Ian Wiliams (Associate Professor, Faculty of Laws, UCL)

5:30 - Conference end