Law and the Early Modern: Power, Speech, Form

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: Nandini Chatterjee (Exeter), Lucy Clarke (Sheffield), Clare Egan (Lancaster), Lenny Hodges (Birkbeck), Rachel E. Holmes (Cambridge), Lorna Hutson (Oxford), Chloë Ingersent (Oxford), Joanna McCunn (Bristol), Subha Mukherji (Cambridge), Tim Stretton (Saint Mary's, CA), Ian Williams (UCL)

Hosted by the Centre for Early Modern Studies at King's College London (CEMS KCL)

Thanks to the support of the Society for Renaissance Studies, we're delighted to be able to offer a small number of travel bursaries to postgraduate and/or early career researchers to attend 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 [email protected] 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.

Host or Publisher Centre for Early Modern Studies (CEMS KCL)