Law As Performance: Theatricality, Spectatorship, and the Making of Law in Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern Europe (Law and Literature) - Softcover

Peters, Julie Stone

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0197903959 ISBN 13: 9780197903957

Verlag: Oxford University Press, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

Tirades against legal theatrics are nearly as old as law itself, and yet so is the age-old claim that law must not merely be done: it must be "seen to be done." Law as Performance traces the history of legal performance and spectatorship through the early modern period. Viewing law as the product not merely of edicts or doctrines but of expressive action, it investigates the performances that literally created law: in civic arenas, courtrooms, judges' chambers, marketplaces, scaffolds, and streets. It examines the legal codes, learned treatises, trial reports, lawyers' manuals, execution narratives, rhetoric books, images, (and more) that confronted these performances, praising their virtues or denouncing their evils. In so doing, it recovers a long, rich, and largely overlooked tradition of jurisprudential thought about law as a performance practice. This tradition not only generated an elaborate poetics and politics of legal performance. It provided western jurisprudence with a set of constitutive norms that, in working to distinguish law from theatrics, defined the very nature of law. In the crucial opposition between law and theatre, law stood for cool deliberation, by-the-book rules, and sovereign discipline. Theatre stood for deceptive artifice, entertainment, histrionics, melodrama. And yet legal performance, even at its most theatrical, also appeared fundamental to law's realization: a central mechanism for shaping legal subjects, key to persuasion, essential to deterrence, indispensable to law's power—as it still does today.

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Julie Stone Peters, H. Gordon Garbedian Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University

JULIE STONE PETERS (B.A. Yale, Ph.D. Princeton, J.D. Columbia) is the H. Gordon Garbedian Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, an Affiliated faculty member at Columbia Law School, and a Global Professorial Fellow at Queen Mary University School of Law. A scholar of law and humanities and media history, she studies performance, film, digital, and legal cultures across the longue durée. Her books include Staging Witchcraft Before the Law: Skepticism, Performance as Proof, and Law as Magic in Early Modern Witch Trials (Cambridge UP, 2024) and Theatre of the Book: Print, Text, and Performance in Europe 1480-1880 (OUP, 2000, winner of the MLA's Harry Levin Prize and English Association's Beatrice White Prize, and finalist for the Barnard Hewitt Award). Her more public-facing essays have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, London Review of Books, Slate, the Village Voice, Public Books, and elsewhere.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Oxford University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2026
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0197903959
• ISBN 13: 9780197903957
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 368
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: ORIGINAL KAISER; https://corp.oup.com/; ; Via Liguria 4; San Giuliano Milanese ; MI; 20098; Italien