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Explores the history of legal theatricality from antiquity to the eighteenth-century. It recovers a long tradition of jurisprudential thought about law as a form of theatre, a tradition that ancient, medieval, early modern, and later theorists transmitted across centuries, continually elaborating and reworking it to suit changing conditions.
List of contents
- Introduction
- 1: Theatre, Theatrocracy, and the Politics of Pathos in the Athenian Lawcourt
- 2: The Roman Advocate as Actor: Actio, Pronuntiatio, Prosopopoeia, and Persuasive Empathy in Cicero and Quintilian
- 3: Courtroom Oratory, Forensic Delivery, and the Wayward Body in Medieval Rhetorical Theory
- 4: Irreverent Performances, Heterodox Subjects, and the Unscripted Crowd from the Medieval Courtroom to the Stocks and Scaffold
- 5: Performing Law in the Age of Theatre (c. 1500-1650)
- 6: Legal Performance Education in Early Modern England
- Epilogue
About the author
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 and Co-Chair of Columbia's Theatre and Performance PhD Program. She has taught at Harvard, Stanford, and the Metropolitan Detention Center (Brooklyn), was Founding Director of the Columbia College Human Rights Program, and has been the recipient of Guggenheim, NEH, Fulbright, ACLS, Humboldt, and other fellowships. Her publications include Theatre of the Book: Print, Text, and Performance in Europe 1480-1880 (Oxford University Press, 2000, winner of the Harry Levin and Beatrice White Prizes), Women's Rights, Human Rights: International Feminist Perspectives (co-edited, Routledge, 1995), and numerous studies of drama, performance, film, media, and the cultural history of law.
Summary
Explores the history of legal theatricality from antiquity to the eighteenth-century. It recovers a long tradition of jurisprudential thought about law as a form of theatre, a tradition that ancient, medieval, early modern, and later theorists transmitted across centuries, continually elaborating and reworking it to suit changing conditions.
Additional text
Julie Stone Peters's Law as Performance invites readers to step away from the decrees, doctrines, and debates that dominate the Western legal tradition and turn instead to how the law was experienced by ordinary people who not only observed it in action but also found ways to challenge and subvert it.
