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This collection focuses on the history of legal emblems and the genealogy of law's visual structures. The growing interest in law and the visual has tended to focus in a somewhat lazy fashion upon film and law, rather than addressing the actual history of law's regimes of visual control. But early modern lawyers, civilian and common alike, developed their very own
ars iuris or art of law. This book traces the complex lineage of the legal emblem and argues that the
mens emblematica of the humanist lawyers was the inauguration of a visiocratic regime that continues in significant part into the present and multiple technologies of vision. Bringing together leading experts on the history of legal emblems, this collection provides a ground-breaking account of the long relationship between visibility, meaning and normativity.
List of contents
Introduction: The Emblematic Cube, Peter Goodrich And Valérie Hayaert, 1 The Gordian Knot Of Emblemata: From The Labyrinthus Absconditus To The Affirmation Of The Prisca Jurisprudentia, Valérie Hayaert; 2 The Evidence Of Things Not Seen, Peter Goodrich; 3. Metamorphosis, Mythography, And The Nature Of English Law, Paul Raffield; 4 Confessio Infirmitatis, Or: A Productive Digression Put To Good Use In Legal Affairs, Anselm Haverkamp; 5 The Heart And The Law In The Scales: Allegorical Discourse And Modes Of Subjectivization In Early-Modern Religious Emblematics, Agnès Guiderdoni; 6 From Pornograhy To Moral Didactism: How The French Play With Emblems, Christian Biet; 7 The Tongue And The Eye: Eloquence And Office In Renaissance Emblems, Piyel Haldar; 8 Don’t Screw With The Law: Visual And Spatial Defences Against Judicial And Political Corruption In Renaissance Italy, Alick Mclean; 9 Epistemological Doubt And Visual Puzzles Of Sight, Knowledge, And Judgment: Reflections On Clear-Sighted And Blindfolded Justices, Judith Resnik And Denis Curtis; 10 Crime Shows: CSI In Habsburg Spain, Bill Egginton
About the author
Peter Goodrich is Professor of Law at Cardozo Law School and Director of the Program in Law and Humanities and is author of
Legal Emblems and the Art of Law (2013).
Valérie Hayaert is a researcher at the Fondation Bodmer, Cologny, Geneva and author of Mens emblematica
et humanisme juridique (2008).
