Law as performance: theatricality, spectatorship, and the making of law in ancient, medieval, and early modern Europe

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Notes

1 Julie Stone Peters, ‘Staging the Last Judgment in the Trial of Charles I’ (2018) 143(1) Representations 1–35; Julie Stone Peters, ‘A Short History of Scaffold Tragedy c. 1650–1800: How a Classic Trope Salvaged the Spectacle of Punishment in the Age of Sympathy’ in Michael Greenberg (ed), A Cultural History of Tragedy in the Age of Enlightenment (Bloomsbury, 2019) 125–46; Julie Stone Peters, ‘Penitentiary Performances: Spectators, Affecting Scenes, and Terrible Apparitions in the Nineteenth-Century Model Prison’ in Martha Merrill Umphrey, Lawrence Douglas, and Austin Sarat (eds), Law and Performance (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2018) 18–67.

2 Peters’ locates the origins of this rival tradition in Justinian’s Code and Digest, and then traces its inheritance by Guillaume Durand in his Mirror of Law (c.1276–89), which Peters describes as being ‘arguably the most widely consulted legal manual of the Middle Ages’ 97 and by Boncompagno da Signa in his Rhetorica Novissima (1235).

3 Such original translations are concentrated in, but not limited to, Chapters 3 & 4, addressing Mediaeval treatises: e.g. Signa da Boncompagna’s Rhetorica novissima 124–29, Guilhem Molinier’s Leys d’amours 129–34, Jean de Jandun’s Questiones super rethoricorum tres libros 134–40 and Thomas Basin’s ‘Libellus de optimo ordine forenses lites audiendi et deferendi’ 153–57.

4 See the section entitled ‘On Forensic Delivery’ 103–108 in Chapter 3.