Tag Archives: Lawyers

Reading Group: A 16th Century Lawyer and his 15th Century Books

Thursday 14 November, 2013, 1-2 pm
Stephen Boyd Room, Kennedy Hall, School of English

Dr Margaret Connolly, Senior Lecturer in the School of English, will lead a reading group entitled ‘A 16th Century Lawyer and his 15th Century Books’.  This topic draws from her current research on a 16th Century gentry family which is provisionally entitled: Newly Reformed Readers and their Reading: A Sixteenth-Century Family and their Medieval Books, taking one member of the family, Thomas Roberts, who was a London lawyer as the focus of the session.

The texts for discussion are:

  1. A summary of how the material relating to Thomas Roberts is like/is not like that relating to other contemporary lawyers, and which lists the contents of surviving books that may be associated with him.
  2. An article by C. E. Moreton, ‘The “Library of a Late Fifteenth-Century Lawyer’, The Library 6th Series, 13.4 (1991), 338-46. This is an example of the type of study that’s been made of late medieval/early modern lawyers and their books, so that people have some frame of reference for her work.

Dr Connolly’s research concerns later medieval English literature and its manuscript context, and she has a strong interest in book history. Of her previous publications, the most relevant in this context to mention is an essay, ‘Sixteenth-Century Readers Reading Fifteenth-Century Religious Books: The Roberts Family of Middlesex’ that has recently appeared in a volume edited by Nicole Rice, Middle English Religious Writing in Practice: Texts, Readers, and Transformations (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013).

 

Inauguration of the Centre for Mediaeval and Early Modern Law and Literature

Wednesday 3 October, 2012, 2.15-6 pm
Lawson Lecture Room, Kennedy Hall, School of English

Inaugural Lecture: Professor David Ibbetson (University of Cambridge) – ‘Early Modern Lawyers and Literary Texts’

2.15-3.15 pm

David Ibbetson, Regius Professor of Civil Law and President of Clare Hall at the University of Cambridge, will deliver the inaugural CMEMLL annual lecture entitled ‘Early Modern Lawyers and Literary Texts’.

Professor Ibbetson’s notable publications include but are not limited to: The Oxford International Encyclopedia of Legal History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); ‘Sixteenth Century Contract Law: Slade’s Case in Context,’ in OJLS 3:4 (1984), pp. 295-317; and ‘Assumpsit and Debt in the Early Sixteenth Century,’ in CLJ 41:1 (1982), pp. 142-161.

The lecture will be followed by a break for refreshments in the Stephen Boyd Room before the Panel Response.

Panel Response: Law and Literature, Mediaeval and Early Modern

Professor William I. Miller (University of Michigan)
Professor John Hudson (University of St Andrews)
Professor Lorna Hutson (University of St Andrews)

Chair: Professor Colin Kidd (University of St Andrews)

William Miller, Thomas G. Long Professor of Law at the University of Michigan and Honorary Professor of History at the University of St Andrews, will join the Directors of CMEMLL: John Hudson, Professor of Legal History, and Lorna Hutson, Berry Professor of English Literature, in a panel response to Professor Ibbetson’s paper.  Colin Kidd, Professor of History, will chair the discussion.  They will also discuss the formation and purpose of CMEMLL.

There will be a wine reception to close the event.