Comic Pleading 1000-1600: Law, Comedy, Dialogue

Law has a long and rich tradition of oral dialogue, and much of that is suffused with comedy. As the Yearbooks of the Common Law courts in England alone reveal, legal pleadings, and thus the conversations between advocates and judges in court, are full of repartee, anecdotes, jokes, insults, absurd hypotheticals, and all kinds of wordplay. One can find similar forms and dynamics of comic dialogue in a range of literary texts and practices in the period, including in classics such as Owl & Nightingale or Marcolf & Solomon, and in law-related wit and dialogical play of Chaucer, Heywood, and Rabelais. This special issue, which ranges roughly from 1000 to 1600, seeks to probe this tradition, which lies at the intersection of law, literature, and culture, and consider the epistemic and political significance of comic pleading. 

This 2-day workshop brings together eight scholars from a range of disciplines – including History, English, Law, and French – who tackle various aspects of comic pleading in legal, religious, poetic, and dramatic texts, and think together about the intersection of law, comedy, and dialogue in the long medieval. The papers discussed will be published in a special issue of Law & Literature. 

Speakers:

Maksymilian Del Mar is Professor of Legal Theory and Legal Humanities at Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of Artefacts of Legal Inquiry: The Value of Imagination in Adjudication (2020) and Neil MacCormick: A Life in Politics, Philosophy, and Law (2025). 

Raphaele Garrod is associate professor of early modern French literature at the University of Oxford. She is the author of François Rabelais and the Renaissance Physiology of Invention (2025) and of Cosmographical Novelties: Dialectic and Discovery in Early Modern French Prose (2016). She is currently researching early modern accounts of the case (casus) as a discursive configuration designed to address the various forms of contingence, and its momentous social, political, and poetic impact.

Tom Johnson is Associate Professor and Tutorial Fellow in Medieval History at Oriel College, Oxford. He is the author of Law in Common: Legal Cultures in Late-Medieval England (2020), as well as numerous academic articles on medieval social and legal history.

Ada Kuskowski is Associate Professor in the Department of History at University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests focus on cultural histories of legal knowledge in France and the Mediterranean during the Middle Ages. Her book Vernacular Law: Writing and the Reinvention of Customary Law in Medieval France (Cambridge, 2023) traces the impact of writing, language, manuscript culture and ideas on customary law in medieval France. Her research interests include legal literatures, notions of authorship, material cultures of law and colonial law.

Miri Rubin is Professor of Medieval and Early Modern History at Queen Mary University of London. She studies the religious cultures of medieval Europe (1100-1600) and explores in them the operation of gender, relations between Christians and Jews, as well as material and visual representation. She is also interested in the diverse nature of urban life in the period.

Cathy Shrank is Professor of Tudor and Renaissance Literature at the University of Sheffield. Publications include Writing the Nation in Reformation England (2004); The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature, with Mike Pincombe (2009); an edition of Shakespeare’s Poems, with Raphael Lyne (2017); and The Oxford Handbook of Thomas More’s Utopia, with Phil Withington (2023). She is completing a monograph on Dialogue in Late Medieval and Early Modern England.

Julie Stone Peters 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 of London School of Law. Her most recent books are Law as Performance: Theatricality, Spectatorship, and the Making of Law in Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern Europe (2022) and Staging Witchcraft Before the Law: Skepticism, Performance as Proof, and Law as Magic in Early Modern Witch Trials (2024). 

Greg Walker is is the Regius Professor of Rhetoric and Literature at Edinburgh University, He has published widely on Medieval and Tudor Drama, political and cultural history. His most recent monograph was John Heywood: Comedy and Survival in Tudor England, OUP 2020, and he is editor of The Oxford Anthology of Tudor Drama, and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature in English (with Elaine Treharne) and The Oxford Handbook of Scottish Theatre (with Randall Stevenson).

Programme:

28 April
9.30: Coffee and tea
10-1 pm: Panel 1
1-2 pm: Lunch break
2-5 pm: Panel 2

29 April
9.30: Coffee and tea
10-1 pm: Panel 3
1-2 pm: Lunch break
2-5 pm: Panel 4

This event is free to attend, but booking is required.