Performing Normativity in the Ancient World Series: Dr. Jack Lennon (University of Leicester), Learning and Perpetuating Stigma and Dirtiness

Despite frequent calls to integrate the study of law into broader scholarship on the ancient world, the study of law and legality often remains isolated. This seminar series, ‘Performing normativity in the ancient world’, seeks to move away from the traditional, narrow conception of ‘capital-L’ Law and hopes instead to focus on the performance, construction, negotiation, and enforcement of regimes of normativity across various spheres of human action by encouraging participants to explore a wider array of consolidated arrangements of “discourses, norms, practices, and institutions” (Duve, 2023) and their functions within the societies in which they emerged and operated. These spheres might include, but ought not be limited to, magic, religion, politics, theatre, literature, and art.

By embracing this broad framework, the seminar allows for a more inclusive approach to understanding the roles that normative systems played in the ancient world. This includes examining domestic hierarchies, divine orders, ritual practices, and rhetorical norms, which were often intertwined with legal systems but were not strictly ‘legal’ in nature. In doing so, the seminar both challenges the disciplinary silos that often separate the study of ancient law from other regimes of normativity, by identifying normativity in non-legal spheres, and by normalising law, highlighting the ways in which it operated in conjunction with and in competition with other schemas of regulation, authority, and control.

Chair: Shekinah Vera-Cruz, LHub & University of Warwick

Speaker: Dr. Jack Lennon  is a lecturer at the University of Nottingham with a specialism in Roman cultural history. In particular, his research focuses on Roman religion and magic; Roman notions of dirt and dirtiness; and processes of marginalisation and stigmatisation in antiquity. He recently published a monograph exploring these themes, titled Dirt and Denigration: Stigma and Marginalisation in Ancient Rome (Mohr Siebeck, 2022), which examines specifically the  perception and presentation of various ‘dirty’ groups in Rome, such as pimps, undertakers, gladiators, and executioners and which generally considers the ways in which stigmatising behaviours were taught and learned at every level of Roman society. He has been a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society since 2022, and has also held positions at the University of Nottingham, The University of Kent, and University College London.

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