Description: Focusing on everyday legal experiences, from that of magistrates, novelists and political philosophers, to maidservants, pauper men and women, down-at-heel attorneys and middling-sort wives in their coverture, History and the Law reveals how people thought about, used, manipulated and resisted the law between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries. Supported by clear, engaging examples taken from the historical record, and from the writing of historians including Laurence Sterne, William Godwin, and E. P. Thompson, who each had troubled love affairs with the law, Carolyn Steedman puts the emphasis on English poor laws, copyright law, and laws regarding women. Evocatively written and highly original, History and the Law accounts for historians' strange ambivalent love affair with the law and with legal records that appear to promise access to so many lives in the past.
Brief description: Carolyn Steedman is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Warwick. Her previous books include Landscape for a Good Woman (1986), Dust (2001), Master and Servant (Cambridge, 2007), Labours Lost (Cambridge, 2009), An Everyday Life of the English Working Class (Cambridge, 2013) and Poetry for Historians (2018).
Review Quotes: 'History and the Law is an intriguing volume that navigates fields and disciplines as distinct as plebeian culture, literary theory, and historiography ... the reader's reward is watching a consummate historian at work.' J. A. Jaffe, Choice