History and the Law: A Love Story

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.

Author: Carolyn Steedman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 01/30/2020
Pages: 294
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.90lbs
Size: 8.90h x 6.20w x 0.60d
ISBN: 9781108736985

Review Citation(s):
Choice 09/01/2020

About the Author
Steedman, Carolyn: - 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).