Law as performance: theatricality, spectatorship, and the making of law in ancient, medieval, and early modern Europe

In: Law and literature

In: Oxford scholarship online

Abstract

This title explores the history of legal theatricality from antiquity to the eighteenth-century. It recovers a long tradition of jurisprudential thought about law as a form of theatre, a tradition that ancient, medieval, early modern, and later theorists transmitted across centuries, continually elaborating and reworking it to suit changing conditions.