Faculty of Law University of Toronto
Law & Literature Workshop Series
Holger Schott Syme
Department of English, University of Toronto
Judicial Digest: Edward Coke Reads
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
12:30 – 2:00
Solarium (room FA2), Falconer Hall
84 Queen’s Park
This chapter is drawn from my recently completed study, A Culture of Mediation: Performance and Authority in Shakespeare’s England. It discusses the approach Sir Edward Coke, Elizabeth I's Attorney General, James I's Lord Chief Justice, and one of the most prominent jurists in English legal history, took to reading depositions and organizing the prosecution's narrative during the trial of the Earl of Essex in 1601. My chapter places Coke's methods in the context of humanist reading practices, showing that he applied the same techniques of commonplacing, excerpting, abstracting, and framing to testimony that he and other lawyers also used in digesting and adapting their professional books, and that were similarly used by law reporters in compiling their accounts of opinions and decisions. The overarching thesis of the chapter, and of the book as a whole, is that the criminal law in early modern England participated in a culture of mediation that valued the transmission of knowledge through authoritative channels over direct experience, and displaced origins and spontaneous acts in favour of the greater credit of multiply mediated narratives or performances.
Holger Schott Syme is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Toronto. His essays have appeared in English Literary Renaissance, Textual Cultures, and elsewhere, and he has articles forthcoming in Studies in Philology (on the absence of juries from early modern plays) and in Shakespeare Quarterly (on 1594). The co- editor of Locating the Queen’s Men, 1583-1603: Material Practices and Conditions of Playing (Ashgate, 2009), he has recently completed a book-length study entitled A Culture of Mediation: Performance and Authority in Shakespeare’s England and will soon begin editing Edward III and The Book of Sir Thomas More for the third edition of the Norton Shakespeare. With Gregoire Holtz, he is co-organizing the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies' annual conference next year, on "Rethinking Early Modern Print Culture."
A light lunch will be provided.
For more workshop information, please contact Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca.
