Krista Kesselring, a professor in the Department of History at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada, will present a lecture as part of the 2023-2024 Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Lecture Series. Her lecture explores women's agency and the development of legal precedents to restrain it in the Court of Star Chamber, an English court that sat at the royal Palace of Westminster from the late 15th century to the mid-17th century.
Social historians have found in the rich archive of the Court of Star Chamber telling accounts of women’s individual agency and collective action. With the court’s records of judgment now missing, however, discussion often ends there, with little sense of how the privy councilors and high court justices who staffed this extraordinary tribunal responded, in a venue where they enjoyed some freedom in crafting their responses to suit offences and offenders as they thought best. Contemporary reports on cases and notes taken from the court’s order and degree books can help fill the gap. Using these reports and notes, with a focus on decisions in cases against "riotous" women, this presentation addresses what role the court itself played in shaping legal doctrines about women’s action and agency. It also explores what cases involving women suggest about Star Chamber, and how they might help us characterize the court in comparison to others in the realm. Other studies have argued that equity courts provided far more benefits to early modern women than did their common law counterparts, with Chancery, Requests, and others allowing exceptions to the doctrine of coverture; but by the late sixteenth century, Star Chamber was more akin to common law than equity, in this respect at least, creating precedents in efforts to maintain the patriarchal equilibrium.
This event is free and open to the public.
Krista Kesselring is a professor in the Department of History at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada. She teaches in the Dalhousie History program, with cross-appointments to the programs in Gender & Women’s Studies, Law, Justice & Society and European Studies. She grew up in the Maritimes and did both her BA and MA at Dalhousie, before completing her PhD at Queen’s University (Kingston, ON) in 2000.
Professor Kesselring’s research interests focus on early modern peace, law and ‘justice’. Interested in women’s history and the consequences of religious reform within that broad frame, she has recently co-authored a book on the post-Reformation history of divorce. She is also studying the notorious Court of Star Chamber to explore how changing uses of records, precedents, and evidence impinged upon the pursuit of justice in both particular cases and in the abstract.
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