Laura Flannigan, Warner Woodring Chair and Assistant Professor in the OSU Department of History, will discuss her recent research on popular legal culture in late medieval and early modern England. In particular, she'll discuss her current article in progress, exploring manuscript notebooks, or commonplace books, from the 15th to 17th centuries, seeking evidence of legal note-taking and knowledge-making.
Co-sponsored by the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and the Humanities Institute.
This event is free, open to the public and welcoming to everyone.
Dr. Laura Flannigan's research re-examines the relationship between government and society in England between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries - when the Tudor monarchs sat on the throne. By revealing how ordinary people litigated their personal suits before the Crown, her work alters our perception of who had a hand in shaping Tudor England and its governance. These findings were the subject of her first book, Royal Justice and the Making of the Tudor Commonwealth, 1485-1547 (Cambridge University Press, 2024). The legal records that formed the basis for this project were published in calendar form as Hearings of the Court of Requests, two volumes with the List and Index Society (2023).
Her current research looks more broadly at the litigious society of early/pre-modern England. In an age of legal pluralism but relatively limited literacy, who knew what about the law – its procedures and substance – and how? Examining personal writings about law, in domestic archives and in commonplace books (or notebooks), it becomes possible to glimpse the proactive acquisition of legal knowledge by laypeople. Initial research from this project has been published in Dr Flannigan's latest article: 'Narrating Disputes: litigation and its retellings in fifteenth-century England'.
Image: Folio 58v of Robert Reynes's commonplace book, a late 15th-century manuscript housed in the Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford as Tanner MS 407.
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