:Law as Performance: Theatricality, Spectatorship, and the Making of Law in Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern Europe

Abstract

Although discussing high-stakes, tense disputation, Peters does not write contentiously. (Though there are points of substantial correction: a remarkable footnote, which begins on page 146 and colonizes the entirety of 147, debunks the claim that the advent of the inquisitorial process in medieval Europe meant the end of “community participation” in trials.) I sometimes felt I was on an impossibly erudite, analytically acute, and very funny tour of European law, as it was practiced: messily, showily, and humanly. Yet Peters challenges two familiar ideas about law, related to each other. First, philosophers from Plato on have argued that law ought not be, or even is the antithesis of, theatricality; second, numerous histories plot toward legal theatricality’s decline, its replacement by a rule-driven, soberly bureaucratic, and modern courtroom.