When: Wednesday, October 23, 2024, 6:00 PM - 7:30 PMWhere: Room 313, Third Floor, School of Law, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS
The Schools of Law and History are delighted to host Professor Karl Shoemaker, the Robert F. and Sylvia T. Wagner Professor of History and Law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, to speak about his current research on the figure of the devil in medieval legal culture.
The history of the devil is a legal history. As a field, however, legal history has hardly noticed how closely the devil’s career has hewn to the history of law. He is normally the concern of theologians and necromancers, not jurists or historians. My project explores a set of medieval legal manuscripts that imagined the devil as a legal actor, suing in court for possession of human souls.
The seminar is co-organised by Maks Del Mar (Law) and Miri Rubin (History).