Symposium on Rethinking the State Trials: The Politics of Justice in Later Stuart England

State trials were the quintessential media events of later Stuart England. The more important of these trials attracted vast public attention, serving as pivot points in the relationship between the governors and the governed. Later Stuart England, the period between the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 and the Hanoverian succession of 1714, has long been known among legal historians for a series of key cases in which juries successfully asserted their independence from judges. In political history, the government’s shaky control over political trials in this period has long been taken as a sign of the waning power of the crown and the rise of constitutional liberties. More recently, as historians have turned to the study of political culture, the state trials, or those trials in which matters of constitutional importance were at stake, have received renewed attention. Historians have turned to the many eighteenth-century compilations of English state trials, several of which are found in the Newberry’s holdings, to answer new questions about the means by which a vibrant, highly partisan and increasingly dynamic public sphere developed in late seventeenth and early eighteenth century England.

This symposium aims to assess these new developments in political, legal, and cultural history and chart a new research agenda for the study of the English state trials.

Speaker names and details of their talks will be posted later.

Sponsored by McGill University and Northwestern University.

Faculty and graduate students of Center for Renaissance Studies consortium institutions may be eligible to apply for travel funds to attend CRS programs or to do research at the Newberry Library. Each member university sets its own policies and deadlines; contact your Representative Council member in advance for details.

Learn more about Newberry Center for Renaissance Studies programs.