Education
Northwestern University.
(The Common Peace traces the attitudes behind the enforcem...)
The Common Peace traces the attitudes behind the enforcement of the criminal law in early modern England. Focusing on five stages in prosecution (arrest, bail, indictment, conviction and sentencing), the book uses a variety of types of sources - court records, biographical information, state papers, legal commentaries, popular and didactic literature - to reconstruct who actually enforced the criminal law and what values they brought to its enforcement. A close study of the courts in eastern Sussex between 1592 and 1640 allows Dr Herrup to show that an amorphous collection of modest property holders participated actively in the legal process. These yeomen and husbandmen who appeared as victims, constables, witnesses and jurors were as important to the credibility of the law as were the justices and judges. The uses of the law embodied the ideas of these middling men about not only law and order but also religion and good government. By arguing that legal administration was part of the routine agenda of obligation for middling property holders, Dr Herrup shows how the expectations produced by legal activities are important for understanding the decades immediately before the outbreak of the English Civil War. As the first book to use early seventeenth-century legal records outside of Essex, The Common Peace adopts an explicitly comparative framework, attempting to trace the ways that social conditions influenced legal process as well as law enforcement in various counties. By blending social history, legal history and political history, this volume offers a complement to more conventional studies of legal records and of local government.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0521375878/?tag=2022091-20
(Sex, privilege, corruption, and revenge--these are elemen...)
Sex, privilege, corruption, and revenge--these are elements that we expect to find splashed across today's tabloid headlines. But 17th century England saw a sex scandal that brought disgrace to the ruling class and ended with the beheading of an earl. In A House in Gross Disorder, Cynthia Herrup presents a strikingly new interpretation of the case of the 2nd Earl of Castlehaven and of the sexual and social anxieties it cast into such bold relief. Castlehaven was convicted of assisting in the rape of his own wife and of committing sodomy with his servants. But more than that, he stood accused of inverting the natural order of his household by reveling in rather than restraining the intemperate passions of those he was expected to rule and protect. Herrup argues that because an orderly house was considered both an example and endorsement of aristocratic governance, the riotousness presided over by Castlehaven was the most damning evidence against him. Avoiding simple conclusions about guilt or innocence, Herrup focuses instead on the fascinating legal, social and political dynamics of the case and its subsequent retellings. In riveting prose, she reconsiders a scandal that still speaks to contemporary anxieties about sex, good governance, and the role of law in regulating both.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0195139259/?tag=2022091-20
Northwestern University.
Herrup"s writings center primarily on the social history of criminal law, but she also touches upon the historical impact of gender and sexuality. Her first book, The Common Peace: Participation and the Criminal Law in Seventeenth-Century England, examined how communities without lawyers made decisions about law enforcement—it postulated that people as well as lawyers were important in the history of law. Her second book,, used a notorious trial to explore how law reflected tensions between genders and generations.
She has held many fellowships, including those from the Folger Shakespeare Library, the National Humanities Center, and the Huntington Library.
Cynthia Herrup edited the Journal of British Studies from 1991 to 1996. From 1995 to 1997, she served on the editorial board of the Journal of Modern History.
Herrup was also president of the North American Conference on British Studies from 2003 to 2005. Until 2005, she served as William Kenneth Boyd Professor of History and Law at Duke University.
(Sex, privilege, corruption, and revenge--these are elemen...)
(The Common Peace traces the attitudes behind the enforcem...)