SUMMERSCHOOL: Osnabrück Summer Institute on the Cultural Study of the Law (Osnabrück: Uni Osnabrück, 18-26 JUL 2026) [DEADLINE 1 APR 2026]

 

(click on image to enlarge; source: Uni Osnabrück)

WORKSHOP: Egodocuments in Legal History: Individual Experiences and Memories as Sources of Legal Cultural Change (Turku: Turku Faculty of Law, 8 FEB 2024)

(image source: Wikimedia Commons)

The appreciation of different types of autobiographical writing as historical sources has grown considerably in the last decades. Diaries, travel journals, memoirs and autobiographies describe their authors’ affairs, impressions and emotions. Such egodocuments also include confessions, family genealogies and personal letters.

Some researchers have discovered the possibilities of egodocuments for legal historical research as sources when studying e.g. legal work, law studies, litigation and legal culture more generally. Yet, they are still much underused.

This workshop aims at exploring a variety of early modern and modern egodocuments and demonstrating their potential for legal history research. Despite the fact that egodocuments have rarely been written for legal purposes, they can be used to answer both more traditional and novel research questions in legal history.

We will discuss the uses of such sources in legal history research through examples from various types of egodocuments. During this workshop, we will investigate the range of research topics, questions and methodological issues relating to their use and how they enrich our knowledge of the legal cultures of the past.

Preliminary Program:

10.30 Welcome and some practicalities (Mia Korpiola, Turku)
10.45 The Possibilities of Egodocuments for Legal History Research (Mia Korpiola)
11.15 Discussion
11.30 Lunch
12.30 Case Study 1: Egodocuments and Early Modern Law Studies (Marianne Vasara-Aaltonen, Helsinki)
Discussion
13.10 Case Study 2: Using Egodocuments for Uncovering Nineteenth-Century Legal Work (Elsa Hietala, Turku/Sarka - The Finnish Museum of Agriculture
Discussion
13.50 Coffee
14.10 Case Study 3: Discovering the Lives of the First Swedish Female Lawyers through Egodocuments (Elsa Trolle Önnerfors, Lund)
Discussion
14.50 Introduction to workshop (Mia Korpiola)
15.00 Working in groups
15.30 Presentation of group work
16.00 Final discussion

Venue: Cal2109, Calonia, Caloniankuja 3, University of Turku
For more information, please contact prof. Mia Korpiola, mia.korpiola[at]utu.fi . Registration takes place via the following link: https://konsta.utu.fi/Default.aspx?tabid=88&tap=17539 (incl. dietary requests, allergies).

VACANCY: Two fully-funded PhD-positions: Communicating the Law in Europe, 1500-1750 (St Andrews: University of St Andrews/ERC, DEADLINE 15 MARCH 2024)

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Two fully funded PhD studentships are available at the University of St Andrews to work as part of the ERC-selected/UKRI-funded project ‘Communicating the Law in Europe, 1500-1750’, under the supervision of the Principal Investigator, Dr Arthur der Weduwen. The project investigates how law was communicated in early modern Europe (c. 1500-1750), and what impact this had on European society.

The PhD studentships will begin in September 2024, will be based in the School of History at the University of St Andrews (with significant periods to be spent on research abroad), and will last for four years. 

These PhD studentships offer the successful applicants the exciting prospect of combining the pursuit of an independently researched thesis exploring a particular dimension of legal and political communication in early modern Europe with the opportunity to work collaboratively within a research team and to contribute to co-authored publications and the organisation of scholarly conferences.

The ‘Communicating the Law in Europe, 1500-1750’ project has been awarded a grant of €1.4 million by the European Research Council and is funded as part of the UKRI’s Frontier Research Guarantee scheme.  It will run for five years, from 1 January 2024 to 31 December 2028, and is led by the Principal Investigator, Dr Arthur der Weduwen.

The COMLAWEU project is the first to investigate comparatively how law was communicated to citizens and subjects by the authorities in early modern Europe (1500-1750). It pursues an original comparative study of the publication and circulation of municipal, regional and national law, encompassing oral communication, ceremonial proclamations and the employment of criers, as well as the affixing, distribution and sale of law texts, in manuscript and printed form.

Based on extensive archival research, this project will seek to establish for the first time to what extent the increasing body of law that was issued in early modern Europe was made publicly available, and in what forms.

The project seeks to add a new and much-needed perspective to the study of European politics in a critical era of state formation, framing the communication of law as an essential stabilising factor in an era of highly participatory but undemocratic politics.

This project will offer multiple comparative frameworks through which the communication of law will be studied, including Protestant and Catholic states, urban and rural areas, and empires, national kingdoms and city-states.

With the aid of such a comparative lens, it is an overarching aim of the project to analyse how the public dissemination of law shaped early modern civic society and influenced political participation and accountability.

The project team, led by the PI and comprising two postdoctoral research assistants and two PhD students, will work collaboratively, using a series of comparative case studies based on European regions to explore and reveal the complex ways in which European authorities communicated with their citizens and subjects.

Further details about this opportunity can be found on the School of History postgraduate funding page.