History and the Law

Carolyn Steedman is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Warwick. Her previous books include Landscape for a Good Woman (1986), Dust (2001), Master and Servant (Cambridge, 2007), Labours Lost (Cambridge, 2009), An Everyday Life of the English Working Class (Cambridge, 2013) and Poetry for Historians (2018).

• A beginning: 'history' Stephen Dunn; 1. Its ziggy shape; 2. Law troubles: two historians and some threatening letters; 3. Letters of the law: everyday uses of the law at the turn of the English nineteenth-century; 4. The worst of it: Blackstone and women; 5. Who owns Maria; 6. Sisters in laws; 7. Hating the law: Caleb Williams; 8. The kind of law a historian loved; An ending: not a story; Bibliography; Index.

'Steedman writes the sort of book we have come to expect - stunningly original, steeped in local archives and literature, distinctive in its methods and voice. History and the Law concerns the everyday legal encounters of ordinary people, and the attraction of the law for historians keen to understand hearts and minds in the past.' James Epstein, Vanderbilt University, Nashville