Julie Stone Peters (B.A. Yale, Ph.D. Princeton, J.D. Columbia) is the H. Gordon Garbedian Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and Co-Chair of Columbia's Theatre and Performance PhD Program. She has taught at Harvard, Stanford, and the Metropolitan Detention Center (Brooklyn), was Founding Director of the Columbia College Human Rights Program, and has been the recipient of Guggenheim, NEH, Fulbright, ACLS, Humboldt, and other fellowships. Her publications include Theatre of the Book: Print, Text, and Performance in Europe 1480-1880 (Oxford University Press, 2000, winner of the Harry Levin and Beatrice White Prizes), Women's Rights, Human Rights: International Feminist Perspectives (co-edited, Routledge, 1995), and numerous studies of drama, performance, film, media, and the cultural history of law.

• Introduction 1: Theatre, Theatrocracy, and the Politics of Pathos in the Athenian Lawcourt 2: The Roman Advocate as Actor: Actio, Pronuntiatio, Prosopopoeia, and Persuasive Empathy in Cicero and Quintilian 3: Courtroom Oratory, Forensic Delivery, and the Wayward Body in Medieval Rhetorical Theory 4: Irreverent Performances, Heterodox Subjects, and the Unscripted Crowd from the Medieval Courtroom to the Stocks and Scaffold 5: Performing Law in the Age of Theatre (c. 1500-1650) 6: Legal Performance Education in Early Modern England Epilogue

The volume, accompanied by an extensive bibliography and a final index of names and concepts, is well edited and easy to read...the book, thanks to the extensive number of citations and references with which it is shaped, is a masterful work in providing a comprehensive and convincing picture of the relationship between performance and law over many centuries.