ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions presents:

“Making the Charter Great: Law’s Visual Vernacular”, Prof. Paul Halliday (History and Law, University of Virginia)

Date: 17 September, 2015
Time: 7.00pm
Venue: Napier Lecture Theatre G03, The University of Adelaide

Law is a wordy business, legal history only more so. The traditional constitutional narrative of Magna Carta’s greatness has focused on its words and on the changing uses to which people put them in the centuries after 1215. This story has been significantly revised through careful historical analysis performed over the last century or so. We no longer tell a linear, progressive tale of a text that laid out a clear set of rights that were gradually realized in ever better legal practices and constitutional arrangements. Instead, we tell a story in which legal and political elites around 1600 transformed the use of the charter’s words.

Even this revised story misses the key point: the words of Magna Carta all but disappeared from view long ago. An icon took its place, one carrying more emotive force than any combination of words. We can see this by attending to the ways in which the bare words “Magna Carta” came to be used as a totem, to pronounce greatness upon all manner of things unrelated to the charter. A survey of early modern print shows increasing use of the expression “the Magna Carta of…” to refer to anything people wanted to declare great, from works of poetry to theological propositions. Through this strange linguistic turn, ten letters were made into an image, one that could then be deployed in literal images in a new mode of argument, visual satire.

The Charter was made great from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth as part of a new visual legal vernacular. Its greatness was and is as an icon, not as a formulation of words, let alone as a nascent constitution. Magna Carta provides a banner in which legal-political heroes or critics of all stripes wrap themselves to promote their claims. This is as much a methodological essay as a work of historical argument, enlisting the history of the senses to understand the engagement of the emotions in the cultural, social, and political work we do through law.

Paul Halliday is the Julian Bishko Professor of History, Professor of Law, and chair of the Corcoran Department of History in the University of Virginia. He is interested in all the ways that English law has moved about the globe and wormed its way into argument in U.S. courts and public life. These days, he is exploring the material forms and vernacular legalities—archive creation, court building, visual satire­—that have long imposed on the substance of law.

This lecture will open the 2015 ‘Change’ Collaboratory on ‘Constitutional Patriotism: Founding Documents and the Emotions from Magna Carta to the Declaration of Human Rights’.

The lecture will be followed by a wine reception. Enquiries to Jacquie Bennett:
jacquie.bennett@adelaide.edu.au