‘Law and the Equivocal Image: Sacred and Profane in Royal Portraiture’

Professor Paul Raffield

Wednesday 16 May, 2012. 6.00-7.15pm
Poster

Professor Paul Raffield will be giving his Inaugural Lecture, ‘Law and the Equivocal Image: Sacred and Profane in Royal Portraiture’, at Warwick University on Wednesday 16 May.

The lecture is from 6-7.15 in the Ramphal Lecture Theatre at Warwick University and will be followed by a drinks reception. All welcome.

Paul enrolled at Birkbeck Law Department in 1994 to study for the Mphil/PhD in legal history and law and literature under the supervision of Professor Peter Goodrich, the Founding Professor of the newly created Law Department. He arrived with a background in theatre and continued acting in TV, films and on stage throughout his studies, combining his knowledge of performance with his academic interest in the theatre of law. Summers would be marked by his disappearance to Scarborough where he regularly appeared in Alan Ayckbourn plays. His PhD was entitled Rhetoric, Ritual and Religion in the Law: the Ancient Constitution and the Inns of Court, 1558-1625 and was awarded in 2001.

As one of the first research students, Paul contributed much to the character of Law Department and to the establishment of legal history and law and literature as strong areas of research interest.

Paul was appointed to the University of Warwick in 2004. His thesis was published under the title Images and Cultures of Law in Early Modern England: Justice and Political Power, 1558-1660 by Cambridge University Press in 2004 (now available in paperback). He has gone on to publish Shakespeare and the Law (Hart Publishing 2008), a co-edited collection of papers from a conference on Shakespeare and the Law held at Warwick in 2007. He is also the founding co-editor of the journal Law and Humanities.

Paul’s latest book, Shakespeare’s Imaginary Constitution: Late-Elizabethan Politics and the Theatre of Law, was published in 2010 by Hart Publishing. It was nominated for the 2011 Inner Temple Book Prize, awarded every three years for a book which has made a profound contribution to the understanding of law in the United Kingdom.