Ian Williams and Nandini Chatterjee on Marriage in the Legal Archives, England and South Asia.
Hilary Term, 6 March 2-4pm,
Mure Room, Merton College, Oxford
Tea & coffee
What can legal archives tell us about everyday life in early modern South Asia and England?
To find out, join Professor Ian Willams (Law) and Professor Nandini Chatterjee (AMES) for a research conversation across disciplinary, linguistic, cultural and geopolitical boundaries. This event is aimed at a broad, interdisciplinary audience of early modernists. We especially welcome students and ECRs who are interested in finding out more about legal and historical work on everyday life and the challenges of different archives. Our speakers will present work, converse with one another and then take questions from the audience.
Speakers:
Professor Nandini Chatterjee is a historian of South Asia with expertise in the early modern (Mughal) and colonial (British-dominated) periods. She works on everyday practices of law under empires, and is interested in functional uses of language, especially languages written in Arabic-derived scripts, such as Persian and Urdu. She is engaged with research and reinterpretation of colonial heritage in Britain, especially through digital media.
Professor Ian Williams is a fellow and associate professor in law at St John’s College and the Faculty of Law. His research interests are centred on English legal history in the early modern period, with a focus on the interaction between legal practice and more theoretical ideas of law and norms. At present he is working on the Court of Star Chamber.
Presentations:
Nandini Chatterjee, ‘Were they really married? Studying disputes over marriage and its incidents in early modern South Asia’
Abstract: ‘Disputes over marriage and matrimonial rights form substantive parts of all major treatises on Islamic jurisprudence, including those compiled in South Asia in the seventeenth century, when the Indo-Islamic Mughal Empire was in place. However, studying actual marital disputes is relatively harder, because of the inherently non-documented nature of Hindu marriages – Hindus being the majority of Mughal subjects. In this paper, I will attempt to access ideas about marriage via a dispute over legitimacy and inheritance in relation to a cross-religious relationship. In doing so, I will also discuss the archival challenges of studying a subject such as this in early modern South Asia, point to our very preliminary knowledge of the institutional matrix within which such disputes were resolved, and aim to draw comparisons with similar human conundrums in other parts of the world.’
Ian Williams, ‘The Wedding Plotter: Marriage as Crime in Early-Modern England’
Abstract: ‘Early-modern drama is full of marriage plots, but plotting to marry could be a serious risk. Early in the reign of Charles I, a young woman, her family and associates were prosecuted in the Star Chamber for plotting, and going through with, a marriage ceremony with a young, wealthy, heir. The dispute is an excellent window into why and how people in early modern England married and argued about marriage, as well as the challenges posed by early modern archival practice. The Star Chamber case itself represented the culmination of developments in the court’s practice, developments which reveal the inter-relationship between the legal system and a wider range of ideas about marriage.’
EBBA 36058, ‘The Hasty Bride-Groom’ Manchester Central Library, Blackletter ballads, BR f 821.04 B49
