Cynthia B. Herrup, Professor Emeritus

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Education:

PhD	Northwestern University	1982
MA	Loyola University	1975
BSJ	Northwestern University	1972

Research Interests:

I am interested in the relationship between law (particularly criminal law) and culture. In general, I try to elucidate the ways in which legal forms and social force are in constant dialogue. My particular focus is on England in the seventeenth century. My first book was a study of how communities without lawyers make legal decisions; my second a study of a notorious trial as the focus of an exploration of law's reaction to tensions between genders and generations; my new project investigates the cultural meaning of pardons and mercy. I am also interested in the history of sexuality and in the history of the early modern Atlantic world.

Current Ph.D. Students  

• Christina Ramos  
• Joanna Kuchinski  
• Jacob W. Selwood,  
• Philippe Rosenberg  
• Colleen Seguin  
• Amy Froide  

Recent Publications

1. The punishing pardon: some thoughts on the origins of penal transportation, in Penal practice and culture 1500-1900: punishing the English, edited by Simon Devereux and Paul Griffiths (2004), pp. 121-138, Macmillan
2. Mervin Touchet, 2nd Earl of Castlehaven, in New Dictionary of National Biography (2004)
3. Review: Lorna Hutson and Victoria Kahn, eds., Rhetoric and law in early modern Europe, Comparative Literature Studies, vol. 40 no. 3 (2003), pp. 337-340
4. "When Mercy Seasons Justice": Pardons and Culture in Early Modern England (forthcoming, 2007) (under contract to Cambridge University Press.)
5. Re-reading politics, Shakespeare Studies, vol. 31 (2003), pp. 288-95