Theme of Colloquium:

The importance with which scholars at the turn of the millenium regard interdisciplinary research of property and inheritance law in early modern England results from the status of innovative work produced across the humanities throughout the 1990s. During this decade, for example, Susan Staves, Professor of English literature, Brandeis University, produced a landmark historical study of Married Women's Separate Property in England, 1660-1883 (Harvard, 1990), just as Dr Laura Brace, a historian of political thought at the University of Leicester, helped to reconceptualise the relationship of politics and legal history in her analysis of The Idea of Property in Seventeenth-Century England (Manchester, 1998). These and other scholars during the 1990s have revealed the truth of the argument, made by the social historian Jack Goody, that analysis of property and inheritance law should not be limited to social scientists and lawyers. In his introduction to Family and Inheritance (Cambridge, 1976), Goody advised, that the transmission of property by means of inheritance "is not only the means by which the reproduction of the social system is carried out . . . it is also the way in which interpersonal relationships are structured. . . . The plots of many plays and novels make the point in a more dramatic way than is available to the historian or the social scientist" (p. 1).

The colloquium to be held on 30 June and 1 July 2000 at the Humanities Research Centre, as part of the HRC's research theme for 2000--Law and the Humanities--seeks to reorient interdisciplinary study of property and inheritance law, as Goody proposed, by connecting important research about literature, law and social history in early modern England. While studies connecting literary representations of women, property and inheritance law emerged in the 1980s, scholarship about these subjects produced dispute rather than consensus about the validity of integrating the methods of historical, legal and literary analysis. In their introduction to Enclosure Acts : Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England (Cornell, 1994), Richard Burt and John M. Archer, for example, cite unresolved debates among literary critics who developed interdisciplinary analyses. One of the goals of this colloquium is to answer such questions as: Is there a theoretical analysis that will more convincingly bridge the different methodologies and criteria of the disciplines of literary, legal and social history? Can an interdisciplinary methodology relate the social practices of inheritance in early modern England to their representation in the literature of that period? In order to facilitate interdisciplinary study of the representation of women's property and inheritance in literature, this colloquium will involve scholars specialising in literature and politics as well as legal history, gender studies and social history.