Chapter 4 moves forward to the religious and political conflicts of the 1640s and 50s, focusing on the Royalist, Church of England poet Henry Vaughan. For Vaughan, the method and structure of evidentiary procedures at law present a crucial resource for negotiating the challenges of mid-century tumult. Having established Vaughan’s legal interests in his career and earlier writing, the chapter explains why questions of legal process became especially charged in the civil wars and Interregnum and why they presented Vaughan with a framework for discussing faith in Silex Scintillans (1650, 1655). The chapter surveys a range of attitudes adopted by Vaughan’s verse towards legal methods of proof: while they can cause activities of biblical interpretation to go awry, they can also, as exegetical processes, help to underpin an enduring faith in God’s mercy and salvation. In the end, it is the regularity of due evidentiary process that itself helps to articulate the justice and order of God’s providence.

Literature in the legal humanities has begun to turn toward performance as a new site of analysis: as source, representation, and intervention. From Law and Performance (2018) to Law as Performance (2022), this belated comparison has garnered increasing traction. But methods from dance and performance studies, those wayward disciplines where corporeality supersedes the literary, still make only passing appearances. The repercussions, however, exceed the methodological toward the most material. This chapter underscores the consequences for this absence by centring the lone figure, “Naked Athena,” as a femme body in protest whose choreographic aesthetic of whiteness allowed particular flexibility under the law. Through her balletic performance of resistance, themes of discipline, elegance, and decorum swirl against the indecent, vulgar, and obscene labels afforded other protesters in the same scene. Motivated by this framing, I focus us toward identification of the publicly exposed body as righteously revealed or promiscuously pornographic, an aesthetic distinction theorized within art history as the difference between nakedness and nudity yet left ambiguous in legal terms.

Climate change has unequal effects on people in different parts of the world. Small Island Developing States face real and existential threats to their land and way of life on account of a crisis in which they have had little or no role to play, and with limited opportunity to take corrective action (Burkett 2015). Countries in Asia continue to be plastic havens for Europe, which for years has exploited weaker regulation in these regions. This has turned lands and oceans in Asia into toxic wastelands, while European countries continue to consume resources in an irresponsible and unabated fashion (Ellis-Petersen 2019). In 2023, we see the continued exploitation of critical minerals in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where there is a mineral race between the United States, Europe, and China (Kara 2023). This continued extraction has resulted in violence, war, and poverty and is often argued to be the result of a ‘failed state’ or ‘poor governance’ (Peša 2022).

However, this only tells a partial story. The existence of such extraction is on account of the ways in which people and communities have been marginalized as a result of a wide variety of economic, political, social, and structural factors on a global scale (Harlan et al. 2015). In fact, as Sultana argues, the root cause of much of the climate emergency that we are experiencing is on account of historical as well as ongoing exploitation of formerly colonized lands (Sultana 2022).

Law, with its seemingly endless paperwork, is almost overwhelmingly textual. From contracts to briefs to opinions to treatises, law lives in its texts. Simultaneously, law requires performances to produce authenticity and authority. Witness testimonies, pleadings, and trials all enact the law through participants’ bodies. There is no law without text. There is no law without performance. Legal texts and performances produce and reproduce each other: Legal texts record or script legal performances; legal performances generate or stage legal texts. Because law entwines text and performance, this chapter considers the law’s material textuality and its theatricality in tandem by probing how law brings performance to book. Drawing on theater studies and the history of dramatic texts, I offer methods for reading legal texts as scripts that precede or follow legal performances. Examples from Anglo-American law reveal that legal documents’ typographical conventions uncover law’s reliance on performance and its anxiety about deviating from textuality. More sophisticated legal attention to the relationship between text and performance would better serve law and, more importantly, justice.

From the Republic through the early medieval period, the local residents and Rome’s institutional power-holders together shaped both the physical and the ideological landscape of the Subura. Defined by the sloping, narrow valleys that fed into the Forum – the functional and symbolic heart of the city – the Subura and Argiletum thrived on the movement compelled by the thoroughfares that lined these valleys and the connection to the Forum that they provided. The valley was understood and perceived in antiquity as an integral topographical unit in Rome’s natural landscape stretching from the Forum to the Campus Esquilinus outside the Porta Esquilina, and it is only by considering the valley as a whole that both the physical and the ideological development of the area can be fully understood. Similar to a landscape archaeology exploring issues of connectivity between different nodes or settlements within a broader terrain, this work has attempted to show how the development of the Subura valley and Cispian hill was very much a function of its nature as a path connecting center and periphery. Its development was directly affected by the ways in which connections with major nodes were manipulated and altered within various historical and cultural circumstances.

Prior to the Pieve’s radical renovation in the nineteenth century, Vasari’s Albergotti altarpiece decorated an altar at the end of the church’s left aisle. Its main panel depicts the Coronation of the Virgin and was originally commissioned by the Florentine Filippo Salviati for the church of San Vincenzo in Prato. This chapter investigates that early commission and the painting’s subsequent purchase by the Aretine lawyer Nerozzo Albergotti, thus providing a deeper understanding of the Albergotti altarpiece’s conception and complicated patronage history, as well as of its iconography and the ways in which Vasari adapted it to the altar in the Pieve on which it was installed.

Introduction

Global companies develop as internationally integrated entities, but they are not subject to a common regulatory framework. Despite being among the main contributors to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, these companies do not have their activities regulated in relation to climate issues either (RUGGIE 2014, 13). Although they contribute to the causes of global warming (IPCC 2007, 449), they are not obliged to assume their own share of responsibility for GHG emissions, nor are they held responsible for the consequences and impacts of climate change. In July 2022, the United Nations (UN) General Assembly declared that the right to a safe, clean, healthy, and sustainable environment is a human right (UN 2022). This resolution also recognized that climate change poses serious threats to the ability of present and future generations to effectively enjoy all human rights.

Addressing the business responsibility to respect human rights, the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) unanimously endorsed the United Nations Guiding Principles (UNGPs) in June 2011. Although it does not specifically address climate issues, the UNGPs states that businesses have a responsibility to respect internationally recognized human rights, which includes not violating human rights and addressing any negative impacts their activities may cause (UN 2011). However, these documents are voluntary and do not provide any sanctions for parties who do not respect their terms and principles.

My aim, in this response to Peters’ timely and powerful work, is both to acknowledge its transformative force for legal studies and at the same time to introduce distinctions that may be of value in distinguishing discussions of the ‘theatricality’ of law from the emergence of a modern understanding of ‘theatre’ as the production of coherent and powerful fictions enacted by characters. The early modern period (1500–1650) is described, in chapter 5 of Peters’ study, as ‘the age of theatre’. If Peters shows how judicial proceedings draw on the performative aspects of rhetoric and theatre, my response aims to show how, in the ‘age of theatre’, theatre’s distinctive fictionality drew on the fiction-generating power of probable argument and inferential reasoning, as taught in legal rhetoric.

The Introduction outlines the intermedial method of this book, which brings together Milton with nineteenth-century writers and artists who engage with each other’s work at the same time as reading Milton directly. It provides an overview of Milton’s place in the visual and material culture of the long nineteenth century. This includes the literary galleries of the late eighteenth century, the development of proto-cinematic technologies and stage spectacles, illustration on canvas and the page, and interventions in books such as extra-illustration and marginalia. The Introduction also addresses the various metaphors drawn from Milton’s writing that scholars have used to explain his influence, comparing him to a ghost, a troll, a father, even God. It then proposes the epic simile as a useful model for the way Milton is understood in this book: just as Milton’s similes describing Satan suggest, a powerful figure can be like many disparate things at the same time.

Introduction

Climate litigation has been defined as the set of judicial, administrative, or extrajudicial actions that are directly or indirectly related to the reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (mitigation), the reduction of vulnerability to the effects of climate change (adaptation), the repair of damages suffered as a result of climate change (loss and damage), and the management of climate risks (risks) (Moreira 2021). As a subject of academic inquiry, it is a prominent field of study in numerous countries within the Global North, although it is a relatively recent and emerging area of study in Brazil.

According to Setzer and Vanhala (2019), there is an imbalance in academic production on this topic in the North and South countries. Nevertheless, comparative studies such as that of Peel and Lin (2008) reveal differences and similarities, as well as cooperative practices and reciprocal influence. The comprehension of the existing differences and similarities between countries of the Global North and South in the formulation and development of cases of climate litigation, as well as among countries of the Global South, is fundamental for the understanding of this phenomenon that has grown regularly and continuously. This theoretical and analytical approach becomes even more relevant when climate litigation is conceived as a potential instrument for implementing climate justice.

The third chapter examines the interventions of Domitian in the lower Subura. Domitian, who was even more socially conservative than Augustus, took a more aggressive approach to the Subura’s intensifying activity with the construction of his own imperial forum, severing the Subura’s connection with the city center. The complex highlighted Minerva and allowed Domitian to insert himself into the earlier discourse on female morality that had already been established in the Subura.